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  1. I realise it’s been less than a year, but everyone was so jolly pleased when the Tory government was ousted I was wondering if there have been any noticeable differences between Sunak’s Conservative government and Starmer’s Labour government?

      • Early days yet. I recall when Starmer became leader of the Labour Party a few Afterworders celebrated that now the “grown ups” were back in charge and the “cranks” had been purged, Labour could get elected and implement real change. So clearly it must only be a question of time, n’est-ce pas?

        Mind you, I imagine those particular Afterworders are already very happy with Starmer’s stance regarding Israel.

  2. Here in East Yorkshire, we now have an ex-Olympic boxer who missed FIVE of the Mayoral debates and who can barely string a coherent sentence together (those two things possibly related) as Mayor. #sofuckingproud

    In Greater Lincolnshire, they’ve elected an ex-Tory who advocates holding asylum seekers in tents.
    In Durham, Farage is already gleefully threatening those in jobs associated with the net zero and diversity agendas, and those who do some work from home, to ‘start looking for new jobs’.

    These are not just examples of a Tory wipeout, but even so – and hating the Tories as I do – I really don’t think they are a source of rejoicing.

    • That would be Katie Hopkins lookalike and serial nutter Andrea Jenkyns, whose greatest contribution to British society has been a stint working in Greggs for which Boris Johnson made her a dame. Or something like that.

  4. Temper your glee, if they are replaced by something more extreme then is that a good thing?

    However I remember the SDP “ending 2 party politics” in by elections 40 years ago. “Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government” roared David Steel. Didn’t happen.

    • Always keep tight hold of nurse
      For fear of finding something worse?

      There is a line of argument that Farage’s latest grift having a power base is a good thing, because the constituents will get to see how useless they are. No one wants to hear their local politicians shouting’Stop the Boats!’ if they’re more concerned about potholes.

      Then again maybe they’ll be really good and prove themselves worthy of the voters’ trust (hollow laugh).

  5. It’s been, ‘We’ve been expecting you, Mr Farage’ in our house. The toad faced **** was bound to have had a good day after the year Labour has had. Well done Rachel Reeve for mis-reading every room and situation she’s been in since.

    So while it sucks no end, let’s see what these awful loons actually achieve. Let’s have the emails pour in from the local residents – as they do anyway – asking for action on a thousand real local problems. Let’s see these twats do some work and see what happens.

  6. Part of me thinks that now that Reform actually have some power and have to be accountable for doing things (like fixing potholes and reducing Council tax) the scales may start to fall from people’s eyes. But then we thought that about Trump and that’s gone well, hasn’t it?

    • Indeed, they can talk a good game, rabble-rouse, and get support. But can they deliver?
      Look across the pond at a crumbing reputation and support now the time has come to deliver on the bluster and promises made

    • Yes, I noted that there was one Reform candidate promising that they were going to freeze council tax AND fix all the potholes. Well, now they’re going to have to do that in eight English counties.
      Of course, first they’ll blame the outgoing council, whatever colour they were, for leaving the finances in a state; then they’ll blame the government for insufficient funding from Whitehall, with a dash of bleating about political discrimination in the value of their grant. But their bragging about bringing DOGE (bloody Venetians!) to our local government will fall flat when they find that two thirds of the budget is for adult social care.
      There was another breathless Reform supporter somewhere round here saying ‘We must stop Labour from building on the green belt, and there aren’t any affordable houses for young families’.

      • Lame andrea jenkyns has doubled down on Farage’s pledge to sack diversity officers in Lincolnshire but the county council has revealed it does not employ any. Though I believe some are employed in other parts of the county.
        I wonder if she’ll move from Leeds to Lincolnshire?

      • So Farage is going to fire all Diversity, Equity & Inclusion staff (a term that I don’t believe is used in the UK – just copied wholesale from Trump)…. Is this what he means by “protecting British workers” ?

        • The term DEI is used pretty broadly in the UK.

          My own employer has a DEI department of about 40 people, maybe a dozen of them in the UK. I also know a number of people, either socially or through work, who are employed in “the DEI space” or as heads of DEI in the UK. I sit on at least one board that has a DEI specialist on it, and a DEI subcommittee.

          I don’t say any of this as a judgement, merely to point out that DEI is certainly a recognised concept here.

          • I stand corrected (as I mention below I’m not currently in the UK so don’t necessarily see all the details). I just had the impression “DEI” was only really used in US based companies.

  7. Our brilliant local councillor got in quite comfortably.
    She’s a young, vibrant, beautiful, highly educated woman and yet, bizarrely, old white men and old white women who read the Daily Mail don’t like her.
    She believes in Climate Change and Diversity and woke things like that.

    Tell you this, she sorted out our bins. That was my major local issue in 2021 (Immigration? Are you shitting me? The only black people where I live are in my record collection) and now it isn’t. I thanked her for it and she seemed genuinely shocked, no one else had thought to say thank you to her.

    Two things:
    A bogus rumour about transport (in this case traffic lights) spread like wild-fire before the election, much like the ridiculous Ulez by-election in Uxbridge after Fat Boy J. had bottled it and run away.
    Secondly, despite my wife being a whizz at such things, she could find absolutely nothing out about the Reform candidate who stood in our area… not helped, of course, by the fact he didn’t turn up at the hustings.

    Predictions:
    Will Reform contest the next General Election?
    Probably, though it’s not a definite.
    Will they win it?
    No.
    Will they get any more seats than they have now?
    Maybe, but I doubt it. I’ll guess ‘one’… Fromage… or ‘two’ if Tommy Ten Names gets over the wall in time.
    Will Reform contest the General Election after next… 2034 say?
    Categorically not, as the Reform party/business model will not be in existence then. I suspect that not everyone will be out of pocket.

    • Their business model is to be heavily bankrolled by oil companies and the like. That should keep them going for a good while. The 250,000 new members paying £25 each are small beans in comparison.

  8. Has the Labour government elected last year made a difference?

    Yes, in a number of positive ways.

    Firstly, they have managed a substantial increase in public expenditure, aimed mainly at the NHS, and have done so without triggering a Truss/Trump style financial meltdown. This alone is a remarkable achievement for which Rachel Reeves deserves credit.

    The living wage has been substantially increased – by 6.7% – more for younger workers.

    Worker’s rights are being increased.

    A publicly-owned energy company, investing in renewable energy, has been established.

    And at time of profound international crisis, we have a grown-up in the room.

    Could they be doing better? Absolutely. However the fact that they are drawing vociferous criticism from both the right and the hobbyist left shows that they bare getting something right.

      • @lando-cakes
        An interesting list of positive achievements and actually, quite literally, the first praise for Starmer’s government that I’ve come across.
        Being something of an ignoramus myself, I asked AI for its opinion (cutting out the “hobbyist left” and “a grown up in the room” references to make my question seem more serious). Of course it gave a long, detailed analysis, summed up with this conclusion:

        “The statement is largely accurate and captures significant policy changes under Starmer’s government, supporting the claim of positive differences in public spending, wages, workers’ rights, and renewable energy. However, it oversimplifies by omitting trade-offs (e.g., spending cuts elsewhere) and exaggerating certain impacts (e.g., NHS focus, GB Energy’s immediate role). A more nuanced version would balance achievements with challenges, such as fiscal constraints and delayed implementation, to provide a fuller picture of Labour’s impact by May 2025.”

        It seems to be the cuts to public services that bother most critics.

    • Policy wise, the means testing of the Winter Fuel Payment and the proposed cuts in PIP payments have been disastrous, WFP being an easy stick to beat them with while PIP payments never seemed generous in the first place. I’m disappointed that there seems to be a reluctance to consider raising more tax from top earners and mega corps such as Amazon. According to the reports I heard on the radio, Winter Fuel Payment was a constant gripe on doorsteps during election canvassing, definitely an own goal which they must be regretting.

      • My wife and I, and other family members, received the winter fuel payment when we didn’t need it. I can’t see why we should have received £600 a year from the taxpayer when we could pay the energy bill without any great pain, and it made sense for the government to say that not everyone should get it.

        Maybe it could have a better formula for supporting people who do need support than simply saying it depends on whether they are receiving pension credit – but I think the issue has been quite cynically distorted by some of its opponents.

        • I’m sure you’re right but it was still badly handled and straight out of the starting gate too. You didn’t have to be a political expert to see this would blow up in their faces, no matter how much noise they made about a £22bn black hole.

          • The only time to do the unpopular stuff is at the start of your term in office. Their majority is such that losses in by elections won’t have any significance from a governance point of view. What matters is performance from mid term onwards and in particular 12 months leading to election, and whether they can actually make sufficient progress. I hope so but the combined impact of self harm (austerity, Brexit), unexpected (Covid) and things that always seemed possible (Trump v2, Russian war mongering) have buggered our economy beyond anything that 9 months in gov’t is going to fix.

    • Yes. They are doing some good things but, in politics, perception is everything. Those changes will take a considerable time to pay off. As for now, the perception is that nothing has changed. They need a quick win from somewhere or they may never gain any credit for anything.

      Trump’s tariffs are damaging our manufacturing. There will be no deal if they force the likes of Amazon to pay tax.

    • I recognise all the points Lando has made, and concur they are all significant, impactful improvements in fiscal, employment and energy policy.

      But for the love of God, when is the UK going to distance itself from the horror being carried out by our dear ally Israel? I know a Tory government with the likes of Patel etc in it would be vying with Germany and the US in voicing untrammelled support to Netanyahu and his thugs, but I had hoped for a firmer, more ethically-driven response from this Government. I am under no illusions, there is little we can do, but a strong condemnation of mass murder and deliberate starvation etc is surely not beyond this former human rights lawyer?

      • I agree. One of the problems is that too many of the voices protesting against Israel are indeed doing exactly that – they call for a free Palestine from the river to the sea and are not only against Israel’s actions in this conflict but against its very right to exist. We need much louder voices from those who believe in Israel and a two state solution but condemn without reservation Israel’s destruction of Gaza and its people. That should be a space a Labour government could occupy very strongly and successfully.

          • They just got rid of their anti semitism problem and probably don’t want to revive it. I don’t think they have the nuance to be a critical friend – better to play dumb.

            • Silence with regard to what many Jewish organisations, leaders and scholars are calling a genocide? Kinda throws any claim of moral integrity out the window. They could at least try and stop British-made weapons being used.

              • This is where we are at. Sane Jewish voices, scholars, human rights groups and for God’s sake, even the former boss of Shin Bet are calling out this insane orgy of killing and cruel, sadistic ethnic cleansing. And Britain? Er…

                Has anyone paused to consider the consequences of this ‘see no evil’ strategy in years to come? I’m not saying foreign policy should be defined by a need to placate terrorists, but honestly, it’s grimly apparent that in years to come, the silence of supposedly developed nations, in tacitly allowing Israel to go berserk will feed Hamas’s rhetoric. And that of other terror organisations, which will inevitably spring from the ruins. Yet another tragedy in this misery is that tomorrow’s terrorists are probably right now scrabbling in the ruins of Gaza, looking for their parents’ bodies.

              • A sad fact is that the Anti-Zionist Jewish organisations and activists appear to be very much a minority, where funding and media influence are concerned. And thus probably still among Jewish communities worldwide.

                It’s occurred to me recently that perhaps the rise of Naziism did Zionism a great favour, elevating what was previously just a crank cult into a driving political and social principle, post WW2.

                Meanwhile, blatant antisemitism is widespread among Muslim and (to a lesser extent) Christian communities, not helped at all by the actions and attitudes of successive Israeli governments since the foundation of their state.

                • The weaponisation of anti-semitism to score political points – perhaps most notably in Britain, Germany and America – has very predictably done a great deal of harm to the fight against genuine anti-semitism (not that the people responsible could give a toss about that!). I’ve seen everyone from Pope Francis to Gary Lineker and even Jewish survivors of the Holocaust smeared with the accusation. As Time magazine reported last year, “the weaponisation of antisemitism intensifies the discrimination and exclusion against vulnerable communities in the U.S.—including Jews”.
                  https://time.com/6977457/weaponizing-antisemitism

                  Genuine anti-semitism does seem extremely rife among Muslims, just as Islamophobia (for want of a better word) seems extremely rife among Zionists.

                  I’m no fan of Islam at all. I think it’s grossly sexist and homophobic (even more so than Catholicism), but that in no way diminishes my horror at the injustice of what’s happening in Gaza. So many innocent children. Beyond heartbreaking.

    • Totally agree. If they took the time to pull it all together into a proper plan aligned with what normal people want and communicated it they’d be in a much better state. Sadly McSweeny is too busy trying to keep 2029 Daily Mail readers happy.

  9. It is true that the PLP have implemented changes none of which are cutting through with the cross section of people I manage to engage with on the occasions I get to speak to others. I live in a staunchly Labour constituency but I will be very surprised if for the first time in living memory it doesn’t vote differently at the next GE. I friend of many years still frequents the local Labour Club and he reports that all he hears there is talk of Reform. This sickens me but the PLP seem determined to drive the core vote into the welcoming arms of the Right. Starmer et al should stop seeking to appease the Right by following their agenda and move to the Left. Start behaving as a Labour government should, stop punching down and start looking up. If they don’t they are doomed to fail and they will usher in a government that I think we will all agree will be disastrous. At the moment too many people are once again sleepwalking believing it will all be ok once all the grubby oiks see what marvels will be bestowed upon them if they just hold fast to the status quo. People are tired of waiting, tired of no jam today and they are not in a mood to be cajoled they want to see obvious improvements to their lives, instead the impression they get is one of being shafted once again. It creates a perfect breeding ground for the Right, for the Nigel Front.

    • I live in a traditionally Tory area, so admittedly Labour would have to do something relatively dramatic to win a lot fans here, but lately there is definitely more talk in these parts about Reform.

      I try not to follow politics too closely, because our current over-supply of half-witted chancers and non-entities (of all parties) makes me despair, but I’m afraid that Reform could gain a lot of strength from people who just want a change. What “change” means, and what effect it might have, seems less important at the moment.

      Labour may be doing some good for all I know, and maybe life will improve, but I think too many people are tired of endless “austerity” (read: constant cuts to basic services), repeated scandals, and the general uselessness of so many of our representatives. Anybody promising – or simply representing – a change from all this is sure to do well, at least for a while.

      I don’t know what quick wins Labour could offer, but they need to do something soon that obviously and inarguably improves some large-ish sector of society or life in the UK, or Farage and his ilk are going to appear as an increasingly reasonable alternative come General Election time.

      • I see Starmer responded yesterday:

        “Most Prime Ministers would respond to these local elections with the same old excuses.
        My response is simple: I get it.
        We’re moving in the right direction, but people must feel the benefits of change.
        I will go further and faster to make that happen.”

        • Labour seems to be stealing the wrong Reform clothes. Rather than hardening the approach to immigration, softening climate change policies and marginalising disabled and trans people, why not nationalise water or the railways.?

          Breaking the link between domestic costs and international gas prices would also be a quick win that Farage could not claim was his idea.

  10. I didn’t vote for Labour but I’m glad they won rather than the Tories. I didn’t expect them to be much cop so I’m not surprised they are struggling which I put down to two things, one which is too late to fix and one which they can fix.

    It pains me to say it but Rishi Sunak was right Labour had no plan when they came in and have been on the back foot thrashing about ever since. As a result they’ve made stupid mistakes and completely failed to communicate an overall narrative and consequently have upset a lot of people through things like the winter fuel allowance, the benefit cap etc. I get that this is to retain the confidence of the markets and not do a Truss but they could have achieved the same thing by having a clear plan which put their decisions in a wider context of delivery. It all looks very fragmented. It’s true though that they have done some good things but haven’t got the message out,Hence the kicking at the local elections. I think a lot of the problem lies at McSweeny’s door – his first move was to go to war with Sue Gray and drive out the person with extensive experience of the Civil Service delivery machine, and he is Mr. Blue Labour who thinks they can out reform Reform. They can’t. I’d get rid of him completely and focus on consolidating and communicating the plan regularly especially why things are being done and when the benefits should appear. There are some good ministers and with better organisation and communication I don’t see why they can’t turn this around. They need to get in with it now though.

    As for the Tories they can’t suffer enough as far as I am concerned and having a useless leader is great for ensuring this continues. They will probably replace her in the autumn with Jenrick who will be equally hopeless. Johnson did us all a favour getting rid of the decent ones. Cleverly is probably best of a bad lot so obviously they won’t choose him.

    • I’ve never understood why Labour didn’t have a plan when they came in and have seemingly been making it up as they go.

      After all those years in opposition, you’d think they would have had plenty of time to come up with a whole raft of worthy and well-worked-out policies that they could put into action on day 1, given the total collapse of the Tories. It would have been nice to think that one of their top people had spent time before the election looking at everything wrong with the country and working out how to fix it. Instead, we’re told to wait for things to improve, and watch as they pick and choose bits and pieces of policies that will come into effect at some unknown point, if at all.

      I didn’t expect Starmer and co. to immediately work miracles, but I did hope they might be aiming a bit higher and making some effective improvements early on. Watching them bimbling along, Farage must think every day is Christmas.

      • We can all agree Trump is reprehensible but that’s exactly what he’s doing. He had a plan, said exactly what he intended to do (more or less) and is vigorously doing it despite all efforts to slow him down. Not surprising his core vote think he’s doing a great job.

        Streeting, for example, was constantly on the radio talking about change. So what does he do? Call for a review. I think they might have lost the next election right there.

  11. There’s a reference above to the dangers of the voting public listening to Reform on immigration, but I think that probably has it the wrong way round. The electorate has been telling politicians for at least 15 years now that they are not happy about immigration. The same is occurring in a number of other Western countries.

    Personally, I’m very much in favour of immigration. I wouldn’t exist without it, and it is certainly a positive in my day to day life. But it feels an inescapable fact that increasing numbers do not share that view/experience, and that there is a mounting danger in continuing to ignore or dismiss their concerns.

    How you solve that problem, I don’t know. Is it even possible to stop the small boats? How do you best encourage new arrivals to integrate? Do you end up inevitably engaging in the theatre of cruelty to demonstrate your seriousness on the subject in the face of your own helplessness?

    Whatever the answers to those questions, it does seem readily apparent that as long as that particular blister remains un-burst, the Reform party, or some other similar entity, will continue to make hay.

    Beyond that, while it’s still comparatively early days, there are other areas where the government can pull its finger out. I didn’t vote for Starmer, and I’m not entirely surprised that he’s struggling to find the right answers, but it does feel inescapable that they’re going to have to row back on the Winter fuel debacle and raise taxes in some way, shape or form.

    The advantage they do at least have here is that they remain faintly connected to reality. They are unpopular and they know it; I have yet to read any suggestions that said unpopularity is solely a product of media brainwashing or the manoeuvrings of foreign governments. Consequently, they are being forced to own their poll numbers, and there remains an opportunity for them to actually listen to voters, and figure out how to give them at least some of what they’re asking for.

    On a semi-related note, given the current success of Reform, I wonder if we might see at least one of the two major political parties split completely. Clearly, the notion that there is no room for a new political party has been disproven, which rather begs the question of why people who apparently disagree so vehemently continue to labour under the same shared political banner, particularly when said banner is rapidly losing whatever cache it once possessed.

    • Rachel Reeves has plenty of good reasons to abandon her self imposed fiscal rules (Trump just one of them) and raise taxes from those who can most afford it. The majority of the MSM will lose its mind but the public would understand, I think.

      I worry that these latest results show there is actually only room for two main parties and that Reform will replace Conservatives. I expect more defections from Tory to Reform. I really don’t see the Lib Dems ever gaining a parliamentary majority by themselves again, or at least, not in my lifetime. Another coalition is very possible.

      That said, our FPTP system has thrown up some spectacular results recently and majorities are built on very shakey ground.

      • Tax increases are always going to be a tough sell politically, but I suspect that in this instance there would be some public goodwill bought by the simple fact that Reeves has clearly tried very hard to avoid them, to her own cost. Could be wrong though. It just feels like they’re going to be the inevitable end destination here, it’s really just a question of how we get there.

        I typed and deleted in my post above my other thought, which is that it’s possible that if things continue along this track we might see another swing at electoral reform towards the end of this parliament, partly to satisfy the apparent appetite for “change”, partly as a bulwark against some of the loonies who may shortly run our country.

        FPTP has been largely successful (until the last decade) because it’s tended to deliver strong government. But I’m not sure a lot of us will want strong government if it’s going to be people like Farage at the head of it.

        • The Reunion on Radio 4 this week covered the Tory/Lib Dem coalition as well as a small section on the AV referendum. It could be revived I suppose and talked up by Reform but there seemed to be little interest in it last time and it only happened because it was a condition of the Lib Dems taking the Conservative shilling.

    • I agree with you that immigration is a good thing. Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t data shown time and time again that immigrants are generally net positive to GDP.

      I’m not living in the UK these days (I’m an immigrant in another country !) but the impression I get is that the problem is not really immigration, it’s that fact that there has not been enough investment in the infrastructure to support the increase in population that immigration obviously brings. People suffer worse services etc and immigrants become an easy thing to blame.

      You are never going to solve immigration by trying to curtail it – there will always be a need (for skills, for the jobs that no one else wants to do, for humanitarian reasons, etc). It’s time this story was turned on its head and made to be about investing in increases in population not blaming those who increase it.

      • There will always be those who dislike and distrust those who are different. Different skin colour, different language, different culture, different religion and I think, as a nation and a sweeping generalisation, we can be guilty of all of these, certainly among people of my parent’s generation. Around the time of Brexit, I heard a radio piece from, I think, Peterborough, where Eastern Europeans make up a significant number of the population, in a town that wasn’t thriving. The gist of the vox pops was that people who had grown up in an area barely heard an English voice/conversation and couldn’t get a council house or doctor’s appointment. It’s easy to dismiss this as prejudice or racism but to the interviewees, it was their everyday life as they saw it. Hardly surprising that it was fertile ground for Farage.

        • Those self same pops are now voxing that the price of their weekly shop has increased, because nobody local wants to spend their working days picking the veg grown on the Fens for minimum wage…

          • Yeah, my heart bleeds for them. Meanwhile, colleagues who used to do a significant amount of their work in Europe are scratching around for anything because they can’t work freely in Europe. Fortunately, I stopped doing overseas work prior to Brexit. I work in a small bubble and haven’t been affected that much by any of the recent economic events. I’m very lucky but it could change quite quickly. If my main end client disappeared, I’d probably just close down as I’m close enough to retirement to not want to have to replace them.

            • One Fen-based Brexit voter of my acquaintance justified their action with “Well, that’s got rid of Cameron!”

              I’m not going to make any lazy jokes about Fenlanders having more fingers than brain cells – oops, I just have – but I really was lost for words.

      • I instinctively agree with everything you day, but these are the same arguments we’ve all been making for nearly two decades and they don’t appear to be working. Quite the opposite, in fact.

        I’ve personally come to the conclusion – and I take no joy at all in it – that immigration is probably experienced differently depending on where you are in the country and in which socio-economic bracket. That in some areas it probably has been a net negative.

        I’m starting to think that it’s time to stop treating immigration as a binary issue (i.e. it’s a positive vs it’s a negative) and move towards a position where we recognise that it’s comprised of opportunities and challenges, and start articulating some solutions to the challenges.

        Otherwise our discourse will remain locked exactly where it’s been for the last decade or so, we’ll continue to tell people that they’re wrong/mislead about their own lives, and the Farages of this world will profit and win.

        • It’s also the case that whilst, overall, there is a net benefit ( albeit relatively small in fiscal terms) there is a huge variation in terms of benefits between different groups.

          Some,particularly highly skilled workers, especially people without dependants, provide very substantial net economic benefits. Those in low paid work, or not working, with a number of dependants, do not. Until recently, some other countries have been far more effective in making a distinction between the two.

    • “it’s time to stop treating immigration as a binary issue (i.e. it’s a positive vs it’s a negative) and move towards a position where we recognise that it’s comprised of opportunities and challenges, and start articulating some solutions to the challenges”. B.Little

      This would be my whole approach to this issue. I am coming close to the end of Hein de Haas’s excellent “How Migration Works” in which he defuses 22 common myths about migration. The conclusions he comes to paint a complex, yet clear picture of the reality of migration – what drives it, and what effects it has on the migrant, the recipient country and the source country. My 800 word response below is somewhat disjointed and lengthy as I am still formulating that picture in my head to become more concise. I tried to give a bit of focus by bolding what I think are key points.

      In essence, migration is a constant for about 3% of the world’s population and the main driving factor for it is labour market needs. Many countries in the West have three factors creating a big low skilled worker shortage (caring, service, agriculture sectors) – ageing and reducing demographics, female emancipation, higher levels of general education. Migration, to an extent, solves this employment shortage, (though migrants also age and bring dependents). If you want to lower immigration, the most effective way to do this is to crash your economy – migrants will return home.

      Chris would seem to be right that immigration is net positive for GDP, yet it is not an unalloyed good, as ernietothecentreoftheearth says – it benefits those who own the industries the migrants work in more than the resident wage earners and the benefit-dependent. A truth not to be brushed under the carpet, if you want to beat the toxic infection of right-wing rhetoric (and bland immigration enthusiasm).

      Regarding the electorate not being happy about immigration, I think some parts, maybe increasing numbers are, but is that based on an accurate picture or mistaken beliefs? De Haas argues (with statistics) that migrants don’t take the jobs and steal the benefits.

      Like Chris I’m also an immigrant. When I return to Witham in Essex, I see the potholes and lack of investment, while in nearby villages, multi-million-pound houses are built. Witham itself was expanded in the 60s by the immigration of many low skilled workers from the East End to work in factories on the local industrial estate. Precious little accompanying infrastructure for the expanse of population has made it a dead and soulless place, despite a river walk. Underinvest in education, training and culture and you will breed resentment, easily mistargeted.

      Re Dave’s point about those who are different. I agree that this is not racism or prejudice, which were weapons used during colonial times, but it is fear. Historically there are two competing narratives – fear of vs welcome to the stranger. Religion, despite its many opponents, has always tried to encourage the latter approach as a way of diffusing conflict, and the ‘natural’ hostility that the bonding hormone oxytocin paradoxically generates to the other as it stirs connection over similarities. Once connections are made, it is possible to cross cultural divides, often by children of migrants (better equipped with the second language) when they encounter others at school.

      On the point of major political party splitting, de Haas explains the reason for this by identifying the 4 quadrants of opinion, dividing the left and right along pro-/anti-immigration lines:
      Left = liberals and human rights activists vs protectionist trade unions. Right = the business lobby vs. Brexit-voting little Englanders (to be crude). Interestingly this split breaks/ignores class (worker/wealth owner) and culture (liberal/conservative) alliances, as if these old divides don’t matter any more (or are conveniently ignored)

      Responding to some of Bingo’s understandable queries:
      – Stop the small boats? De Haas advises that small boats are a reaction to tighter borders – no other way to get to the UK – regularise access or face continued ingress in response to the job market. Also recognize that smugglers will only disappear when migrants stop paying them, they aren’t big crime syndicates.
      – Encourage new arrivals to integrate? Don’t discriminate against them. 2nd generation migrants tend already to be more integrated.
      – Labour engaging in the theatre of cruelty? This achieves nothing other than feeding the profits of the arms and security industries that reap billions from providing border security equipment and staff. Regularise immigration.

      Returning to my original point about the root cause for migration (taking up employment that needs to be done), blocking free movement, whether Brexit or generally strict border controls, is a profoundly illiberal policy that disrupts the free flow of talent and skill sets, generating frustration and tension. Avoiding the truth about migration will certainly play into the hands of populists who can focus on the genuine aspects that are problematic without providing any serious long term solutions.

        • Aargh!! Seriously?
          No AI involved, I promise you. It’s probably the product of 15 years working in the international civil service – I write corporate…

          Edit: is this the sort of neo-Turing test to look forward to from now on? “Can you prove your writing isn’t artificially generated?”

          • Yikes, sorry Sal. Something in the way the information was arranged (plus the telltale hyphens) felt familiar.

            To be honest, it is something I’ve been thinking about of late. I could just about live with the idea that when you enter into online “debate” you’re potentially wasting your time going back and forth with a remedial or a literal child, but the idea of doing so with a chatbot feels particularly joyless and pointless. And inevitable.

            I agree with a lot of what you’ve said above, although I think there’s a fair bit it leaves out. On the integration point, for example; I’d say this is a two way street. It’s certainly easier for immigrant communities to integrate in the absence of discrimination, but we should also consider that we’re asking (perhaps even requiring) something of the immigrant as well. It’s a basic tenet of life that one cannot require respect without first showing respect, after all.

            I also think you’re being over-optimistic about religion, but then that’s just me.

            • A colleague reviewing job applications recently said all the aptitude tests were done with Chat GPT – he could tell by the formatting (all text capitalized in the titles, for example). There will come a time, I can imagine, when ChaT GPT and others will wise up to this and avoid ‘AI traits’ like hyphens. (I use them because I’m a shite typist, and it’s a lot easier than typing a full stop and a capital letter….). But like a text-based geometric arms race (choose your own AI adventure – what fun), people will spot new ways AI does generic copying of the previous generation of text formulation (from last week’s internet scraping, maybe).

              Just interact textually with what interests you is my supposition for an interesting life. I suppose that might mean I end up typing to a generated mirror image of myself – “how fascinating, Sal, I wish I had thought of that” – “You did, Sal, you did”. “Maybe that is already happening, have you thought of that”. Spooky.

              Enough, enough.

              “The bit I left out” is the interesting part for me – the blind spots that weaken my argumentation. That’s golden.

              Integration. Yes, a two way street. In fact I didn’t address at all the genuine grievances about the difficulties migration bring. Except a bit of the peace. love and understanding, Chiz rightly says is in short supply nowadays. It never goes amiss, even when it seems scant response to basic human needs. We will come back to it at some point, when the other options are chased to the tail.

              What is that something we are asking (requiring) of the migrant, I wonder? I read that it was a deliberate policy in the sixties to recruit factory workers from rural areas of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey and North Africa, because they were likely to be less educated, more culturally conservative and so unlikely to be subversive or rights-demanding. The consequences of such recruitment are seen in the enclaves of uncommunicative first generation immigrants, only slowly integrated through the cultural communication of the successive generations.

              I wonder if the costs of migration mean that modern migrants (self selecting, rather than imported) are more likely to be urban, middle class and more likely to integrate?

              Over optimistic about religion? Yes, definitely. Bag o’shite that just oppresses people.(not really, but also less culturally significant in atheist UK than it might have been once).

              • Religion can bring a lot of good into people’s lives, certainly at an individual level, but obviously it comes with its own baggage, and it obviously complicates the debate over immigration.

                What are the obligations on the immigrant? I suspect you and I both have a good sense of that from our own lives. I doubt you turned up in Germany determined to separate yourself from the locals and with a simmering contempt for their values, for example.

                My Mother used to cry on every flight back from South America to the UK and certainly wasn’t averse to criticising her new home, or its history. But she was also an instinctive pluralist who recognised that not everyone needed to agree with her – in fact, she’d probably have changed her views if they did.

                There’s a biting point to be found, isn’t there? If you move to another country you should be allowed to keep your past, your culture, your beliefs, but you also need to figure out how to make all of that work without too much friction with your new surroundings, and maybe that’s where the responsibility lies.

                I would certainly argue, for example, that if you don’t want to live in a place where women have specific rights, or other people have certain sexual freedoms, you could spare all parties a lot of trouble by simply not moving here. Likewise, if you have certain ethnic or religious enmities you’d like to bring in your hand luggage, perhaps those should be left at the front door too.

                • Religion for me was expressed in its historical (community-binding Karen Armstrong sense) rather than its topical (belief system divisive/fundamentalist sense). Whatever the schismatic function it can be abused for these days, there is at the heart of all world religions (apart from for JD Vance obvs.) a sense of benevolence for others.

                  A simmering contempt for German values? Now there’s a dilemma for a Brit…
                  No, like most migrants in the world, I chose a country not very far away from my own, in this case with similar Saxual roots (so Saxy). Sometimes I think there’s more that separates different parts of the UK from each other than separates other European countries from the UK.
                  I also think the idea that while migrants might flock together for a sense of cultural connection (as most of us do, don’t we?), have in any large number a sense of simmering contempt for the UK is questionable.

                  I shouldn’t, but I can’t resist a terrible joke – did Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice write a song for your mum. Apologies in advance…
                  I know when my Mum first moved to Zurich, she had profound culture shock and could not connect at all with the profoundly insular Swiss Germans. I think how welcoming the Brits were to Ukrainians, compared to Farage’s approach to their near neighbours, the Romanians. It might be a two way street, but it definitely feels like priorité à droite quite a lot of the time. The advantage is on the side of those already settled in a country, I feel.

                  Amitav Ghosh wrote a great book about colonialism and climate change – The Curse of The Nutmeg. When the East India Company decimated the population of the Spice Islands they invaded and terraformed for monoculture production of nutmegs, cloves etc, the indentred labour they brought in to work the land had no cultural connection with the people who they had supplanted. However, with in some years, the shape of the land, the climate, the geology, the weather patterns, the soil, the vegetation – the whole environment, drew them to adopt coincidentally or through developed practice, the cycles and rituals of those that had been there before.

                  What I am trying to say is that the land shapes the people who live in it, not the other way around. Stay somewhere for enough generations and you become of that place, deliberatively done or not. What doesn’t fit from your old life is cast off like a coat before the sun, what does, becomes part of the range of national dishes. It’s not responsibility, it’s human nature.

                  As to your last paragraph, there are enough reactionaries in the UK already willing to rip up hard won freedoms for those with their own grievances not to stand out any more among their own communities.

                  • Hmmm… I’m not sure I agree with some of this, excluding the bit about the cultural similarities between the British and Germans, which is spot on.

                    Is a sense of benevolence for others really at the heart of all world religions? I’ve no doubt it’s at the heart of your own faith, but a Quick Look through history suggests that any benevolence has a tendency to reach only as far as the water’s edge of one’s own tribe, and sometimes nowhere near even that. I’m not sure I believe there’s inherent virtue at the centre of these faiths and more than I believe there’s inherent vice.

                    Similarly, while the land shapes the people, not the other way round, has a lovely ring to it, it isn’t actually always true. Immigrants have shaped the UK (certainly the bit of it that I live in) just as much as they’ve been shaped by it, and in many cases moreso, to our collective benefit. Cultural cross-pollination is a dialogue, so I guess what I’m saying is that we should be looking for people who are open to that dialogue, and avoid those prone to monologuing.

                    It’s the last paragraph I disagree with most though. The fact we have our own reactionaries shouldn’t mean we simply wave in more of them, and it’s an easy thing to say when it isn’t your neck on the line. Let’s say you’re part of a group that these imported reactionaries dislike/hate: why on earth would you be supportive of the import of people who are disproportionately likely to attack you and/or vote against your rights and interests (to give but one example).

                    For multiculturalism to work at all, we need a commitment to cultural pluralism and a basic respect for “otherness”. If you want to come and live in this country under the auspices of that mutual respect then you should be willing to extend the same to others, in my view.

    • It offers a 3 year NI break to the employer, not the employee. Theoretically the UK still come out up on the deal because income tax is still due.. Still, don’t expect that to be pointed out by Saint Nigel, or indeed the fact that a similar deal already exists with Auz, NZ and Canada.

        • He will, although from the briefing I’ve been sent it only applies to “the UK operations of Indian employers”, so it doesn’t allow and kind of wholesale switch to Indian employees. It’s the kind of detail that Badenoch is already ignoring.

        • We know someone who works for one of the big accountancy firms and they have been employing Indians here for years, putting them up in local houses but paying them less than their UK counterparts. When I queried the ethics of this I was told the Indian workers benefit from the experience and are very keen on the arrangement. Hmm…..

          • Looks like a similar scenario regarding construction workers in the UK some years back.
            A lot of Eastern Europeans came here as tradesmen and as labourers after the Iron Curtain lifted. East Europeans were popular with the labour agencies and employers because they were prepared to work for less money than Brits. After a while, when their home countries economies were doing better, they had to be paid the same as the British workers, or they’d go back home or move to some other European country.
            Even before Brexit that was happening.

    • It says we don’t collect taxes which they also pay in India, and is reciprocal so UK workers in India also don’t pay twice. Badenoch is of course saying they’re getting a tax break when they are not.

      From The Indy

      “Kemi Badenoch has denounced the national insurance contributions exemption for temporary workers as “two-tier taxes from two-tier Keir”, saying that she refused to agree to it when she was trade secretary.

      As far as I can tell, that part of the deal is a normal double-taxation agreement, so that Indians working here temporarily but paying social security contributions in India would not be charged twice, with the same applying in reverse to British temporary workers in India.”

      • Doesn’t the real-world reciprocity of that agreement rather depend on roughly equal migration of British workers to India as vice versa? Which, given that something over 300,000 Indian nationals were granted uk visas last year, makes you wonder if the figure moving in the opposite direction is anything like as much. Hard to find that figure, but I doubt it. In-principle reciprocity is all very well, but it’s what happens on the ground that really counts.

        • I think the reciprocity here isn’t on a job for job basis, but around some kind of calculation of exchanged value. The cut in booze and car tariffs levied on UK goods boosts sales which (I presume) yields more UK jobs and is traded off against allowing more Indian nationals to be employed here (albeit the rules on salary thresholds and the NHS surcharge that is levied are still in place).

          We have goods they want, we have skill storages they are very adept at filling. No idea if it all balances but that seems to be the aim here.

          • I think it’s at individual level. You don’t pay tax twice then have to try to reclaim it with all the attendant admin for everyone. It’s the same with France, for example.

            Badenoch probably hasn’t bothered to try to understand it and has leapt to the RWP headline. Her laziness is one of the reasons they’re thinking about getting rid of her.

  13. It’s always the case that in politics that everyone knows the answers except the people in charge. Stop the war! Stop the boats! Punish the rich! Punish benefit scroungers! Just stop oil! Just stop immigration! Compelling and competing slogans. We all understand, I’m sure, that it’s not really that easy, whatever the likes of Farage or Corbyn would say.

    Peace, love, understanding, compassion and tolerance are in short supply at the moment, which does rather rule out any leftist solutions which rely on what we might once have thought were basic human traits. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Starmer has been doing the unpopular stuff first, because… that’s what you do in Year One, and that’s what he said he’d do.

    Lando has outlined what Labour has achieved, but the effect of shorter waiting lists or nutritional breakfasts for school kids, or getting Jeremy ‘I bought my farm to avoid inheritance tax’ Clarkson to pay his fair share, or not giving £400 holiday money to wealthy pensioners won’t be felt immediately. It’s easier to ignore those and pretend that our favourite solution, Left or Right, would have eradicated poverty and stopped war in their first year in charge, if only enough people had listened to us.

  15. Reply to Bingo above.

    Hope you’re enjoying this as much as I am, Bingo. I think by now, we’re just throwing around preferences and opinions, rather than hard and fast facts, which is OK by me. It’s interesting to read artfully articulated perspectives.

    I may have messed up my expression of what I meant to say about religion. Although I strongly feel there is a ‘do as you would be done by’ golden rule in the teachings of world religions, though you may not, (if not in the way those religions have been expressed, often as state ideologies), my position was more that, historically, religion introduced a way for people of different backgrounds, regions, countries, to overcome the innate hostilities those differences might encourage on meeting through the same rituals, practices of a shared faith. The Power of Strangers by Joe Keohane is rather good on this aspect of how religion at one point in human social evolution managed to stop people killing each other quite so much.

    My point about the land shaping the people was to put emphasis on something that often seems to be forgotten or marginalised, not that people don’t shape the land – of course they do. But that when people move away from where they come from, they become people of the place they are in, weathered by the weather, cultured by the culture. What they bring from their own background has to make sense in the new place or it is, sooner or later, discarded, even the monologuers (if anyone listens to them).

    Regarding reactionaries imported from abroad, I was just saying I wasn’t sure if there is any evidence that there are proportionally any more than already exist in this country. It seems like a bit of a media-generated Aunt Sally to think that migrants are all, for example, intolerant homophobes and misogynists.

    • Oh, I certainly agree that at more than one point in the story of humanity religion played an important role in shaping shared norms and values that more or less propped up civilisation. We wouldn’t be where we are today without it.

      I’m also obviously not saying that all migrants are intolerant misogynists and homophobes. That would be mental.

      But there are certain communities we know to, for example, be disproportionately far more homophobic than the wider British public, and we know this because they have repeatedly told us so when polled.

        • Without wanting to be rude (and I genuinely do mean that), I kind of see this discussion as emblematic of the issue that I’m talking about upthread.

          I would really, really like multiculturalism to work in this country. I kind of need it to do so. But, like anything else, cultural diversity isn’t an unalloyed good; it’s a relatively recent concept at this scale, and it comes with challenges we still need to work out.

          I think there’s a reflexive tendency to defend immigrant communities on principle, on the basis that any criticism of them must be rooted in racism/xenophobia. Lord knows I’ve experienced that reflex myself. But I’m concerned that this tendency makes it much harder for us to have any kind of meaningful dialogue on these issues, because we end up haggling over relatively basic realities.

          I’ve lived in London pretty much my entire life. I’ve grown up with and around all sorts of different communities, and I’m raising kids in a pretty diverse area. Spend time in these places and you’ll find it’s pretty readily accepted that there are a number of different immigrant groups that have regressive views on the LGBTQ community. I was trying to be polite in not naming them, but I will do so if asked as to do otherwise now seems mealy-mouthed: certain sections of the Black British community, certain sections of the South Asian community, certain sections of the Eastern European community, and – quite obviously – certain sections of the Muslim community. .

          Basically, anyone who joins us from a country with more regressive attitudes to homosexuality is likely to bring with them a more regressive attitude to homosexuality. Their values don’t magically liberalise on arrival, in part because those values are often deeply rooted in religion. Frankly, it would be a miracle if it were otherwise.

          The UK has become a more tolerant place on these issues during my lifetime (albeit it still has a very long way to go) because it has become more secular. It’s possible that immigrant communities – and again, I’m not using that term as a pejorative, I count myself as part of one – will become more secular and tolerant over time, but based on current evidence it may be a slow process. I know plenty of secular second generation kids, but some of these prejudices die hard.

          There are a wealth of studies available via a quick Google which bear out what I’m saying above, but I’m not going to post any of them because this really isn’t about the veracity of any one study. It’s about the famous “lived experience”.

          I have friends in pretty much all of the communities I’ve listed above. I’ve lived my life with them, been on many nights out with them, and I know both what their own views are and that they would readily accept that this is an obvious cultural difference in their community. Not everyone from these groups is homophobic, obviously, but that homophobia is more prevalent is fairly glaring.

          We can come up with all the conceptual reasons in the world it’s not really an issue, or why it’s the legacy of colonialism, or whatever else. But those are parlour games – it IS an issue, not least because if you bring in enough people who don’t like the Gays, at some point those people will start to use their voting power accordingly.

          Ultimately, it’s the age old question of whether tolerance should extend to intolerance. But make no mistake; the intolerance exists, and if we pretend otherwise we’re doing ourselves (and others with a little more skin in the proverbial game) a grave disservice.

          • Thanks – you weren’t being rude (in my eyes). I think it’s good to have informed comment from lived experience, and to be honest about how you see the discussion. The reason I started reading the de Haas book was to reveal and question my own prejudices and assumptions, as much as to understand the truth underlying the overheated debate as a whole and positions of those I would contest.

            I just looked up ‘multiculturalism’ in the de Haas book. Previously I thought it was an approach that recognizes and values different cultures and communities if not equally, then at least with greater proportionality. De Haas argues that instead it is a form of apartheid-lite – for countries that don’t consider themselves to be ‘immigration countries’ (so Germany, Netherlands, etc as opposed to the USA. Canada etc). “We will encourage you to cherish your own culture, religious traditions, language” – with the underlying, implicit assumption that you will go back to your own country, when your time as a guestworker is complete. Multiculturalism stimulated segregation and delayed integration, de Haas writes. Where the sweet spot lies between segregation and enforced assimilation (as per Native Americans and Aborigines) with the dominant culture, I don’t know, but I would argue it is marked out by communication and evolution. Nothing is static, unless it is preserved in aspic.

            I don’t think it’s impolite to name groups you experience as having regressive views. We are a product of our background, our family, our heritage and naming features of those shouldn’t damn individuals or imply that those views colour everything about those communities. Conflicts exist and they don’t need to be violent, even if it isn’t easy to clarify and resolve them either way. For several years I lived in Bradford among immigrants originating from rural Mirpur in Pakistan. There were ‘street-tough’ teenage boys asserting similar views to the sort of things Andrew Tate might say on a mild day. But that wasn’t all they were, and connecting with them helped to get over objectionable attitudes and explore areas of greater connection.

            Nettles and brambles grow in nature, but you defeat them more effectively by planting other plants to shade them out, than by just razing them to the ground over and over. They, and other weeds are resilient for a reason, and they can always burst out – deep rooted, as you say. Of course it is an issue, particularly for those affected, but your second to last paragraph brings to mind the Great Replacement Theory, intentional or not, and I suggest population statistics and attitude surveys probably don’t support the sort of fearmongering that kind of narrative encourages.

            Tolerance extending to the intolerant is, as you say, age old. I remember it being contested fiercely between the Student Labour group and what was then the Tory Reform group (how different those words seem now) at uni – with the Tory boys and girls delighting in trolling the Trots by bringing on campus provocative right wing speakers with obnoxious views. The best I can do is to argue that the intolerant should not expect others to agree with them, nor even impose their views on others.

            It is complicated, there are no easy answers, and we all get things wrong. But we can learn and explore how to do things better.

            • Cheers, Sal. I agree with a lot of that, although naturally I disagree with the reference to the Great Replacement Theory.

              I guess that, to me, that’s another example of the reflexive bristling I mentioned above. In my view it’s a pretty long way from observing that importing more homophobic people has the potential to have negative political consequences for the LGBTQ community to a crackpot conspiracy theory that “whites” are being deliberately replaced. In fact, if I’m being honest I think the comparison is a bit cheeky (although I’ll live).

              I reckon I’ll leave it there. If you don’t believe that these communities have more conservative views on homosexuality I simply suggest that next time you’re visiting the UK you ask them yourselves and see what comes back.

              • Thanks, Bingo. The reference was deliberately cheeky, to bring out in clear view the nuance of your position which I appreciate and agree with.

                What I think is important, when there are dog whistles and sly allusions from many (and you know I don’t include you in this category), is to spell things out that risk misinterpretation. Same as I did with the community question earlier.

                As per my reference to young Mirpur- sourced Bradfordians, I’m quite familiar with intolerant attitudes in communities imported from effectively peasant societies overseas. There is an issue there, and i think it’s to do with poorly thiught through government and industry policy in the post-war years. Would those communities have made their own way to the UK, France, Germany, etc without government intervention? Could they have had better perpetraron for the inevitable culture shock?

                I think De Haas emphasises through the book, that though the picture is complex, if there are winners and losers from migration, it would be the employers who bring in cheap labour on one side, and those already resident who face unaffordable work as a consequence.

  16. In 2019, Starmer and his then boss (whoever he was, can’t remember now) promised:
    Substantial increases in funding for the NHS
    Nationalisation of key industries (energy, water, rail, Royal Mail, and broadband infrastructure)
    Increase in the minimum wage
    No increase in pension age
    Replacement of Universal Credit
    Renegotiation for softer Brexit deal and a second referendum, with the option to remain in the EU.

    Widely regarded as the most “radical” manifesto in decades, it perhaps doesn’t seem so unappealingly “radical” now.

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