General British politics discussion thread

The sane people in the room know that young immigrant labour is needed to fill jobs it's not about taking anyone else's. Unless higher wages are a price you are willing to pay for constant disruption to construction and hospitality sites not being able to open doors.

That's before we get into the serious stuff of the hospitals having no staff.

Not too far out. The 70s into the 80s. My now deceased UK Labour party friends described the slow change and the differing views across the Labour party around it. Older members taking the traditional protectionist view. The younger Blairite generation having the other opinion. I can see those opposing points here in this thread. Older ones such as me with my opinion. I'm closer now to 70 than 60.

There is another strand to the argument and that is the mostly Tory move from public sector provision to outsourcing. This may be one of the big drivers of anti immigrant feeling across many industries. Former Government jobs that had increasing payscales for years service being outsourced and the new staff completing the work are on the minimum wage or close to it. Prison officers in the UK being let go and the work being outsourced. The new staff will get a fraction of the former staff's wages.

In my youth, the late 70's, loads of school leavers got jobs in the bank, Telecom Eireann, ESB, County Councils, Civil service etc. straight from school or possibly from a secretarial college. These were jobs that offered a path to a reasonable wage that allowed you buy your own home over time etc.

Now lots of these jobs are low paid, short term contracts. Allied to the complete dislocate of the cost of housing, unless you hold a good degree or higher in an in demand field, or are a tradesman (most of whom are in cyclical occupations) the standard expectation of owning your own home, having a family etc may well be beyond you.

This must be a huge driver of social discontent.

This.

The concept we're looking at here is the dependency ratio - the number of inactive people in society (children, students, the retired, the disabled) in relation to the economically active workforce. As you can see from the chart below, in the UK this reached a peak around 1970, then fell until about 1980, wobbled a bit for the next thirty years or so and is now climbing steeply. The chart shows the number of the economically inactive for every hundred people of working age.

The peak in 1970 had to do with families having lots of kiddies in the 1950s and 60s. In the 1970s they start to enter the workforce and the dependency ratio drops sharply because (a) there are now more workers, plus (b) they themselves have much smaller families, so fewer kids being added to the inactive side of the calculation.

The rise we are seeing now is not to do with lots of kiddies; family sizes are still small in the UK. It's lots of retired people. And this is an issue because (a) retired people cost a lot more to keep than kiddies - they expect to live in their own homes and drive their own cars, the selfish creatures - plus (b) unlike kiddies, they are not going to enter the workforce in due course.

A rising dependency ratio means a squeeze on living standards (each worker has more dependents to feed, clothe and house) often manifested through a rise in taxes, because that's how social security pensions and social care for the elderly are funded. Also, the more business revenues are paid out to shareholders (large pension funds, who pay them to the elderly) the less business revenues are availlable to pay wages. So there's competition for a slice of the pie there too.

Things you can do to alleviate the economic strains caused by a high dependency ratio:

Raise the retirement age, so as to keep workers on the "economically active" side of the calculation for longer: UK has been doing this, but it's politically costly, plus the effects take decades to kick in.

Encourage people to have more kiddies: hard to do, since people's decisions about family size are very personal, and are hard for the government to influence. Plus, it's again very slow-burning; in fact it makes the problem greater for 20-25 years before any benefit is felt.

Increase the workforce by facilitating immigration. This, in fact, is what largely accounts for the improvement in the dependency ratio from 1995 to 2007 seen in the chart above. Unlike the other methods of addressing the problem immigration begins to improve the dependency ratio immediately. But of course immigrants will themselves have children, and some at least of them will remain in the UK when they retire, so in time they will add something to the other side of the calculation.

The government can do a lot to influence the birth rate.

Any/all of secure housing, work/life balance and affordable childcare will increase the birth rate.

People were poorer overall in the 60s but those 3 points were there and so we had the boomer generation born.

Though the main is to not base an economy on constant growth, eventually a population will stop growing in size, computers will stop doubling in power every 18 months etc. and the only way to get growth is to screw workers/customers which leads to a reduction in the population which means more screwing of workers/customers is required. Though we seem to be far too invested to stop it now.

Braverman is a Home Secretary that appears to be even worse than Patel. She's clearly pitching this stuff at the English far right and the numerous bigots / racists on social media. The language is quite shocking and inflammatory.

I don't see any difference between what Braverman is saying to the comments of Farage, the Daily Express, GB News etc.

Whatever one thinks of the refugee situation, Dover dinghies and how to handle it, for a senior Tory government minister to be openly using the language of the far right in Parliament is a bit shocking.

With the Telegraph coming out with a headline like this...

"Zombie Suella looked like a dead minister walking this Hallowe'en"

...she's in deep trouble.

Interesting take from these guys. Seems the problems with the UK refugee system mostly lie with the zealots at the top of the Home Office. It's not so much the system that isn't working but the right wing policies and ideology of our Tory friends.

Rumour has it that he appointed Braverman to appease the ERG and to keep them on board (seemingly her appointment was a key demand of theirs).

Some people have pointed out that the nasty culture at the Home Office started with Theresa May. For a supposedly Christian woman, she had some very unsavoury opinions about immigrants.

I don't think the ERG listen to anyone on anything. They don't give a fk if Sunak sinks.