General British politics discussion thread

That's fair enough. The coalition gutted local council budgets and since local authorities are responsible for social care, that went to pot. Nobody since May has even talked about the issue beyond vague platitudes. The problem is that she tried it while negotiating with the EU and the end result was that she was shoved out by rebels. You just don't mess with wealthy older voters here. You just don't.

Jesus. Thing are slowly getting worse.

There's an intergenerational wealth gap, not nearly enough housing and a shrinking pool of rental properties and this is the solution.

I don't know.

Treasury officials are being urged by senior ministers to consider exempting people over the age of 50 from income tax entirely for up to a year to encourage them to start working again.

I suspect it's a play to try and attract more votes given that nobody under 40 has any reason to vote Tory.

My aunt runs her husband's plumbing firm in north London. They exclusively hire Romanians. My brother once asked about this and the response was along the lines of "These ones are trustworthy".

I don't think a lot of Tory MPs are overly bothered about foreigners. It's largely their affluent constituents in the home counties who rarely see them who rage and rail against it, fomented in no small part by the red tops. This is ultimately the end result. Create an artificial barrier between the market and the supply chain, add some spice with a hostile environment and you get this. Before someone says that other EU countries are facing this problem as well, they weren't stupid enough to exacerbate the problem via Brexit.

You either breed a workforce or you import it. AI won't be servicing your boiler or emptying your bins any time soon. Stripping away workers' rights is just the next step down the road to calamity. Those migrants that Pixelburp alludes to who left and didn't come back didn't see reason to. There's even less reason to return to an employer who ditched you at the first opportunity. Even the university I work for has some serious strikes on the way.

Nuance was never something that red tops ever cared for though. Ditto for the world of 300-character tweets. Unemployment was usually low here. Very low. In a country so riddled with toxic exceptionalism, this one always got me. No pride in the fact that hundreds of thousands of people were coming here every year, just the same old racism and xenophobia while exporting old people to France and Spain.

In fairness to someone who is unemployed in somewhere like Sunderland, moving to a crammed London flatshare to hand over almost half your net income to a landlord isn't that much of a step up when you'd have to leave your community behind to do so. Don't even start me on the cost of trains.

I've done the same myself. I've lived in Oxford, Manchester, Brighton & Hove and now London. I've identified potential roles in Utrecht, Heidelberg, Galway and Stockholm as well having applied for roles in Ghent and The Hague. I love London though and it'd kill me to have to leave. Seen a role in Glasgow I might like as well. Housing is the issue as well but of course nobody in politics wants to seriously talk about it.