People who have to up sticks and move are inevitably going to be on average the more intelligent, determined and motivated type of person, meaning this is great news for the UK (except for the brexitier-type dullards who can't compete).
Risky, m8, have you been contaminated by some Tice DNA? You're flipping into full racist mode. Maybe clear your cookies and reset the YouTube algorithm?
It’s interesting that a direct factual quote from the economist is considered ‘racist’ but I guess it shows how far to the left and out of touch with ordinary people the centrist duds are on here.
I agree with gaga. The idea that we’ve given up on fostering domestic talent and are relying on importing it is very depressing and will take decades to shift
I think our education system is fine actually. I went to a comprehensive school in an industrial city in the midlands and my kids go to a comprehensive in a gritty part of south London. If the kids and parents engage then the school does too.
The issue is really why parents and kids generally don't have a "growth mindset" and this is perhaps because the UK rewards those who are already wealthy rather than giving esteem to earned income and vocational occupations.
I work for a company with offices in Copenhagen, Bucharest, Zurich, Plovdiv (Bulgaria), Malmo. These offices don't just have rich professionals in them. The difference in mindset between these places and our offices in the UK is astounding.
Centrist dads and the politicians they support are about to absolutely boss the fvck out of a general election, harder and faster and buttreamier than one has ever been bossed the fvck out of before, making absolute smeared political roadkill of the populist Right that risky loves so much. Moderate left-centrism is about to win a madge to last twelve centuries. But yeah sure hmm hmm yeah sure yeah sure it’s the centrists who are out of touch yeah sure hmm hmm hmm CHINNY CHINNY hmm CHINNY CHINNY hmm CHIN CHIN CHIN.
Jesus wept. London is one of the shittest places to live in the UK.
If this were true then why are property prices in London so much higher than elsewhere in the UK and why has that gap increased in relative terms over the past 30 years?
Public transport in London is infinitely better than any other region of the UK. (And Andy Burnham is entirely correct that it is criminal that the Westminster Parliament maintained transport governance in London while destroying it in the rest of England.)
I tell an awful truth now - one that you won't read about in the media except in the most veiled terms:
- English society believed that immigrants coming into the UK would, on average, result in upward social mobility for the natives. Because that's what happens in other similar countries, e.g. the U.S. and Australia.
- However, the past couple of decades something different is happening. The average first generation legal immigrant is coming in above the average native. And the children and grandchildren of previous generations of immigrants have advanced themselves relative to the natives.
Many of those who voted for Brexit aren't really against immigrants. They'd be completely fine with immigrants if those immigrants were performing the lower paid and less regarded roles in society and they could look down on them. Their issue was much more seeing immigrants in higher earning jobs and accruing wealth while they are not.
Housing being more expensive makes it worse not better and that’s a product of population density - which is awful for wellbeing
Education depends on wealth and other factors - plenty of outstanding schools outside London including grammar schools and top public schools
Public transport not necessary when you can drive leisurely and park where you want - impossible in London.
The wealthy people in London stay fleetingly or have multiple properties. People who LIVE in London full time are often wage slaves and many rent
LOL at the idea that most or many immigrants accrue wealth - most do low paid work that local people don’t want to do, are too lazy to do or which doesn’t pay much
Rob - do you have any sources for the second half of your post?
I don’t think it’s untrue necessarily but I think it’s missing a bit of context (i.e. the main issue in my opinion is that there’s a generation of boomers who made an absolute killing out of the housing market over the past forty years, are frustrated that their kids can’t do the same, are blaming the EU / immigration for having to help their kids with the deposits)
But would be interested if you had anything on first gen immigrants doing better generally than others.
LOL at the idea that most or many immigrants accrue wealth - most do low paid work that local people don’t want to do, are too lazy to do or which doesn’t pay much
This is not particularly consistent with the fact that it's very obvious that the areas of England with the highest percentage of immigrants are those with the highest income levels. You won't find many migrants in places like Sunderland or Doncaster. You'll find lots in London.
We know that immigrants have materially higher savings rates than UK natives. This study ( https://izajodm.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40176-015-0034-y) says that the average amount of savings per month for migrants is £167.54 versus £157.17 for UK natives. I see how migrants are more pushed to get on the housing ladder. They buy cheaper properties in worse areas and do work on them. Natives prefer to rent nicer properties in nicer areas and don't build up capital. Obviously, that's a generalisation, but on average there is a difference.
And LOL at the idea that housing density and housing prices are correlated. Liverpool has denser housing than North Yorkshire but it has significantly lower house prices.
I find the endless tedious insistence that any concern about immigration must be racist - as ridiculously dishonest and unfair.
I have no problem with immigrants wanting to bave abeyter life. I would be the same probably. But its far clear that overall immigration has a positive impact. Weve had quite a lot over the past 20 years and itndoesnt feel like anything is improving. And the currenr scale is now at truly vast and unprecedented levels. It could turn out to be a huge mistake.
Tbf there’s a lot of truth in the second bit of Rob’s 22.26. Ordinary British people are rightly pissed off by immigrants effectively saying ‘we’re better than you’. Try emigrating to India, Australia, North America, and see how far that gets you. Britain is hobbled by post colonial guilt and the ruling classes still rule. Its feudal. The Tories have tried weaponising their affluent brown members against the British people and it hasn’t worked. Hopefully they’ll get kicked out of government before they get the chance to make it stick, but that doesn’t mean they won’t keep trying.
It's not that they effectively say "we're better than you". It simply that some of them are better than lazy and entitled "I've won first prize in life's lottery" Englishmen.
Paragraph of rob’s 2226 is 💯 wrong. People in exactly those groups voted for brexit in their droves because they could see an endless supply of imported ‘unskilled’ cheap labour stopping their chances of gettin a job or a pay rise.
“LOL at the idea that most or many immigrants accrue wealth - most do low paid work that local people don’t want to do, are too lazy to do or which doesn’t pay much”
anybody else got anything demonstrably wrong and dumb to share?
Didn’t mention control just an opinion as was clearly flagged at the end of my post.
Tell me you don’t read to the end of a clause without telling me blah blah proviso which flips the whole thing exception which drives a cart and horses blah blah u egg.
I always find these “immigrant” threads a bit odd, like why are we so obsessed with people trying to make something of their lives? Immigration hasn’t made your life bad. Greedy capitalism, the banking system, exploitation by multinational corporations and billionaires, corrupt governments, defunding of public services- so many actual enemies to choose from and yet the immigrant is your target.
Weather is a bit better today than yesterday. Might even mow the lawn
See I can change the topic too .
The mistake the left has made over the last few decades has been having this weird attitude, it's why we have had Trump and Brexit.
People don't like being told they're all lazy and racist and we need to import replacements for them in the workforce because they're so useless at everything ...
Well knock me down with a feather from the world's smallest bird ...
We have Trump and Brexit (and huge increases in hate crimes, racism, Islamophobia, transphobia etc) because the hard right have first confected and then weaponised something they have called ‘culture wars’, using vulnerable minorities to leverage the innate conservatism of middle aged people into increasing fear and hate.
They wouldn't be able to do that if there wasn't a kernel of truth in the issues being raised but people like you just pretend there is no issue at all which isn't helpful in the slightest and will only lead to more power for unpalatable parties and movements in the future .
It's like the upcoming labour victory . I dunno why you're celebrating , it's going to be 5 years of a Labour party which basically doesn't do anything different to the current Tory administration followed by a hard right Reform style victory from the horrid Tozzas next time . And you'll just reply by saying "everyone's racist I'm not, gold star for me"
People don't like being told they're all lazy and racist and we need to import replacements for them in the workforce because they're so useless at everything ...
"Don't like being told" implies they are, but find being made aware of the truth a little unsettling. Maybe try and be better at stuff, rather than refusing to try to improve and claiming your shit life is the fault of someone else.
Gaga, that works for every single one of your "issues".
And it's still a mystery to you why that's not a popular message for the electorate ? Youre basically punching down at people who have had no advantage at anything (I'll choose to ignore the childish relating of it back to me ).
Don't come crying to me next time an election /referendum doesn't go the correct way for you and your annoying ilk
The Tories and Labour are not markedly different from one another and the vote is to get an incompetent and sleazy government out . Even with the Tories in the state they are now, Keith Starmer is so terrified of doing anything remotely left wing that he's alienated proper lef ists . I actually found myself largely in agreement with Owen Jones ' article on this the other day tbh.
It's not that the people of Britain have suddenly decided they love immigration. We could easily have a very right wing , populist and regressive govt by the end of the decade if things pan out the way some commentators say they will.
The sight of a multi millionaire with his carefully assembled group of people of various racial backgrounds preaching about damagIng the earth while himself going around in private jets /being made of plastic / being already pretty much a known nonce at this point , was always an unedifying one.
Even as a kid I was desperate for him to lose that Xmas no1 chart battle, didn't care if it was the Beatles , Coolio, Oasis or whoever that beat him. He was a wrongun
I work for a company with offices in Copenhagen, Bucharest, Zurich, Plovdiv (Bulgaria), Malmo. These offices don't just have rich professionals in them. The difference in mindset between these places and our offices in the UK is astounding.
1 in 6 is quite a lot. We are a very popular country. We are also fairly crowded - about 18m more people than when I was born. I have done my family tree on all sides to at least the 1700s and yet to find someone born outside UK/Ireland (mostly Scotland and Ireland and bit of England)! What a boring lot we must have been, even those ancestors who worked on ships abroad, even my granny who went to India to work as a servant in 1921 or her father who fought in South Africa in about 1900 - all seemed to marry people from the UK instead. However my DNA back 30,000 years on the maternal side takes up to the Caucasus mountains.
In the UK it seems to be more acceptable to opt out by saying "I can't do x". Someone else on ROF mentioned this independently and speculated that it was because our education system specialises too early with A-Levels and the like.
Sometimes x is a specific skill (e.g. lawyers doing maths / laying out a spreadsheet), sometimes it's a task that someone thinks is beneath them or just can't be bothered to do (e.g. a recent example getting a coffee machine replaced)
Overseas colleagues tend to be better at learning/finding ways of just getting things done!
Foreign languages is a another example. "oooh I can't speak x and everyone speaks English anyway" ignoring the fact, say, that if you have customers in France and your competitors are French-speaking Germans, guess who is more likely to win the business?!
Im pretty much on the fence on immigration. Clearly immigrants do tend to work hard and add to the economy etc. And it provides a boost to aggregate GDP and potentially helps to address the demographic crisis. But Im yet to be convinced it is really adding that much to gdp/head - which has flatlined throughout the past two decades of immigration growth.
And immigration probably does keep some wages lower. Albeit it also keeps some costs lower and adds to demand in some area. I suspect however that the distributional impact of this favours better off brits over poorer Brits. They benefit more from the lower costs and probably find that immigration does press down as hard on their wages. In terms of demand the obvious problem is increased demand for housing an public services. Again less of problem (and even a boon) if you already own housing; more of a problem for people without housing assets. We have a massive housing crisis and I cannot see how immigration is not going to make this worse - unless it is very targetted (which it does not appear to be). We already live in some of the smallest houses and have some of the highest house prices in the world. Towns and cities already feel overcrowded to me. And theres not that much free countryside to build on before it will feel quite oppressive.
I think culturally it can work - and to date has been pretty successful. But theres no guarantee that will always be the case and the pace and scale seems to have stepped up even more significantly recently. There has to be real risks that it goes wrong. Lots of immigration comes from countries that are far more socially conservative than the UK and I think people are genuinely entitled to be worried about what that may mean in the future. Whilst the Islamist problem is hyped up by the political right you cannot pretend its not there.
On balance I think we need to limit it, although I am open minded. But right now the scale - in terms of sheer numbers - has become really vast and unprecedented. If nothing else a more gradual approach lets us monitor whether it is beneficial or not.
What does annoy me is how people opposed to immigration are smeared with being bigots/racists etc. I am sure some of them are. In the same way that some Muslims are genuinely dangerous Islamists. But not many. The dumb ad hom stuff makes any intelligent debate about the issue impossible.
Britain is uncompetitive and Britons are not productive. Brexit has added in xenophobia. As the City shrinks and AI wipes out the jobs all those in satellite towns have relied on for their value inflated lifestyles, there will be an even worse squeeze.
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There was a ratio of 7 or 8 helots to every Spartan citizen.
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Excellent! I’m one of them
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I'm one of them! I was born in sharjah of irish descent parents.
You want to send me "back"? I'm nice and white.
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good news
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let’s see if we can get it to one in five
cross pollination strengthens the strain
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Awful post from Dalek. Reported.
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this is astonishing news given how the right have practically turned the country into a failing state in the last 15 years
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People who have to up sticks and move are inevitably going to be on average the more intelligent, determined and motivated type of person, meaning this is great news for the UK (except for the brexitier-type dullards who can't compete).
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Similar to the Netherlands and lower than Switzerland whose standards of living we can only dream of.
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Risky, m8, have you been contaminated by some Tice DNA? You're flipping into full racist mode. Maybe clear your cookies and reset the YouTube algorithm?
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(well not me.personally but the median UK citizen)
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Risky being eased into his new brown shirt here
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To deconstruct the Warren post a bit...
That's great and all but I do think we need to start worrying a bit about why we have so many Brexit style dullards who can't compete
Our education system is fvcked
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It’s interesting that a direct factual quote from the economist is considered ‘racist’ but I guess it shows how far to the left and out of touch with ordinary people the centrist duds are on here.
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I agree with gaga. The idea that we’ve given up on fostering domestic talent and are relying on importing it is very depressing and will take decades to shift
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The Normans ruined everything
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Tl;dr just no arranged marriages chz thnx
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I think our education system is fine actually. I went to a comprehensive school in an industrial city in the midlands and my kids go to a comprehensive in a gritty part of south London. If the kids and parents engage then the school does too.
The issue is really why parents and kids generally don't have a "growth mindset" and this is perhaps because the UK rewards those who are already wealthy rather than giving esteem to earned income and vocational occupations.
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I work for a company with offices in Copenhagen, Bucharest, Zurich, Plovdiv (Bulgaria), Malmo. These offices don't just have rich professionals in them. The difference in mindset between these places and our offices in the UK is astounding.
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Does anyone care where someone else was born?
I mean, unless it was Norfolk it’s not something that is going to carry any negative weight.
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Centrist dads and the politicians they support are about to absolutely boss the fvck out of a general election, harder and faster and buttreamier than one has ever been bossed the fvck out of before, making absolute smeared political roadkill of the populist Right that risky loves so much. Moderate left-centrism is about to win a madge to last twelve centuries. But yeah sure hmm hmm yeah sure yeah sure it’s the centrists who are out of touch yeah sure hmm hmm hmm CHINNY CHINNY hmm CHINNY CHINNY hmm CHIN CHIN CHIN.
BIG LOLZ @ SILLY RISKY.
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The OP seems to care…luckily most Londoners don’t. I couldn’t speak on behalf of the rest of Britain as it’s a bit of a foreign country to me.
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“The rest of Britain.. [is] a bit of a foreign country to me”
Jesus wept. London is one of the shittest places to live in the UK.
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If this were true then why are property prices in London so much higher than elsewhere in the UK and why has that gap increased in relative terms over the past 30 years?
GCSE and A-level results in London are higher than any English region and the gap is getting bigger not smaller. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/infographic-gcse-results-2023/infographics-for-gcse-results-2023-accessible
The crime rate in London is in line with the average for English regions and below that for the North-West, the North-East, Yorkshire & Humber and the West Midlands. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254571/uk-crime-rate-by-region/
Public transport in London is infinitely better than any other region of the UK. (And Andy Burnham is entirely correct that it is criminal that the Westminster Parliament maintained transport governance in London while destroying it in the rest of England.)
I tell an awful truth now - one that you won't read about in the media except in the most veiled terms:
- English society believed that immigrants coming into the UK would, on average, result in upward social mobility for the natives. Because that's what happens in other similar countries, e.g. the U.S. and Australia.
- However, the past couple of decades something different is happening. The average first generation legal immigrant is coming in above the average native. And the children and grandchildren of previous generations of immigrants have advanced themselves relative to the natives.
Many of those who voted for Brexit aren't really against immigrants. They'd be completely fine with immigrants if those immigrants were performing the lower paid and less regarded roles in society and they could look down on them. Their issue was much more seeing immigrants in higher earning jobs and accruing wealth while they are not.
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Housing being more expensive makes it worse not better and that’s a product of population density - which is awful for wellbeing
Education depends on wealth and other factors - plenty of outstanding schools outside London including grammar schools and top public schools
Public transport not necessary when you can drive leisurely and park where you want - impossible in London.
The wealthy people in London stay fleetingly or have multiple properties. People who LIVE in London full time are often wage slaves and many rent
LOL at the idea that most or many immigrants accrue wealth - most do low paid work that local people don’t want to do, are too lazy to do or which doesn’t pay much
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Rob - do you have any sources for the second half of your post?
I don’t think it’s untrue necessarily but I think it’s missing a bit of context (i.e. the main issue in my opinion is that there’s a generation of boomers who made an absolute killing out of the housing market over the past forty years, are frustrated that their kids can’t do the same, are blaming the EU / immigration for having to help their kids with the deposits)
But would be interested if you had anything on first gen immigrants doing better generally than others.
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It has been a really bad two weeks for gob gammon on rof.
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This is not particularly consistent with the fact that it's very obvious that the areas of England with the highest percentage of immigrants are those with the highest income levels. You won't find many migrants in places like Sunderland or Doncaster. You'll find lots in London.
We know that immigrants have materially higher savings rates than UK natives. This study ( https://izajodm.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40176-015-0034-y) says that the average amount of savings per month for migrants is £167.54 versus £157.17 for UK natives. I see how migrants are more pushed to get on the housing ladder. They buy cheaper properties in worse areas and do work on them. Natives prefer to rent nicer properties in nicer areas and don't build up capital. Obviously, that's a generalisation, but on average there is a difference.
And LOL at the idea that housing density and housing prices are correlated. Liverpool has denser housing than North Yorkshire but it has significantly lower house prices.
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Chinless dickhead living off parents' money feels threatened by people coming to this country and making something of themselves.
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I find the endless tedious insistence that any concern about immigration must be racist - as ridiculously dishonest and unfair.
I have no problem with immigrants wanting to bave abeyter life. I would be the same probably. But its far clear that overall immigration has a positive impact. Weve had quite a lot over the past 20 years and itndoesnt feel like anything is improving. And the currenr scale is now at truly vast and unprecedented levels. It could turn out to be a huge mistake.
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Tbf there’s a lot of truth in the second bit of Rob’s 22.26. Ordinary British people are rightly pissed off by immigrants effectively saying ‘we’re better than you’. Try emigrating to India, Australia, North America, and see how far that gets you. Britain is hobbled by post colonial guilt and the ruling classes still rule. Its feudal. The Tories have tried weaponising their affluent brown members against the British people and it hasn’t worked. Hopefully they’ll get kicked out of government before they get the chance to make it stick, but that doesn’t mean they won’t keep trying.
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Cookie, we get it. You don't like brown people.
It's not that they effectively say "we're better than you". It simply that some of them are better than lazy and entitled "I've won first prize in life's lottery" Englishmen.
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The final
Paragraph of rob’s 2226 is 💯 wrong. People in exactly those groups voted for brexit in their droves because they could see an endless supply of imported ‘unskilled’ cheap labour stopping their chances of gettin a job or a pay rise.
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“LOL at the idea that most or many immigrants accrue wealth - most do low paid work that local people don’t want to do, are too lazy to do or which doesn’t pay much”
anybody else got anything demonstrably wrong and dumb to share?
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I reckon about 40 million people is the ‘right’ number of people for the island of Britain. Other people may have other opinions!
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I reckon monging About control of human population is a sign of the deep wrong’un
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Didn’t mention control just an opinion as was clearly flagged at the end of my post.
Tell me you don’t read to the end of a clause without telling me blah blah proviso which flips the whole thing exception which drives a cart and horses blah blah u egg.
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Heh! On my deals it’s me writing the king and confusing clauses tbftbf
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half my family was born overseas!
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I always find these “immigrant” threads a bit odd, like why are we so obsessed with people trying to make something of their lives? Immigration hasn’t made your life bad. Greedy capitalism, the banking system, exploitation by multinational corporations and billionaires, corrupt governments, defunding of public services- so many actual enemies to choose from and yet the immigrant is your target.
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it’s because Lee Anderson “wants his country back”.
NB Lee Anderson was born in 1967; whatever England it is he’s liking to imagine, it certainly never existed within his lifetime.
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More whataboutism than Michael Jackson in the opening lines of Earth Song with it's hideously sanctimonious/hypocritical video there from hun bun
Whenever the conversation gets awkward it's a typical leftist response to basically change the subject
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You sound lovely.
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Weather is a bit better today than yesterday. Might even mow the lawn
See I can change the topic too .
The mistake the left has made over the last few decades has been having this weird attitude, it's why we have had Trump and Brexit.
People don't like being told they're all lazy and racist and we need to import replacements for them in the workforce because they're so useless at everything ...
Well knock me down with a feather from the world's smallest bird ...
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Yes it's the non-racists fault that racists are racist. Genius.
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We have Trump and Brexit (and huge increases in hate crimes, racism, Islamophobia, transphobia etc) because the hard right have first confected and then weaponised something they have called ‘culture wars’, using vulnerable minorities to leverage the innate conservatism of middle aged people into increasing fear and hate.
HTH.
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Typical smug Guardian attitude
They wouldn't be able to do that if there wasn't a kernel of truth in the issues being raised but people like you just pretend there is no issue at all which isn't helpful in the slightest and will only lead to more power for unpalatable parties and movements in the future .
It's like the upcoming labour victory . I dunno why you're celebrating , it's going to be 5 years of a Labour party which basically doesn't do anything different to the current Tory administration followed by a hard right Reform style victory from the horrid Tozzas next time . And you'll just reply by saying "everyone's racist I'm not, gold star for me"
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We should try be more tolerant of people who condemn racism. They're not all as enlightened as us.
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"Don't like being told" implies they are, but find being made aware of the truth a little unsettling. Maybe try and be better at stuff, rather than refusing to try to improve and claiming your shit life is the fault of someone else.
Gaga, that works for every single one of your "issues".
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Pwned
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And it's still a mystery to you why that's not a popular message for the electorate ? Youre basically punching down at people who have had no advantage at anything (I'll choose to ignore the childish relating of it back to me ).
Don't come crying to me next time an election /referendum doesn't go the correct way for you and your annoying ilk
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Middle aged men with extremely divorced energy and/or incel energy are more of a threat to society than immigrants. Dont @ me.
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Typical right-winger has never heard of structural disadvantage / privilege.
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The Tories and Labour are not markedly different from one another and the vote is to get an incompetent and sleazy government out . Even with the Tories in the state they are now, Keith Starmer is so terrified of doing anything remotely left wing that he's alienated proper lef ists . I actually found myself largely in agreement with Owen Jones ' article on this the other day tbh.
It's not that the people of Britain have suddenly decided they love immigration. We could easily have a very right wing , populist and regressive govt by the end of the decade if things pan out the way some commentators say they will.
The poll isn't the gotcha you think it is.
"Don't @me"
Ooh you're ard showing off cos the...
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Earth Song is a great tune with a critically important message that humanity would have done well to heed. Hope this clarifies.
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Jarvis Cocker's Earth Song rebuttal had it right
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The sight of a multi millionaire with his carefully assembled group of people of various racial backgrounds preaching about damagIng the earth while himself going around in private jets /being made of plastic / being already pretty much a known nonce at this point , was always an unedifying one.
Even as a kid I was desperate for him to lose that Xmas no1 chart battle, didn't care if it was the Beatles , Coolio, Oasis or whoever that beat him. He was a wrongun
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Earth Song was superb.
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It wasn't about the song, it was the man singing it
I remember all the jokes in school about what he's got in common with a Waitrose carrier bag...
White, plastic and should be kept away from small children
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Interested by this - please tell us more.
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1 in 6 is quite a lot. We are a very popular country. We are also fairly crowded - about 18m more people than when I was born. I have done my family tree on all sides to at least the 1700s and yet to find someone born outside UK/Ireland (mostly Scotland and Ireland and bit of England)! What a boring lot we must have been, even those ancestors who worked on ships abroad, even my granny who went to India to work as a servant in 1921 or her father who fought in South Africa in about 1900 - all seemed to marry people from the UK instead. However my DNA back 30,000 years on the maternal side takes up to the Caucasus mountains.
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In the UK it seems to be more acceptable to opt out by saying "I can't do x". Someone else on ROF mentioned this independently and speculated that it was because our education system specialises too early with A-Levels and the like.
Sometimes x is a specific skill (e.g. lawyers doing maths / laying out a spreadsheet), sometimes it's a task that someone thinks is beneath them or just can't be bothered to do (e.g. a recent example getting a coffee machine replaced)
Overseas colleagues tend to be better at learning/finding ways of just getting things done!
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Foreign languages is a another example. "oooh I can't speak x and everyone speaks English anyway" ignoring the fact, say, that if you have customers in France and your competitors are French-speaking Germans, guess who is more likely to win the business?!
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Classic Lyds.
Lightening the mood with bizarre personal anecdote since her astonishing DNA was forged in the ...
Caucasus mountains 30,000 years ago ....
🤪
Genuinely love it Lydia, always amuses, please dont ever change!
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Interesting observations from Vertigo tbf.
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The language thing even works here. Sales person in a fancy shop was French so I spoke to him in french. And he gave me an unsolicited 15% discount.
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Im pretty much on the fence on immigration. Clearly immigrants do tend to work hard and add to the economy etc. And it provides a boost to aggregate GDP and potentially helps to address the demographic crisis. But Im yet to be convinced it is really adding that much to gdp/head - which has flatlined throughout the past two decades of immigration growth.
And immigration probably does keep some wages lower. Albeit it also keeps some costs lower and adds to demand in some area. I suspect however that the distributional impact of this favours better off brits over poorer Brits. They benefit more from the lower costs and probably find that immigration does press down as hard on their wages. In terms of demand the obvious problem is increased demand for housing an public services. Again less of problem (and even a boon) if you already own housing; more of a problem for people without housing assets. We have a massive housing crisis and I cannot see how immigration is not going to make this worse - unless it is very targetted (which it does not appear to be). We already live in some of the smallest houses and have some of the highest house prices in the world. Towns and cities already feel overcrowded to me. And theres not that much free countryside to build on before it will feel quite oppressive.
I think culturally it can work - and to date has been pretty successful. But theres no guarantee that will always be the case and the pace and scale seems to have stepped up even more significantly recently. There has to be real risks that it goes wrong. Lots of immigration comes from countries that are far more socially conservative than the UK and I think people are genuinely entitled to be worried about what that may mean in the future. Whilst the Islamist problem is hyped up by the political right you cannot pretend its not there.
On balance I think we need to limit it, although I am open minded. But right now the scale - in terms of sheer numbers - has become really vast and unprecedented. If nothing else a more gradual approach lets us monitor whether it is beneficial or not.
What does annoy me is how people opposed to immigration are smeared with being bigots/racists etc. I am sure some of them are. In the same way that some Muslims are genuinely dangerous Islamists. But not many. The dumb ad hom stuff makes any intelligent debate about the issue impossible.
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Britain is uncompetitive and Britons are not productive. Brexit has added in xenophobia. As the City shrinks and AI wipes out the jobs all those in satellite towns have relied on for their value inflated lifestyles, there will be an even worse squeeze.
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The talk of AI wiping out all the jobs now, is one of those things that people 30 years hence will make fun of us for
Such hyperbole. Most office jobs now could be largely automated with technology we've already had for decades but most companies still choose not to.
It's just another thing for professional doom mongers like Noah Harari to bore on about (AI could probably write his next book about it though )
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