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

I wasn't arguing for any particular party (which I suppose is a bit cowardly). But rather the frame that all of them operate under: market interventions may be necessary because 1) the market has become dis-regulated and can't self correct or 2) the inefficiency is a justified cost (e.g. lower overall growth in exchange for some social good). In all cases the goal is to limit the market intervention as much as possible in order to contain the cost.

With respect to executive pay, the general consensus is that executive pay restrictions will adversely affect attracting and retaining talent and distort the way CEO's are compensated in order to avoid those limits - that it's especially damaging with respect to startups, venture capital investment, and that the EU (and especially nordic ) style regulations are a significant reason that the EU has had almost zero success in tech despite that being the economic development prime directive for the last 10 years.

It's still fair for a country to say: "that's all right. We're willing to forgo tech prosperity in order to maintain income equality." But the costs of what that means should be spelled out, and they're very high.

Immigration (especially illegal) is special because some immigrates (illegal and special classes) aren't allowed to participate in the labour market. But the general case is that immigration is a boon to the economy (and emigration a detriment) and it's incoherent for national parties to argue against it because at their root every national party is neo-liberal and know that it's necessary - so, they'd be arguing against their own theory of government and their own set of prescriptive tools. If you want to suppress immigration because it dilutes culture, or cut it in order to boost short term wages by causing labour shortages, that's fine. But don't pretend there's no cost.

The argument that immigration suppresses the long term price of labour and therefore harms workers is one of the oldest and most debunked economic fallacies in the liberal cannon, though (like price controls) it's a perennial favourite among populists. My real point is that if you're going to propose that, and you're a national party that aspires to governing rather than just being a gadfly, you need to present some coherent model of government other than neo-liberalism, and nobody is (not even the greens or youparty).

This doesn’t answer how to get off the cycle of ever increasing population. If it’s needed for a boom does it just keep going up?

This is really a separate question and somewhat theoretical - the UK's fertility is so low that even with immigration at its highest, the long term trajectory was still negative. But yes, one of the questions is: do we want want to cap the UK at a certain size? Maybe the answer is yes, but there are alternatives to sprawl into the countryside and there is an economic cost - maybe one people are willing to pay, but politicians should be honest about it.

I find the conversation around immigration irritating in its dishonesty and opaqueness but yes the question could be a direct what should our population size be ideally.

Usually people spin off at this point with deflection or worse but really it’s a simple question. Are we at where we should be roughly? Probably, but if people want the population to keep expanding they’ll need to make a case for it.

As for birth rate declining, fine maybe we’ll see that across many countries and it could relieve resource pressures.

We want a discussion on this. I believe Reform and likely the Tories will propose extensive Parliamentary/committee time to set out strict quotas for specialized sectors, likely some auction/bidding from quota to quotas. And a huge reduction in unskilled. Plus major changes to IDR, retrospective to the Boriswave, and a huge change to only British born and fully naturalized citizens being able to access benefits and social housing.

Politicians tend to think that policies can be repeated and have the same effect as in past, or can turbocharge them and have more of a positive effect.

Relatively small number of immigration, a small welfare state, at a time of both private and state investment is good. It means that business can prosper.

Having a chaotic approach where lots of immigration occurs with no clear purpose, doesn't make the economy grow stronger, faster. It just creates housing problems, and pressure on the welfare state.

The idea that immigration creates jobs and more tax returns to fund an ageing population is based on a different immigration at a different time.

I can speak from personal experience that it's not CEO salaries being restricted that prevents start-ups in the UK, it's insane levels of bureaucracy and it being a massive hassle being stymied at every turn. No start-up is making any money to start with, many will fail. The idea some prospective future cap (at a very high level) of CEO salary if you ever get to the point of the start up being successful is a disincentive is mad.

Yes and at some point on an island you'll actually run out of land. What then?

This is an interesting article that I think is relevant to the discussion here:

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-war-of-inclusivity-against-distinctiveness/

"What the people who write these reports are objecting to is the very existence of a specific culture. The presence of distinct local characteristics is framed as “exclusionary” by their very nature. To make everybody welcome, no one can feel at home.

In a thoughtful recent essay for The Critic, Paul Heron wrote about the lost mid-20th century dream of “assimilation” — the idea of “immigrants changing to fit into British society, without reciprocal change on the part of native Britons”. What the UK often seems to have is the opposite — British society being expected to change to fit new cultural requirements without reciprocal change."

Edited to add link to second article mentioned in quote above: https://thecritic.co.uk/the-rise-and-fall-of-assimilation/

I think many people and politicians do act as if they believe that.

But increasing GDP without looking at the population changes is a bit of a scam they are pulling. It doesn't represent any kind of real increase in productivity.

And you can exchange the same piece of metal back and forth 1000 times but it doesn't mean there is more real wealth.

None of that has anything to do with socialism.

Actually, no, I don't think the claim that it suppresses wages has been debunked. That was the claim for years, but I think that was ideological, not evidenced , and a very self-interested claim- it is quite clear now that it does suppress wages.

I also think that it is not "socialist" to point out that people, as well as contributing to economic exchange, also incur costs, and their families incur costs. And if they produce less than the state spends, they are not really contributing wealth. Just moving things around.

Actually, no, I don't think the claim that it suppresses wages has been debunked.

Well, i disagree. So, we probably have to leave it at that. But I'd point out that I disagree in a very specific way. Neo-liberal economic doctrine argues that unfettered access to labour markets (practically) always produces wealth (for everyone) over the long term, and restricting access to labour markets destroyed wealth (for everyone) over the long term. Within that framework there are many well worn arguments of why 'suppression of wages' is populist fallacy, just like 'effectiveness of price controls to control corporate greed' is, i.e both have been 'debunked'.

If you believe neo-liberalism is wrong, then of course you might disagree with those conclusions (and a great many others). That's fine. In fact many people say they oppose neo-liberalism (or globalism) - so much so that it's often used an expletive. My greater point is that if you believe that, you need to put forth an alternative theory. Neo-liberalsm is a highly coherent, predictive, flexible and empirically validated theory for managing an economy. (It doesn't say that you can't restrict immigration, it says that if you do, there's an economic cost.)

People say they disagree with it but then don't answer the question how Britain expects to import iPhones and provide medical services - how it expects to borrow money on the bond market - how it can generate exports that compete with other countries in the global market.

That's the theory, but 'everyone' doesnt mean each individual.

The total amount of wealth may increase, the immigrant moving country might be have £1,000, rather than £1. But the plebs arent necessarily richer.

Since 2020 for example, wages have increased, but havent kept up with inflation. The country may be richer on paper, but the average person is not. That might not be directly associated with immigration, but in a period of extremely high immigration far more than we can sustain long term, it should, in theory, make us richer than we ever have been, but we are not.

Id also question how rich we are as a country when the UK has to borrow at such a high rate, and have to ask for other countries to invest in infrastructure.

It could be argued that we are still limiting immigration and need open borders, really test the theory. But in a democracy, politicans wont get elected with a policy of overall wealth, but individual reduced standard of living.

I’m quite Keynesian when it comes to government borrowing. I prefer the idea of them borrowing to invest in developing the country/sectors of the economy and building/maintaining infrastructure.

I don’t understand the Thatcherite attitude of privatisation + outsourcing infrastructure sectors to other countries. It’s sends wealth out of the country and it dilutes national security to be reliant on other countries for maintaining vital services. I prefer the idea of being more self-sufficient.

Other European countries control their own energy and rail infrastructure and also control (and extract profit) from the same sectors in the UK because of privatisation.

I’ve never understood why successive UK governments are happy to sell off pieces of the state. The current negative economic effects arising from decades of economic globalisation convince me even more that it was unwise to outsource so much manufacturing and infrastructure responsibility to countries like China and to rely on energy supply from Russia.

I feel the same with regards immigration: it can be a temporary stopgap but effort should be put into developing capacity within the population and ensuring that immigrant workforce members should be as self-sufficient as possible to reduce impact on public expenditure. I would expect to be treated that way if I moved to another country and to only be eligible for citizenship rights/benefits if I became a contributing citizen.

The obvious problem with privatisation is that its alters the priority from delivering the service to shareholder profit. Its bonkers that governments didnt see any negative consequences down the line.

The money they recieved from the sell off is long gone and they have little control other than giving out subsidies.

China owning so much of our infrastructure is a whole other problem.

My view isn't ideological, and doesn't require a theoretical basis, it's empirical. Where you have excess labour or movement of labour, wages are in fact suppressed.

Too much reliance on over-arching theories is something of a problem in economics, I think.

We are certainly stuck with things like bond markets, because they are what the global economy has chosen to use and no nation has any real control over that. That does not, however, mean that they are somehow a natural occurring phenomena or part of a natural ecosystem, or that "neoliberalism" is some kind of natural ecosystem that has be be accepted in every way.

Too much reliance on over-arching theories is something of a problem in economics, I think.

I disagree, but this is really what I disagree with - individual voters believe lots of things that aren't fully consistent and don't have a theoretical basis. I'm sure I do. But ruling parties owe the population policy coherence.

That does not, however, mean that they are somehow a natural occurring phenomena or part of a natural ecosystem, or that "neoliberalism" is some kind of natural ecosystem that has be be accepted in every way.

I agree that neoliberalism shouldn't be taken as an immutable law of nature. There's glibness among neoliberals that I find off-putting - the West Wing managerial class. But it is a coherent, battle tested, political economic view about how economies work and how to organise a national economy. And, importantly, the world economy demands that nations run their own economy according to it, if you don't then you don't have access to capital markets to fund your debt, don't have a stable currency, aren't able engage in international trade.

Bennism accepted this reality and posited an economic program that would allow Britain to interface with the global neoliberal order while insulating domestic economic management from its demands. It was a complete, coherent system with theory behind it. It started from the premise of Britain having a population size of X and then worked backwards about how to maintain full employment for that population - how to allocate labour and capital to make sure that Britain was productive and sovereign - how to participate in the global market so that a middle sized island nation could export sufficiently to import what it couldn't produce at home - and how to allocate the fruits of that productivity fairly and humanely. If Benn were to say: we will reduce immigration to zero, he had a system that he could point to to show how he would make that work.

Bennism was rejected by Labour, which instead adopted the neo-liberal frame of market competition and market based prosperity. In that frame, transfers from a portion of that marked generated, capitalist prosperity are established via profit taxes to fund services, knowing that those were costs and that the bond market imposed tight parameters on the size of those transfers. Today you have people who say they're rejecting neoliberalism (or globalism) and reject those constraints but they don't have the equivalent of Bennism to show how that would work.

One of the worst things about Trumpism is its blatant dishonesty. It claims to be against neoliberalism and globalism, and yet it's both on steroids. How could a movement built on rejecting neoliberalism and globalism have managed to be the purest form of both of those since Reagan? Because it presented individual policies as grievance disconnected from any theory of economic policy. That's exactly what's happing with reform -its a form a political manipulation.

Biden too claimed to be post-neoliberal, but his central proposal was modern-monetary-theory: ignore deficits and spend money until inflation tells you to stop (ooops), i.e. just bad financial policy masquerading as anti-neoliberalism.

From a personal point of view, I'm married to an immigrant. The country he comes from had pretty much the same standard of living as the UK when we met and married. Now, his country has a far higher standard of living for the family members who were on a par with my family members (similar jobs) now. I've got direct experience of two family groupings in two countries and the UK has seen an obvious and stark decline in standard of living for families relying on the same primary employment as people in this other country over 20 years (ish).

To think people won't notice this is mad. Not everyone has such direct comparisons but they're not idiots.

Now, this may very well not be due to immigration and immigration in the past may very well have been a positive for the UK but there is still a very legitimate question about why we're allowing so many people to come in right now and consume state resources when the people already here (be they immigrants or not) are suffering worse quality of life, worse health outcomes, worse education for their children etc.

Great article on Labour’s woman problem by Susan Dalgety. I’ve included some excerpts below:

https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/why-labours-girl-bosses-are-as-big-a-problem-as-their-boys-club-5597079#

“Labour’s issue with women is as much the fault of the veteran Harman – appointed as the country’s first Minister for Women back in May 1997 – and her mini-mes, including Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the current women’s minister, Bridget Phillipson, as it’s the responsibility of the lads in Downing Street and party HQ.

Reeves and Phillipson, with their shiny bobs and carefully pressed trouser suits, represent the ‘girl boss’ strand of feminism. Harman personifies it. Their goal, it seems, is not to dismantle the economic, social and cultural structures that shore up misogyny and entrench patriarchal attitudes.

Instead, they want to “empower” women to take control of their lives, and in particular their careers. It is a personal rather than a collective approach to women’s rights. And for many Labour women, it has proved spectacularly successful.

Labour’s challenge is not with satisfying the ambitions of female Oxbridge graduates or North London matriarchs. The party struggles with women because the men – and women – at the top of the party seem to have a problem understanding the reality of most women’s lives.

…Indeed, until recently the Prime Minister seemed to have a problem understanding what exactly is a woman. Only three years ago, he was arguing that a woman can have a penis. Former Labour MP Rosie Duffield was hounded out of the party for having the temerity to insist that sex is based on biology, not the gender identity myth.
And as a senior Labour source told the Spectator magazine this week, prior to the 2024 election, the party spent “more time working out whether chicks could have d than on a programme for government”.

…Progress is not another Oxbridge graduate with a shiny bob and the air of a head girl as First Secretary for women. He should start by enforcing the law on women’s rights, as confirmed in the Supreme Court ruling won by For Women Scotland nearly a year ago.

Women’s minister (in name only) Bridget Phillipson has been sitting on the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s updated guidance on single-sex spaces and the Equality Act for 163 days. No one but Phillipson knows why.

If Starmer is serious about rooting out structural misogyny, he must pick up the phone to her this weekend and instruct her to lay the guidance before parliament as soon as recess is over.

His government’s continued failure to recognise women as a sex class and enforce women’s existing legal rights says far more about him and his attitude to women than his eagerness to please the girl bosses at the top of his party. Deeds not warm words, Prime Minister. Deeds.”

I have to say it’s worrying at the moment especially if you look at Gorton and Denton.

I saw one of the hustings in a church.

the question was

” the Supreme Court has ruled what a women is so do the candidates agree with the decision and that this is now finished Business.

a couple of hand including Reform went up BUT the women from Labour, Lib Dem’s and Greens firmly kept their hand in their laps.

they expect women to vote for them to overturn centuries of women rights. Weird.

this is the picture from a video and the women filming calls them scandalous.

so be prepared the battle for safe spaces and Trans ideology is not dead. Hannah the greens talks women’s rights, but her colleague the Deputy leader( also worth looking up his celebrations when winning his seat) has persuaded the Muslim Network to support the Greens. An ideology also that doesn’t represent women’s rights.

Plaid and SNP still refute the Supreme Court and both alongside Greens and the other left parties want open borders.

just look at the daily crime against women.

pretty scary really.

@WillaT13 In what way does the Muslim network not support women’s rights? What women’s right are you talking about?

Also most “daily crime” against women is committed by known men from their own community.

So if you’re trying to frame misogyny as an “immigrant problem” you’re wrong.

The scariest men to me are the type who call themselves patriots and organise themselves to come together and intimidate immigrants including women and children.

Do you know how many of the men involved in the August 2024 riots had DV convictions? A lot!

I’ve also felt quite unsafe around drunk football hooligans who also tend to be white and British.

There is a reform candidate talking about women who choose not to or can’t have children paying more tax.

In what world is reform a good party for women? They are like the UK version of US MAGA and we know how misogynist they are.

The only questionable reporting here, I suspect, is that a one in five figure is too low.

With MN having spent the last few years lurching ever toward the right, I suspect the actual figure of people here who agree with a particular ideology that wouldn't look anachronistic in a certain European country in the first half of the last century far exceed the mere 20% suggested by the article.

Not sure where to start. Have you looked at this and how the greens are grooming the Muslim vote from Labour.

checkout some of the videos from Imans and Islamic speakers.

women less than cattle

if she refuses sex a manmaynhit her but not mark her just remind her of her role

they are instructed to wear hijab to help other me not list after the women. So the man can’t control his urges so hide away.

any women is seen as available after they first bleed so 9-12.

one final for us all. If you are not Muslim you must pay a tax, if you refuse to pay a tax they behead you.

just type in Google and see all the crimes. how many terror related incidents anywhere are not because of Islam?

ps a majority of the illegals are all Muslims, many from North Africa ( where Christian’s are being massacred )

Oooos one Gunnar on Gov website.

Muslim population in 2021 around 7%, whilst prison population is 18%.

We can't stop people who are legally here who are misogynist potential rapists.

What we CAN do is not import more. A fair number of men who've raped children recently have come from Europe where they've already been found guilty of sexual offences. Served their time, got released and come here and been put up in hotels, supported to offend again. Even when caught and prosecuted they're costing the state a vast amount of money while their victims get fuck all in terms of support. And often their lives are ruined for good.

Why on earth should we accept that it's just going to keep getting worse and not take the most basic of steps to stop it getting worse?

Men who arrive illegally have no right to be here, many come from backgrounds that see women as slaves - literally they are in favour of female slavery. Their rates of offending against women is far higher than for British men or long term immigrants (in general). We're knowingly importing a huge risk.

It's like saying 'oh well, things are bad, half my stuff's been stolen, I'm just going to open my house doors wide so that any burglars coming past can take the rest and I'll die in poverty'. Like WTAF. It's suicidal.

It's depressing how much people are willing to sacrifice individual girl and women's lives to be 'right on'. People who use this straw man argument are choosing to sacrifice women and girls (some of whom will be immigrants I'm sure too but not men so they don't count, I guess).

I'm totally in favour of immigration if it's women from Afghanistan. The demographic matters.