>>103112 There were a bunch of protests outside a hotel housing asylum seekers earlier in the year because a man staying there was arrested after sexually assaulting two women, one of whom was 14, and telling two other teenagers he wanted to put a baby inside them. This month he was found guilty on all counts.
This may have been the incident that led to protests outside other hotels housing asylum seekers around the country. He was an African who arrived here on a small boat. Is it racist not to want people like this in the country? Would sorting out the economy change people's minds about the small boats?
Around 184,000 have entered the country via small boats since they started collecting this data in 2018. That's roughly a city the size of Ipswich or Milton Keynes. It's not a small issue.
I'll avoid getting into the weeds with your ideas about Labour's traditional base. You are wrong but I know I won't persuade you because you are too committed to your view that education uber alles and having a party rooted in completely non-ideological vote chasing and survival for its own sake is the solution to anything.
The thing is about the pro-immigration socially liberal demographic, is that they are essentially useful idiots for capital. They see themselves as socially conscious lefties, who would oppose all kinds of exploitation and indignity, but their tolerant views on migration are and always have been simply a kind of manufactured consent for the economic import of cheap labour. So you end up with a middle class that plants its flag in left wing turf, all the while supporting the aims of the bourgeoise right. And so we end up in the topsy turvy ridiculous situation like we have today, where the entire working class is behind a far right party that absolutely does not have their best interests at heart.
Personally I don't give a fuck if Labour lives or dies; it's going to die, but for me, if that opens up the space for a real left wing party that will actually champion the needs of working people, so much the better. I've been a Labour supporter all my life, but not because I am comitted to Labour. I find that people who see it that way around have the entire concept of politics backwards.
That would be tip top, if it weren't for the fact absolutely nobody is apparently even interested in fixing the economy, because either a) they have a vested interest in the current broken system or b) they're never going to get within an inter-continental ballistic missile range of power.
See here's the thing. You can prevaricate about how it's not actually immigrants all you like, and I will even agree, but it's irrelevant. The economy is flatlining. So that's the context you have to look at it in. What you're telling people is "listen, the water flooding in through the gaping hole isn't the problem, if we just counter act it by adding more ballast outside the boat, we'll all stay afloat!" It may well be true, but people are not being irrational if they want to fix the gaping hole first.
It's. Too. Late. It was already too late in 2016. Things have not improved since then. That chance has faded irretrievably into the past. It's gone.
Above all I think that's the point a lot of people with your outlook need to come to terms with. People are just sick of hearing it. They shut down as soon as they figure out where your sentence is going. They've no time for you, because they have been betrayed time and again, and they'd frankly rather burn the entire political establishment to the ground and start over, than give another chance to some midwit liberal who tries to paper over the fact they're struggling to make ends meet by wittering on about "unity".
>>103115 >What you're telling people is "listen, the water flooding in through the gaping hole isn't the problem, if we just counter act it by adding more ballast outside the boat, we'll all stay afloat!"
No, what they're telling people is "listen, the seagulls flying in from France aren't the problem, it's the fucking water flooding in through the gaping hole".
>>103115 >The economy is flatlining. So that's the context you have to look at it in. What you're telling people is "listen, the water flooding in through the gaping hole isn't the problem, if we just counter act it by adding more ballast outside the boat, we'll all stay afloat!" It may well be true, but people are not being irrational if they want to fix the gaping hole first.
So does the water flooding in represent economic stagnation? Because if so, I want to patch the hole, and it's finger-pointing about Somalians that's represented by the misdirection about ballast.
>>103114 If we had a better economy, we'd be able to afford police and prisons to lock this guy up in. We'd be able to process his asylum claim so he wouldn't be wandering the streets committing sex crimes.
You two might be defeatist that the economy is broken and nothing we do can ever fix it, but then why not be defeatist that we can't stop immigration? I could easily tell you to stop worrying about immigrants because they're already here so just suck it up, and then you would say that society is doomed so we should just focus on what we can change, and go clobber a wog. As a tie-breaker between these two things that the government isn't fixing, I suggest that we try to fix the thing that will benefit people. And that, I regret to inform you, is my thing, not yours.
>>103117 >We'd be able to process his asylum claim so he wouldn't be wandering the streets committing sex crimes.
To give credit where it's due for doing the bare fucking minimum the backlog has been consistently coming down for the past year now that the government reversed the previous government's decision to effectively stop processing claims entirely.
>>103115 Assuming you're still talking about class in Marxist terms, I'll keep it brief: the "middle class" is working class. Reform support is propped up by small business owners and retirees. There's a working class component, sure, but trying to win them back is madness when you could just consolidate the rest of the non-pensioner non-small-business-owner vote.
If you've got any data showing a substantial voter base for a Reform > Your Party or Reform > Green swing voter, a well adjusted person who sees the machinations of capital at work, I'd love to see it. Failing that, the best I can offer is that on existing data the split is between degree holders who like structural explanations for why everything is shit, and between less educated voters who blame immigrants.
(In service of this, I'd dig up that chart showing concern about immigration has little correlation with immigration figures, but correlates almost perfectly with press hysteria.)
And, because it didn't fit anywhere else: Workers of the world unite? What middle class codswallop. Workers of BRITAIN unite, you have nothing to lose but your half time oranges.
On the economy the speech seemed somewhat schizophrenic. He spent one part of it going on about the benefits of public investment (which seemed to be what Andy Burnham seemed to be making the case for), but then later went on about how government borrowing is evil because it will burden future generations.
As far as I could gather, Burnham's infamous bond market comments were about borrowing to invest, not to simply fund giveaways like Truss. Sure, gilt yields are higher than the record lows of the 2010s, but the government is still able to borrow long-term cheaper than anyone else. If the government can't afford to borrow to invest, who can? Are we just going to wait and stagnate until interest rates come down? Where is the growth going to come from?
You could imagine this lot coming to power in 1945 with debt/GDP at ~250% and deciding no we can't rebuild the country and the welfare state, we've got to wallow in squalor until the bond market says we've been well behaved enough. Back then the bond market was back in its box, but for some reason this government seems to be intent on letting the bond market ruin it's day, inheriting from the last lot the same obsession of trying to 'free up' institutional investors to dump gilts.
No, all you're doing is changing the subject and then claiming you're clever. Not flying on me mate.
Do not mistake my meaning here: There's no functional difference between illegals and legals. It doesn't matter what colour their skin is or where they came from. THAT is misdirection, sure. The fundamental issue is just the fact it's more people, in a country that's already stretched to support the existing population, where every week we hear about how there's no money and we have to up taxes and so on and so forth. More frogs in the pot. Or crabs in the bucket, if that's your preferred type of patronising class snobbery paradigm.
More pressure, more tension, more resentment, more potential for conflict.
Economic stagnation is the fact we were all on a flimsy boat that was barely staying afloat in the first place. The water flooding in is the ~800,000 net migration we've had for the last 10+ years, that you can't hide from.
Some people just refuse to accept the objective fact that our services and housing supply have a limited capacity. You can say "well we should have added more capacity" but then we are back at the beginning again aren't we, because we didn't do that. We should have, but we didn't. Shrug emoji.
How about, we could have had a vaccine, but we didn't, so now we've caught covid. Taking the vaccine doesn't help when we are currently symptomatic and suffering from the effects of the disease. You have to stabilise the patient, you have to fight the flames, plug the leak; and then you can invest in solutions that prevent it becoming a crisis again in the future.
>I'll keep it brief: the "middle class" is working class.
Then I'll keep it brief too. Your entire premise is based on accepting and going along with the false consciousness of media propaganda, and trying to work within its paradigm. I explained before why that won't work- Sooner or later it becomes unavoidable that it is propaganda and fabrication.
>>103122 Material interests do not remain constant over time. A pensioner - which is what a 20-something trade unionist under the last half-real Labour government (Callaghan) would now be - does not have the same material interests as a young graduate or a 40-something worker. Set aside education and look at age: Reform support is almost as correlated with age.
Fundamentally I think our disagreement is that you think the actually-existing left isn't really the left (but that we had a real left at some point in the past) while I think that while our party system is dire, the picture when it comes to voters is actually pretty optimistic. The material interests of working people have increasingly pushed them to left wing voting habits, and the country has gone right because of massive shifts with older people who get their news from legacy media.
(That's not part of my argument, I'm trying to fairly characterise our disagreement because honestly I think my last reply wasn't great.)
> the government is still able to borrow long-term cheaper than anyone else
That hasn't been true since the Truss mini-budget. The yield on 10yr gilts is now only 10bp lower than the average investment grade bond. A large proportion of multinational corporations can now borrow more cheaply than the British government.
>>103121 >The fundamental issue is just the fact it's more people, in a country that's already stretched to support the existing population
This is the bit where the goose chases you and asks "and why is it stretched?"
Because we have stagnant economic growth and an ageing population. The tax base isn't getting bigger, but demands on the public purse are rapidly rising. The rich are paying more tax than ever - more than in many supposedly more progressive European countries - but average earners are paying historically low levels of tax.
Those average earners still feel like they're being taxed too much, mostly because their incomes haven't risen in real terms since 2008. Those stagnant wages are directly downstream from stagnant growth; workers aren't getting more productive and firms aren't getting more profitable.
Britain had unusually generous support schemes during COVID and the energy crisis, but that has left us with a mountain of debt on top of our already substantial debts. Our debt continues to grow, because we're still spending more than we earn; this undermines market confidence in our ability to repay those debts, creating a vicious cycle of higher debt servicing costs requiring us to borrow even more money.
>>103126 >The tax base isn’t getting bigger
What about all the immigrants? And, to be less circular in the arguing, are there any countries which tax its immigrants at a different rate from its own citizens? Because that sounds like a win-win, but it might be illegal.
>>103126 You talk about those things as if they were inevitable consequences or unchangeable circumstances as opposed to the result of deliberate political choices that we could have decided, and can still decide, differently.
>The rich are paying more tax than ever
That's a good one, keep on like that and they'll be booking you for the inevitable Live at the Apollo revival.
I inevitably forget to type something pretty crucial to my point, but I can see you're not daft. So I don't think we're just disagreeing over mistaken terminology or whathave you. I will try to elaborate as I see things:
>Material interests do not remain constant over time.
They do. Let's strip it right down to the basics and just look at a base level dynamic of politics and economics: An employer's interest is to get as many hours of work out of his employees, for as little money as possible. An employee's interest is to get as much money for his work, and do as little of it, as possible.
Those interests don't change, any more than the speed of light does, or the gravitational constant does. You don't wake up tomorrow in a world where the conservation of energy suddenly isn't a thing. To me, these are the political/economic laws of physics. People may get mixed up or pushed around by propaganda and media hysteria, but underneath, these forces are always present.
What can change is people's position in relation to those dynamics. A person might start on the factory floor, rise up the ranks, start their own business, and become a business owner. They'd be on the complete opposite side of the picture, but the dynamics would have been the same. There would be another worker where they used to be. There would be an employer who retired or went bust, who they are now in the shoes of. The groups are still there, the interests are still there.
The interesting one is with your middle class (working class) educated liberal demographic. They usually hold middle management or administrative roles. It's not so easy to say which side their interests lie on- Do they want workers to earn more and do less, or is it better for them to side with the boss? These are the professional managerial class I keep banging on about. They are working class, really, as you identify correctly; but they identify themselves as having interests more aligned with the employer, the bourgeois, capital. That's how they end up supporting things that would be self-contradictory if they were rationally cognisant of their class position and interest; they think they're in bed with the upper class, so what's good for the upper class is also good for them; but it isn't.
Building a party around their support is a recipe for disaster, and that's not just based on my arrogant know it all political theorising. It's exactly, 100%, the entire strategic blunder the Democrats made in America. They bet the last decade of support on this PMC socially liberal, economically lukewarm centrist voter. And look where that put them.
>I think our disagreement is that you think the actually-existing left isn't really the left
Sort of. It just depends if you think left and right are relative terms that change with the Overton window, or if they actually concretely stand for certain things. I tend towards the latter because again, that's how you end up with the Yank brainworms, the perception where "liberal" and "conservative" really don't mean anything whatsoever and just become red team and blue team.
It's like anything when we talk about "the economy"- When you say "the economy is doing well", that statement entirely depends on your position in relation to it. Of course it's doing well if the criteria are rents going up, and housing supply being down, and you are a landlord/home builder etc. That's great news for you. It's not great news for most of the rest of us. That's a very blunt force kind of example, but you get what I am saying there.
>>103128 >keep on like that and they'll be booking you for the inevitable Live at the Apollo revival.
I caught some of it yesterday and it was awful. Paul Chowdhry making really lazy jokes about race followed by the curly haired lass on the current series of Taskmaster. She was somewhat amusing at least, but Chowdhry was absolutely dire.
I can grant you "because we have ideologically stripped and sold the country's assets and resilience since 1979". But that means by the same token, you have to admit "a process which meant we were really in no position to take on 10 million foreigners and doing so had predictably negative outcomes".
But the thing is, they went hand in hand since the start. I will again point out that large scale immigration was Thatcher's idea and her government was the first to implement it. Blair's government largely followed suit. As did Camebourne and Bojo. Large scale migration, particularly of unskilled workers, is a right wing neoliberal agenda. The fact that the left found itself not only pinned with the blame, but actually taking up and defending it, is some quite staggering conservativeoldry.
>That's a good one, keep on like that and they'll be booking you for the inevitable Live at the Apollo revival.
Your ideology is based on a fiction. You are railing against injustices that exist only in your imagination. Your proposed solution to the country's problems is to do the thing we are already doing, but you do not recognise that we are already doing it.
>>103130 I think I did the exact same thing, except I changed away faster. I must not have been enjoying the news, so I changed from BBC1 to BBC2, and I instantly twigged that I was going to be watching one of those acts where an Asian man says "blud" and "mandem" a lot, so I changed back again. I hope the other two acts weren't funny either.
>>103135 I didn't catch his full set, fortunately, but the bit I saw was mainly talking about curry or doing funny voices. Only white middle class people eat at Dishoom because it's not a restaurant for Asians. Then he started doing a geezer voice. Then he kept doing various Indian accents but it was painfully unfunny.
>>103133 I like how you boldly and confidently claim that we're doing a thing and the source you provide to back it up reaches the clear conclusion that we are not doing the thing.
The rate of tax paid by the average worker is at the lowest level since the 1940s. The overall tax take as a proportion of GDP has never been higher. Who do you think is paying all that tax?
>>103138 Mostly workers. The idle rich, who have considerably more wealth than any category of worker, have ways of making most of their tax liabilities go away.
I'm wondering how Labour can thread the needle of their being a massive opportunity to steal skilled US workers and entrepreneurs against the rising sentiments that such people are trying to escape. Raising ILR and eventually citizenship barriers seems bizarre to me, the exact opposite of 'high-walls, open drawbridge' people have asked for decades for and conceptually it makes it harder for people to integrate into this country.
Also looking around the world is flashing recession indicators everywhere you look. So Labour is fucked and given the fiscal pressures it's a caretaker administration.
>>103112 I think you can have a decent life and still be a bully. In fact I'd bet there are an awful lot of very wealthy racists.
>>103115 >The thing is about the pro-immigration socially liberal demographic, is that they are essentially useful idiots for capital. They see themselves as socially conscious lefties, who would oppose all kinds of exploitation and indignity, but their tolerant views on migration are and always have been simply a kind of manufactured consent for the economic import of cheap labour. So you end up with a middle class that plants its flag in left wing turf, all the while supporting the aims of the bourgeoise right. And so we end up in the topsy turvy ridiculous situation like we have today, where the entire working class is behind a far right party that absolutely does not have their best interests at heart.
Are immigrant workers actually undercutting people? I don't mean to interrupt the long and tedious 20th century demagoguery that followed this post but is it really the problem that all those Polish plumbers are still coming over 'er and stealing our jobs and why is it that some of the hardest Reform voting bits of the country can have comparatively little immigration? This is especially pertinent because the heart and soul of Labour should be international class solidarity rather than national socialism.
It seems to me the problem is one of internal security, perception and - to give us a break from the usual discussion (have we had a pop at women yet?) - a lack of any unifying progressive story beyond managed decline which allows conservatives to win on idealised visions of the past. I know the retort from this will be 'well we'll adopt 1930s style progressivism with mass mobilisation of society!' But it's outdated bollocks, the world we're heading towards has overproduced itself into oblivion and the only way out is either painfully changing how we live (less cheap slop from China but less dopamine hits as the local high-quality stuff you have to save for) or compromising with techno-feudalism for now for the chance that we'll birth the machine god.
>>103139 That's not what he's saying. The UK tax system is progressively structured where the highest earners pay the bulk of tax - that's objective fact and we see it in the tax take.
The 'idle rich' are a vanishing small demographic that have been cracked down on for decades - the most recent sting being in changing inheritance tax rules so that one of the biggest financial mistakes the very wealthy can make is getting hit by a bus. I know Gary might tell you there's a shadowy clique of super-rich aristocrats that we only have to put a small tax on sky castles to solve all our problems but it's all an argument going on vibes.
>>103140 >I think you can have a decent life and still be a bully. In fact I'd bet there are an awful lot of very wealthy racists.
This has the potential to become another thread with 3000 posts and multiple new threads, but I believe most racists are thick and poor. Of course you will be able to find a few posh hoorays who hate the darkies (Jimmy Savile, for example, or those lunatic American venture capitalists like Peter Thiel), but I tend to see those people as an ill-fitting fringe of the overall racist demographic.
>Are immigrant workers actually undercutting people?
I don't really think so myself, but I did notice after Brexit that wages suddenly started going up a lot faster, certainly in my job. They went up so beautifully that the government said it was causing inflation and everyone had to stop.
>and - to give us a break from the usual discussion (have we had a pop at women yet?) - a lack of any unifying progressive story beyond managed decline which allows conservatives to win on idealised visions of the past.
Somebody, presumably here, said once that all those anti-globalisation protests in the early 2000s were effectively protesting against precisely the society we have now, where a handful of companies are so huge and powerful that they drain all the money out of the rest of society and no government can stop them. I really think Gary Stevenson's YouTube videos are the unifying progressive story we all want.
>>103141 >I know Gary might tell you
You motherfucker.
>there's a shadowy clique of super-rich aristocrats
His proposed answers might not work, I'll give you that, but I still believe his analysis of the problem is absolutely spot-on.
>>103142 Gary lives near me in a posh-ish bit of London so I see him about all the time. I've yet to say anything to him but let me know if you want me to give him a message or try to get him to drop a word or wear a jazzy shirt.
He's got really bad acne scars which you don't see in the media or on Youtube, I assume he wears makeup for the camera and dresses up a bit.At least he doesn't leave passive aggressive post-it notes like Tom Scott did.
I've seen FT headlines saying stuff like this but I'm sceptical how consistently this has been the case - I'd be interested if you have any charts to share. There's a reason that yields on sovvies are considered the risk-free rate. If gilt yields are higher at longer-maturities that would reflect liquidity problems stemming from haphazard debt management - e.g oversupply of gilts relative to demand at certain tenures due to the central bank dumping gilts via quantitative tightening and pension funds being discouraged to hold longer-term gilts. The government could mitigate to this by responding to the market, issuing less of the maturities investors don't want, instead focusing issuance at the short-end. There should be no reason why the UK government isn't able to borrow for investment cheaper than anyone else.
Sure there's also the possibility carry trades to exploit lower interest rates elsewhere, so let me rephrase my original remark to "the government is still able to borrow long-term in sterling to invest in the UK cheaper than anyone else."
Both of you can tell him he owes me money for nicking the idea about putting an expiry date on wealth. I first posted about that on here about a decade ago and he plagiarised it.
Well to put it plainly, yes. They are. But not just that- They're effectively an underclass of precariat worker which we never had before in this country. Their presence is essentially what enabled all the zero hour contract, casual-self-employed, no rights malarkey you see in today's employment market. It's not purely about wages, but the weakening of worker's rights and bargaining power across the board, by making people more expendable.
Just look at it objectively, we already had structural unemployment that exceeded vacancies, all the way through the 80s and 90s, and especially after the meltdown in 2008. That has only become worse and worse over time. We're at something like 3m unemployed to 700,000 vacancies as of the last time I checked. You cannot look at the numbers and say "yeah immigration had absolutely no effect on that."
You can't be a left wing party who's supposed to stand for "international class solidarity", and say "we want to strengthen worker's rights", while at the same time actively doing things that in no uncertain terms weaken worker's rights. Anyone who does is either extremely stupid, or a liar.
Otherlad made valid points about globalisation too. I will also point out that the working class reactionary opposition to migration has been echoed note for note in the white collar world over the last few years, in response to AI and outsourcing. There's a big double standard there I would say.
Oh and I'll also further point out that it all goes hand in hand with cutting benefits, trying to force people with disabilities back into work, and so on and so forth. Who else possibly benefits from all these factors working together, than people like Bezos who need desperate people to work in the hellish conditions of their modern day textile mills?
Add in the fact that the money those people make for him is then sucked straight out of the British economy, and absorbed straight into the American stock market instead of our own. What's not to love.
The classic response is that you can only really have an internationalist and open left wing government if everyone else you are open to is also a left wing government. Then you know all those countries will have the same worker's protections and unemployment mitigation strategies, so it's not as much of a problem to allow free movement- It doesn't have a negative impact if there's no imbalance between the markets.
The big problem is when you have a large pool of people in a country with poor wages and conditions, and a permeable barrier with a country that has high wages and good conditions. Same as with outsourcing, if you share your labour market with those countries, you are diluting your own. Osmosis. This is the big issue for the UK, we've successively just let boatloads (lol) of people in from our former colonies, and then as part of the EU, the former Soviet eastern bloc.
The whole racism aspect is just a side effect, and it's a very nice wedge issue that the right wing press has enjoyed exploiting. But underneath all of the noise, it is a real and genuine material concern. It's not just propaganda that was created from whole cloth. It's an economic reality that was very badly mis-handled.
>>103141 >That's not what he's saying.
No, it is what he's saying. To quote the exact text from >>103126:
>The rich are paying more tax than ever
The rich are very much not paying more tax than ever.
>The UK tax system is progressively structured where the highest earners pay the bulk of tax
The "highest earners" are not "the rich", they're just high earners, most of whom still draw some form of wage. "The rich" are those who for the most part do not draw a wage, but live off rents and written-off "borrowing" that isn't ever expected to be paid back.
>The 'idle rich' are a vanishing small demographic
And that's precisely the problem. Their numbers are vanishingly small, but their wealth is anything but. For such a tiny proportion of the population, they control such a massive proportion of our country's collective wealth.
Close tax loopholes like offshore IP holding in the caman islands or whereever the fuck it's at. Gersey?
One of you business lads start up a regular bank over there then teach and invite all the plebs to avoid tax. The holes will soon be closed when the rest of us start doing it, just like crypto.
>>103146 >You can't be a left wing party who's supposed to stand for "international class solidarity", and say "we want to strengthen worker's rights", while at the same time actively doing things that in no uncertain terms weaken worker's rights.
I see no problem in standing for international class solidarity and workers rights by being pro-immigration. If capital is allowed mobility, why not labour?
Working for Deliveroo is shit and exploitative, but it beats almost anything you're likely to find in a chunk of the developing world. When you take people from shit countries and put them in better countries with better conditions, you're delivering improved rights to them. Even basic stuff like "You'll probably be paid for doing the job", which isn't always guaranteed elsewhere. "Indigenous" workers get a cheap taxi for their food, immigrants get to live in a developed country, it's a win-win even if it's all a bit neoliberal and ugly to put it in these terms.
Which is why the left, while "anti-anti immigration", can comfortably take fantasy lines like "Open borders isn't left wing, people don't need to emigrate, they just need left wing governance at home." if you invite them to. Sometimes things that sound horrible are good. The biggest improvement in living standards in human history came about because China decided to become a sweatshop paradise for a bit - that sounds much worse than saying it's because they've got a left-wing government...
You might say it undermines domestic workers to import such an underclass, but the numbers that would back that up make for a very mixed picture. A simple model would imagine that you can just slap wages and unemployment on a line and watch wage growth stop and unemployment rise as we bring in more people. Instead, wage growth continues in the early phases of mass immigration under Blair, stalling in 2008, then bounces around randomly (despite a shift to even higher immigration under Johnson), while unemployment also shows basically no correlation. The ratio of unemployed to vacancies is substantially better than it was in 2015 when we were still panicking about immigration. We're up 4 million people since then, supposedly with 1.6 million unemployed.
And that's for Britain - which is anomalous. Take somewhere like Australia or New Zealand, where the population has grown spectacularly since the 1990s thanks to huge immigration, and they've been doing brilliantly relative to us. You can even cheat and take America, the world's superpower, quite famously made that way by importing people from all over the world.
The problem with the theory that it's immigrants that broke workers rights is that it's very easy to look back to the 1990s and see that it was the Tories that broke workers rights and the Labour party that refused to fix them (remember, Blair's only pro-union reform was to undo Thatcher's ban on intelligence workers joining a union.), combined with some fairly unimaginative, risk averse, and occasionally outright dodgy leadership from trade unions. For example: when the IWGB (a minor union) was busy organising Deliveroo workers, Deliveroo and the GMB struck up a "partnership agreement" and the GMB spent thousands fighting the IWGB in court. I don't think you can blame immigrants for that.
The answer should be obvious. Capital can move where it wants to be. Labour can only move where the whims of the market allow it to. They are not comparable.
>I don't think you can blame immigrants
I am not blaming immigrants. I am blaming nobody but neoliberal Thatcherite capitalists.
>>103154 Labour flows are constrained by governmental immigration restrictions, not by the whims of the market. Thatcherites scrapped capital controls and kept immigration controls. No matter the net migration figure, you can't enter the country with the same ease you can send all your money into or out out of it - even though airlines would gladly sell you the tickets if they were allowed.
It is not obvious to me in economic terms or humanist terms why this should be the case , it only makes sense in (non-pejorative) nationalist or protectionist terms.
>>103155 We buy things from China because China makes cheap stuff. We don’t go to work in China, because China makes cheap stuff. There are no laws against a British person going to work in a Chinese factory, I assume, but we don’t because the labour market discourages it.
>>103152 >The ratio of unemployed to vacancies is substantially better than it was in 2015 when we were still panicking about immigration
It's worth adding the caveat that both of those input numbers are subject to substantial manipulation. There are a whole bunch of people who don't count as unemployed because they're either in some form of serfdom disguised as employment or have just given up altogether. The vacancy count can be inflated by companies doing a capitalism and claiming vacancies exist when they don't because vacancies imply good times and the perception of more vacancies makes a company look like it's doing better than it really is. The latter in particular can be exaggerated in cases where the vacancy count is published by a job site using a methodology along the lines of "assume we're seeing a proportion of the market and scale up to the whole market" because then the fake ads will inflate the number for the rest of the economy.
We've had at work our first client of the year wanting to take a six figure tax-free lump sum from their pension because they're convinced Rachel Reeves is going to cap the maximum you can take.
Not this shit again. Not two whole months of people losing their heads over what might happen in the Budget.
>>103160 "Home Secretary" really is just a euphemism for "official chief fascist of the government". They never do anything except threaten fundamental liberties and shriek about Muslims. It would be nice if governments also had a minister whose job was to be an ineffectual woolly lefty in a vegan jumper, for balance, but I guess the British people don't want such a thing.
Why don't Labour hammer the Conservatives/Reform on being irredeemable Americans? A solid chunk of their ideas (British DOGE! British ICE! Make Britain Great Again!) are just whatever Trump pukes up this week, and it would lay the groundwork for when all the stories about them being funded by dodgy yank donors come out.
If you wanted a serious, non-idiotic patriotic/nationalist line, preventing the Americanisation of British society seems much more likely to attract support than insisting you should vote Reform lite to keep Reform out. If you really want "Progressive patriotism", I can think of nothing more obvious than the smug self-satisfaction that even socially conservative Britons used to feel when looking at American flag-shagging, bible-bashing, and basic ignorance about the world around them.
Instead, you get Labour conference awkwardly pledging allegiance to the flag and the Republic for which it stands and Scottish Labour promising to set up their own DOGE if they win the next Holyrood election.
Actually, a better question is: why don't the Lib Dems do it? Labour are the world's most useless party, and they arguably they have to suck up to Trump, but have all our elites forgotten that as a US cultural satellite with a lower GDP per capita than even their crappiest states, the one thing we've got left is thinking we're culturally superior to the stupid fat Americans? Take that away and you might as well ask Trump to take us on as the 51st state - if nothing else it would be good for growth.
>>103167 I don't think that would work. For starters, a lot of Reform voters wouldn't even see Labour making this message in the first place because they're too busy getting their worldview from GB News talking about how many brown-eyed people have crossed The Channel in small boats or from fellow patriots on Facebook.
Even if they did get this message then it's unlikely they'd be receptive to it because all that really matters to them is immigration. That's all anyone voting Reform cares about. You might grab their attention for a little while, but five minutes later they'll read a story about an asylum seeker trying to touch up some teenage lasses and it'll be back to square one.
If Labour want to counter Reform they actually need to offer something. They got into power because people were finally sick of the Tories, not because people were excited about Labour. They've pissed the small amount of goodwill they had away by offering nothing, absolutely nothing, other than talking about how the grown ups are now in charge and we're in for tough times that they've decided to make worse by discouraging growth.
They're completely directionless and all they can do is blame the Tories for the mess we're in. They spent so long defining themselves by who they aren't, "vote for us we're not the Tories", they don't know who they actually are and what they stand for. If Labour want any chance of beating Reform they need to be bold, they need to make people feel optimistic. Build shit. Nationalise shit. Offer something positive for once.
