But most immigrants want to come to London or one of the other major cities where there are jobs. They don't want to go to the Highlands or rural west Wales.
Immigration is a very good thing for the country as a whole. Most immigrants are young and hard-working and add to the tax base while consuming little in the way of services. But some people suffer as a result. Working class wages are depressed as there is always a ready supply of immigrants and housing, in particular, is put under pressure. You can also have too much of a good thing and it is hard to see how our infrastructure can cope with net migration rates of 250k plus for a sustained length of time. OTOH, the only way to achieve this would be to leave the EU, which would be an even greater disaster for the economy, so I can only hope that the incipient recovery in the Eurozone gathers pace and lowers the UK's relative attractiveness.
agreed .. mostly (see the highlighted comments) .. although a report in todays 'Times' states that 1 in 4 of UK births in 2013 was to a mother who was born outside the UK .. presumably the bill for this was picked up by UK tax payers in the form of payments to the NHS. Also, many immigrants earn too little to pay tax or NI, in fact many would qualify for tax credits and child benefit. The trouble has been and remains, that a vast number of British young people have been fooled into thinking that a University degree will lead to a wonderful career, a huge salary and security for life. Hence, when this fallacy is exposed and they find themselves with a pretty worthless 'degree' and £20/30,000 in debt, many are reluctant (to put it mildly) to go out working in the fields harvesting asparagus and cauliflower, to clean public toilets or to sweep the streets for a living. As the cliché has it, immigrants are prepared to do such jobs, at least in the short term. Also, so long as the UK can import medical doctors, IT experts, nurses and other skilled personnel 'on the cheap', there is less and less incentive to upgrade the UK secondary education system to train and educate UK born and based young people in skilled and in demand professions. Any moves to reduce immigration must include a contract to provide better education and benefits for UK residents and an 'agreement' from UK residents to do the jobs that only immigrants are prepared to do. I wonder if this will ever be the case. Labour is promising to give every youngster 'who qualifies' an apprenticeship and to make sure that immigrants cannot claim UK Public benefits for the first two years of residence. If this includes NHS treatment for free is not clear. If Miliband and co. really want power, they should make a better show of advertising such policies and leave alone the futile arguments about whether Dave Cameron is or is not a coward for refusing to take part in debates on the telly.
But most immigrants want to come to London or one of the other major cities where there are jobs. They don't want to go to the Highlands or rural west Wales.
Immigration is a very good thing for the country as a whole. Most immigrants are young and hard-working and add to the tax base while consuming little in the way of services. But some people suffer as a result. Working class wages are depressed as there is always a ready supply of immigrants and housing, in particular, is put under pressure. You can also have too much of a good thing and it is hard to see how our infrastructure can cope with net migration rates of 250k plus for a sustained length of time. OTOH, the only way to achieve this would be to leave the EU, which would be an even greater disaster for the economy, so I can only hope that the incipient recovery in the Eurozone gathers pace and lowers the UK's relative attractiveness.
Agree.
In regards to the "running out of room" argument though. We could look at plenty more issues closer to home i.e the amount of empty/abandoned housing in our cities, the huge increase in foreign owned property, the reluctance to encourage business growth outside of London, the slow and reluctance of investment in transport infrastructure. All these things should be a much higher priority than any discussion on immigration causing us to run out of room.
As I've said before around this issue. The government are quite happy to receive all the benefits that immigration brings but are unwilling to spend anything in return. "Look we're bringing down the deficit" whilst at the same time ignoring any sort of investment the country as a whole desperately needs.
We aren't running out of room. Something like 11% of the UK is urban.
Fully agree - overpopulated my arse! There are surely more valid arguments against mass immigration than the population/space one.
Even 54% of urban is open space - add in private gardens and so on and the actual built area of the UK is just over 2% - this compares with woodland that comes in at 12%.
The perception is that it's far more overcrowded primarily because most of us live in the 2%.
These points would be valid if either of you had any perception of the effects of human expansion beyond what you can physically see.
1) Urbanisation affects green spaces in ways you cannot imagine. Even the small amount of urbanisation that has occurred over the last two centuries is causing irreparable damage to our countryside.
2) Building a new town or city isn't as simple as 'there's a big field in Wales, let's build there' as you also have to build plumbing, sewage, gas and electricity supplies there as well.
3) the effects of increasing the size of existing cities not only affect the health and wellbeing of those living in the city but also damage the surrounding countryside as well.
The only reason why we're building more and forcing population growth is so we can all get richer and fatter, but in the long term we are doing serious damage to ourselves and our countries. One day we will wake up and realise that we can't eat or drink money.
We aren't running out of room. Something like 11% of the UK is urban.
When will we be running out of room then? What urban percentage does it take? How many people can the UK's useable open spaces support before we "run out of room"? Immigration enthusiasts never give a number.
Most people would recognise that infrastructure in all its forms including schools and hospitals, not just roads and railways, is straining a bit under the present population levels and it seems to me the state does not have the money to invest in this when its already borrowing nearly £100 billion a year that realistically it can never repay. Both Labour and Tories are talking of reducing Govt spending so how do you provide that infrastructure? What will you cut out? Or where else is it thought the resource for this will come from?
I genuinely fail to see the attraction in relentlessly increasing the headcount in our little island and why some people are so intent on that. Please explain and convince me?
We aren't running out of room. Something like 11% of the UK is urban.
When will we be running out of room then? What urban percentage does it take? How many people can the UK's useable open spaces support before we "run out of room"? Immigration enthusiasts never give a number.
Most people would recognise that infrastructure in all its forms including schools and hospitals, not just roads and railways, is straining a bit under the present population levels and it seems to me the state does not have the money to invest in this when its already borrowing nearly £100 billion a year that realistically it can never repay. Both Labour and Tories are talking of reducing Govt spending so how do you provide that infrastructure? What will you cut out? Or where else is it thought the resource for this will come from?
I genuinely fail to see the attraction in relentlessly increasing the headcount in our little island and why some people are so intent on that. Please explain and convince me?
The figure I've used was merely pointing out that we haven't "run out of room" as the anti immigration enthusiasts love to bang out.
As I've said as well the government needs to be doing more in terms of investment for the country. The anti immigration enthusiasts also fail to see the problem in simply cutting off immigration. With our ever increasing aging society what will happen to the growing number of pensioners? With a lower percentage funding their pensions do you think that will not be cut? And in terms of the NHS, it has been shown that EU immigrants are net contributors to the system. That means they are funding services such as healthcare for the "native" people of this country.
We aren't running out of room. Something like 11% of the UK is urban.
Fully agree - overpopulated my arse! There are surely more valid arguments against mass immigration than the population/space one.
Even 54% of urban is open space - add in private gardens and so on and the actual built area of the UK is just over 2% - this compares with woodland that comes in at 12%.
The perception is that it's far more overcrowded primarily because most of us live in the 2%.
So you agree most people are crammed into 2% of the land but think we do not have a problem??? You can twist any argument you want by resorting to averages. Presumably we only have a traffic problem in the south east because we're not driving between midnight and 6 am.
If you want to use rural land you have to build infrastructure. What do you do first, send people there with a tent or build some houses? If you build some houses there needs to be jobs and roads and schools and hospitals. I know some will argue that money can be found for everything, but that money has to be borrowed because we spend more than we collect. Cue tax the rich bastards.....
Presume you have offered your garden to the council so they can build social housing and you would like to see Greenwich Park turned into a housing estate with a motorway through Blackheath village to join up with the A2.
"Would you then agree that the problem isn't with immigration, as such, but it is that the government are not spending enough in terms of infrastructure?"
At the risk of contradicting myself, some elements of infrastructure have money waiting to be thrown at it by the private sector. Infrastructure is an investment in real assets that can deliver a secure long term return e.g Dartford Crossing. It's planning rules that prevent houses being built, and without houses no infrastructure will appear, it's a chicken and egg situation.
It's the lag between creating demand for public services and meeting demand, which is the key issue, finding the money is secondary. Spending on the NHS and Education will be the last piece of infrastructure, in the meantime there will be pressures on the existing resources. Like I said it's the imbalance between population and services and it isn't a simple overnight fix.
If you are happy that the overpopulated areas suffer and blame government for not spending enough that's a cop out that solves nothing.
Hardly a cop out when it's the truth. I've just turned 30, I have no dependents, I earn more than the average wage in London, yet I have absolutely no opportunity to buy my own home in London. How can that be right? I can hardly blame immigrants for it either. Where are the affordable homes being built? How is it possible for one or two people to own multiple homes (in some cases hundreds of homes)? Moving out of London and commuting in is hardly an option either given the current capacity on the trains and their astronomical cost.
We aren't running out of room. Something like 11% of the UK is urban.
Fully agree - overpopulated my arse! There are surely more valid arguments against mass immigration than the population/space one.
Even 54% of urban is open space - add in private gardens and so on and the actual built area of the UK is just over 2% - this compares with woodland that comes in at 12%.
The perception is that it's far more overcrowded primarily because most of us live in the 2%.
An area 22 times the size of Hyde park has already been at least partially paved over in London as a result of front gardens being turned from grass to concrete. #not a lot of people know that
But most immigrants want to come to London or one of the other major cities where there are jobs. They don't want to go to the Highlands or rural west Wales.
Immigration is a very good thing for the country as a whole. Most immigrants are young and hard-working and add to the tax base while consuming little in the way of services. But some people suffer as a result. Working class wages are depressed as there is always a ready supply of immigrants and housing, in particular, is put under pressure. You can also have too much of a good thing and it is hard to see how our infrastructure can cope with net migration rates of 250k plus for a sustained length of time. OTOH, the only way to achieve this would be to leave the EU, which would be an even greater disaster for the economy, so I can only hope that the incipient recovery in the Eurozone gathers pace and lowers the UK's relative attractiveness.
Agree.
In regards to the "running out of room" argument though. We could look at plenty more issues closer to home i.e the amount of empty/abandoned housing in our cities, the huge increase in foreign owned property, the reluctance to encourage business growth outside of London, the slow and reluctance of investment in transport infrastructure. All these things should be a much higher priority than any discussion on immigration causing us to run out of room.
As I've said before around this issue. The government are quite happy to receive all the benefits that immigration brings but are unwilling to spend anything in return. "Look we're bringing down the deficit" whilst at the same time ignoring any sort of investment the country as a whole desperately needs.
But most immigrants want to come to London or one of the other major cities where there are jobs. They don't want to go to the Highlands or rural west Wales.
Immigration is a very good thing for the country as a whole. Most immigrants are young and hard-working and add to the tax base while consuming little in the way of services. But some people suffer as a result. Working class wages are depressed as there is always a ready supply of immigrants and housing, in particular, is put under pressure. You can also have too much of a good thing and it is hard to see how our infrastructure can cope with net migration rates of 250k plus for a sustained length of time. OTOH, the only way to achieve this would be to leave the EU, which would be an even greater disaster for the economy, so I can only hope that the incipient recovery in the Eurozone gathers pace and lowers the UK's relative attractiveness.
Agree.
In regards to the "running out of room" argument though. We could look at plenty more issues closer to home i.e the amount of empty/abandoned housing in our cities, the huge increase in foreign owned property, the reluctance to encourage business growth outside of London, the slow and reluctance of investment in transport infrastructure. All these things should be a much higher priority than any discussion on immigration causing us to run out of room.
As I've said before around this issue. The government are quite happy to receive all the benefits that immigration brings but are unwilling to spend anything in return. "Look we're bringing down the deficit" whilst at the same time ignoring any sort of investment the country as a whole desperately needs.
We aren't running out of room. Something like 11% of the UK is urban.
When will we be running out of room then? What urban percentage does it take? How many people can the UK's useable open spaces support before we "run out of room"? Immigration enthusiasts never give a number.
Most people would recognise that infrastructure in all its forms including schools and hospitals, not just roads and railways, is straining a bit under the present population levels and it seems to me the state does not have the money to invest in this when its already borrowing nearly £100 billion a year that realistically it can never repay. Both Labour and Tories are talking of reducing Govt spending so how do you provide that infrastructure? What will you cut out? Or where else is it thought the resource for this will come from?
I genuinely fail to see the attraction in relentlessly increasing the headcount in our little island and why some people are so intent on that. Please explain and convince me?
The figure I've used was merely pointing out that we haven't "run out of room" as the anti immigration enthusiasts love to bang out.
As I've said as well the government needs to be doing more in terms of investment for the country. The anti immigration enthusiasts also fail to see the problem in simply cutting off immigration. With our ever increasing aging society what will happen to the growing number of pensioners? With a lower percentage funding their pensions do you think that will not be cut? And in terms of the NHS, it has been shown that EU immigrants are net contributors to the system. That means they are funding services such as healthcare for the "native" people of this country.
Lets ignore your rhetoric about 'anti-immigration enthusiasts'. Or would you like to describe yourself as a 'pro-overpopulation, head-in-the-sand enthusiast'? Because that is, by default, what your position is - ignore overpopulation and leave the effects of immigrations and population as a problem for future generations to solve.
Yes, I agree - immigration does, in the short term, have economic benefits. Immigrants are net contributors to society on an economic level and do help with issues such as the ageing population, but again this is all short-term.
Immigrants settle here and have children. Those children are not classed as migrants and are economically inactive until reach working age. We also have millions of job-seekers already in this country and every job a migrant takes, someone already here has to survive off the taxpayer. Then, once the migrant retires, they will then become a pensioner and they will not longer be net contributors. The long-term economic costs of immigration are simply not factored in to the short term benefits, which is why myopic pro-immigration enthusiasts can't seem to see why some people are against further increasing our population size.
Immigration doesn't solve the ageing population question, it just rolls the problem forward until tomorrow. 1 million tax-paying migrants will one day become 1 million pensioners at a cost to the taxpayer.
The answer isn't simply stopping immigration, as the workforce does lack the necessary skills that this country currently needs, but re-evaluating how immigration is managed and monitored. In the meantime, the current workforce needs to adapt to the two main issues facing our labour market:
1) Too many skilled occupations unfilled due to lack of training and education
2) Shortages of unskilled labour due to people's unrealistic expectations as well as exploitation of those within the unskilled labour field
In an ideal world, we would have a surplus of skilled workers and a shortage of unskilled workers, using short-term migrant labour to plug gaps in so-called 'undesirable jobs'.
The ageing population issue can only be solved by addressing the fact that a lot of people approaching retirement have completely unrealistic expectations of what they are entitled to once they reach retirement age. There are massive pension funding gaps in older schemes, especially in the public sector, largely caused by the over-generosity of the schemes and that the members of those schemes have put very little into those schemes compared to what a modern scheme would demand in terms of contributions. Nothing about society is sustainable - immigration, population growth, or our expectations of employment or post-retirement living standards.
Back to the SNP which were mentioned somewhere on this a thread. Why would they form a coalition? If they hold the balance of power they can use it at every debate. Every single minutie of policy and a bill will have to pass the "Scotland test". Nothing will be passed unless it means more money going to Scotland in some way or other. Extra £100m for education - only if half it goes to Scotland! Let's increase pensions by 1% - only passed if its 2% in Scotland etc etc.
But most immigrants want to come to London or one of the other major cities where there are jobs. They don't want to go to the Highlands or rural west Wales.
Immigration is a very good thing for the country as a whole. Most immigrants are young and hard-working and add to the tax base while consuming little in the way of services. But some people suffer as a result. Working class wages are depressed as there is always a ready supply of immigrants and housing, in particular, is put under pressure. You can also have too much of a good thing and it is hard to see how our infrastructure can cope with net migration rates of 250k plus for a sustained length of time. OTOH, the only way to achieve this would be to leave the EU, which would be an even greater disaster for the economy, so I can only hope that the incipient recovery in the Eurozone gathers pace and lowers the UK's relative attractiveness.
Agree.
In regards to the "running out of room" argument though. We could look at plenty more issues closer to home i.e the amount of empty/abandoned housing in our cities, the huge increase in foreign owned property, the reluctance to encourage business growth outside of London, the slow and reluctance of investment in transport infrastructure. All these things should be a much higher priority than any discussion on immigration causing us to run out of room.
As I've said before around this issue. The government are quite happy to receive all the benefits that immigration brings but are unwilling to spend anything in return. "Look we're bringing down the deficit" whilst at the same time ignoring any sort of investment the country as a whole desperately needs.
Immigration doesn't solve the ageing population question, it just rolls the problem forward until tomorrow. 1 million tax-paying migrants will one day become 1 million pensioners at a cost to the taxpayer.
And if they retire to their homeland, they will receive a pension, but none of that money will be spent in the Uk, this is a time bomb.
Migrants don't just do the 'jobs brits won't do'. An accountancy job at our place recently received 72 applications - from mostly qualified british people. It was awarded to a Bulgarian (and lovely she is too).
But decent people spend a fortune getting off thier arse and getting qualified in a profession and now face all this extra competition, from people who have only relatively recently rocked up in the Country.
I think it's a huge issue in Accountancy - one only needs to attend an exam sitting to see the huge numbers of those evidently not born here.
So its not exclusively a case of 'they're only doing/taking jobs ours won't do'.
A good book that explains how UKIP has targeted voters from both Labour and the Torys. As has been mentioned above many Labour voters especially in the North have begun to switch allegiance to UKIP.
Immigration doesn't solve the ageing population question, it just rolls the problem forward until tomorrow. 1 million tax-paying migrants will one day become 1 million pensioners at a cost to the taxpayer.
And if they retire to their homeland, they will receive a pension, but none of that money will be spent in the Uk, this is a time bomb.
If you are under the age of 40 today, I don't think you will ever receive a state pension. I expect the state pension to be wiped out in the next 20-30 years, once the baby boomer generation has been paid.
We aren't running out of room. Something like 11% of the UK is urban.
Fully agree - overpopulated my arse! There are surely more valid arguments against mass immigration than the population/space one.
Even 54% of urban is open space - add in private gardens and so on and the actual built area of the UK is just over 2% - this compares with woodland that comes in at 12%.
The perception is that it's far more overcrowded primarily because most of us live in the 2%.
An area 22 times the size of Hyde park has already been at least partially paved over in London as a result of front gardens being turned from grass to concrete. #not a lot of people know that
Terrible isn't it? Doesn't allow for any social housing to be built on people's front gardens...... What the hell does that have to do with anything and why does it matter? Causes floods of course! Zzzzzzzz
We aren't running out of room. Something like 11% of the UK is urban.
Fully agree - overpopulated my arse! There are surely more valid arguments against mass immigration than the population/space one.
Even 54% of urban is open space - add in private gardens and so on and the actual built area of the UK is just over 2% - this compares with woodland that comes in at 12%.
The perception is that it's far more overcrowded primarily because most of us live in the 2%.
An area 22 times the size of Hyde park has already been at least partially paved over in London as a result of front gardens being turned from grass to concrete. #not a lot of people know that
Terrible isn't it? Doesn't allow for any social housing to be built on people's front gardens...... What the hell does that have to do with anything and why does it matter? Causes floods of course! Zzzzzzzz
I simply thought it was an interesting factoid, hence the Caine reference. Sorry it has made you so angry.
Migrants don't just do the 'jobs brits won't do'. An accountancy job at our place recently received 72 applications - from mostly qualified british people. It was awarded to a Bulgarian (and lovely she is too).
But decent people spend a fortune getting off thier arse and getting qualified in a profession and now face all this extra competition, from people who have only relatively recently rocked up in the Country.
I think it's a huge issue in Accountancy - one only needs to attend an exam sitting to see the huge numbers of those evidently not born here.
So its not exclusively a case of 'they're only doing/taking jobs ours won't do'.
Of interest too, I think, is the number of Brits living permanently abroad. Different reports quote different numbers but, broadly, there's around 5.5mn of us it seems. 1.3mn in Australian alone. Then there's 0.75mn in the USA, 0.7mn in Canada and 0.3mn in New Zealand. In Europe, there are 0.4mn in Spain, 0.25mn in Ireland, 0.2mn in France and 0.1mn in both Germany and Italy. There are 4 Brits in San Marino and even 294 living in North Korea.
I don't think our infrastructure could cope if they all came home, that's for sure!
Migrants don't just do the 'jobs brits won't do'. An accountancy job at our place recently received 72 applications - from mostly qualified british people. It was awarded to a Bulgarian (and lovely she is too).
But decent people spend a fortune getting off thier arse and getting qualified in a profession and now face all this extra competition, from people who have only relatively recently rocked up in the Country.
I think it's a huge issue in Accountancy - one only needs to attend an exam sitting to see the huge numbers of those evidently not born here.
So its not exclusively a case of 'they're only doing/taking jobs ours won't do'.
Of interest too, I think, is the number of Brits living permanently abroad. Different reports quote different numbers but, broadly, there's around 5.5mn of us it seems. 1.3mn in Australian alone. Then there's 0.75mn in the USA, 0.7mn in Canada and 0.3mn in New Zealand. In Europe, there are 0.4mn in Spain, 0.25mn in Ireland, 0.2mn in France and 0.1mn in both Germany and Italy. There are 4 Brits in San Marino and even 294 living in North Korea.
I don't think our infrastructure could cope if they all came home, that's for sure!
Why would making our own immigration rules stricter, force those people back? It would certainly have no influence on me, it's not as if China can make their rules and stricter in response.
Migrants don't just do the 'jobs brits won't do'. An accountancy job at our place recently received 72 applications - from mostly qualified british people. It was awarded to a Bulgarian (and lovely she is too).
But decent people spend a fortune getting off thier arse and getting qualified in a profession and now face all this extra competition, from people who have only relatively recently rocked up in the Country.
I think it's a huge issue in Accountancy - one only needs to attend an exam sitting to see the huge numbers of those evidently not born here.
So its not exclusively a case of 'they're only doing/taking jobs ours won't do'.
Of interest too, I think, is the number of Brits living permanently abroad. Different reports quote different numbers but, broadly, there's around 5.5mn of us it seems. 1.3mn in Australian alone. Then there's 0.75mn in the USA, 0.7mn in Canada and 0.3mn in New Zealand. In Europe, there are 0.4mn in Spain, 0.25mn in Ireland, 0.2mn in France and 0.1mn in both Germany and Italy. There are 4 Brits in San Marino and even 294 living in North Korea.
I don't think our infrastructure could cope if they all came home, that's for sure!
Why would making our own immigration rules stricter, force those people back? It would certainly have no influence on me, it's not as if China can make their rules and stricter in response.
I don't know. But removal of reciprocity is possible. Removal of the EHIC rights in the EU another aspect that could drive Brits home. Anyway, that wasn't the point I was making. Which is that we seem to be complaining about Johnny Foreigner taking British jobs while not being concerned about the reverse happening. So if UK = UKIP, France = National Front (which has similar anti-immigration policies but more voters), etc, etc.
We aren't running out of room. Something like 11% of the UK is urban.
When will we be running out of room then? What urban percentage does it take? How many people can the UK's useable open spaces support before we "run out of room"? Immigration enthusiasts never give a number.
Most people would recognise that infrastructure in all its forms including schools and hospitals, not just roads and railways, is straining a bit under the present population levels and it seems to me the state does not have the money to invest in this when its already borrowing nearly £100 billion a year that realistically it can never repay. Both Labour and Tories are talking of reducing Govt spending so how do you provide that infrastructure? What will you cut out? Or where else is it thought the resource for this will come from?
I genuinely fail to see the attraction in relentlessly increasing the headcount in our little island and why some people are so intent on that. Please explain and convince me?
The figure I've used was merely pointing out that we haven't "run out of room" as the anti immigration enthusiasts love to bang out.
As I've said as well the government needs to be doing more in terms of investment for the country. The anti immigration enthusiasts also fail to see the problem in simply cutting off immigration. With our ever increasing aging society what will happen to the growing number of pensioners? With a lower percentage funding their pensions do you think that will not be cut? And in terms of the NHS, it has been shown that EU immigrants are net contributors to the system. That means they are funding services such as healthcare for the "native" people of this country.
Lets ignore your rhetoric about 'anti-immigration enthusiasts'. Or would you like to describe yourself as a 'pro-overpopulation, head-in-the-sand enthusiast'? Because that is, by default, what your position is - ignore overpopulation and leave the effects of immigrations and population as a problem for future generations to solve.
Yes, I agree - immigration does, in the short term, have economic benefits. Immigrants are net contributors to society on an economic level and do help with issues such as the ageing population, but again this is all short-term.
Immigrants settle here and have children. Those children are not classed as migrants and are economically inactive until reach working age. We also have millions of job-seekers already in this country and every job a migrant takes, someone already here has to survive off the taxpayer. Then, once the migrant retires, they will then become a pensioner and they will not longer be net contributors. The long-term economic costs of immigration are simply not factored in to the short term benefits, which is why myopic pro-immigration enthusiasts can't seem to see why some people are against further increasing our population size.
Immigration doesn't solve the ageing population question, it just rolls the problem forward until tomorrow. 1 million tax-paying migrants will one day become 1 million pensioners at a cost to the taxpayer.
The answer isn't simply stopping immigration, as the workforce does lack the necessary skills that this country currently needs, but re-evaluating how immigration is managed and monitored. In the meantime, the current workforce needs to adapt to the two main issues facing our labour market:
1) Too many skilled occupations unfilled due to lack of training and education
2) Shortages of unskilled labour due to people's unrealistic expectations as well as exploitation of those within the unskilled labour field
In an ideal world, we would have a surplus of skilled workers and a shortage of unskilled workers, using short-term migrant labour to plug gaps in so-called 'undesirable jobs'.
The ageing population issue can only be solved by addressing the fact that a lot of people approaching retirement have completely unrealistic expectations of what they are entitled to once they reach retirement age. There are massive pension funding gaps in older schemes, especially in the public sector, largely caused by the over-generosity of the schemes and that the members of those schemes have put very little into those schemes compared to what a modern scheme would demand in terms of contributions. Nothing about society is sustainable - immigration, population growth, or our expectations of employment or post-retirement living standards.
My "rhetoric" was based purely on Bryan's post. I'm not pro immigration nor am I anti. I can see the many benefits it brings us but equally I can see that it isn't a solution to all our problems and mass immigration in the long term obviously brings problems with it.
I agree with much of your post but it does assume that all the immigrants over the last 10 years will stay in the UK until they retire. I think that is unlikely and has been shown that many stay for short periods of time before returning home.
I also slightly disagree with the overpopulation issue. Some areas suffer from overpopulation such as London but many areas of the country do not. As I've said previously the government need to regenerate these areas and encourage businesses to locate to them and thus encouraging many natives and immigrants to not cram into a few areas. In turn would ease the housing situation in London and the South East. Now obviously I'm not in dream land and I know this is unlikely to happen, governments are extremely short term focused, they have little desire or incentive to create such long term plans. Add to that that they are more than happy with increasing house prices and I honestly can't see an end coming to those particular problems.
Migrants don't just do the 'jobs brits won't do'. An accountancy job at our place recently received 72 applications - from mostly qualified british people. It was awarded to a Bulgarian (and lovely she is too).
But decent people spend a fortune getting off thier arse and getting qualified in a profession and now face all this extra competition, from people who have only relatively recently rocked up in the Country.
I think it's a huge issue in Accountancy - one only needs to attend an exam sitting to see the huge numbers of those evidently not born here.
So its not exclusively a case of 'they're only doing/taking jobs ours won't do'.
Of interest too, I think, is the number of Brits living permanently abroad. Different reports quote different numbers but, broadly, there's around 5.5mn of us it seems. 1.3mn in Australian alone. Then there's 0.75mn in the USA, 0.7mn in Canada and 0.3mn in New Zealand. In Europe, there are 0.4mn in Spain, 0.25mn in Ireland, 0.2mn in France and 0.1mn in both Germany and Italy. There are 4 Brits in San Marino and even 294 living in North Korea.
I don't think our infrastructure could cope if they all came home, that's for sure!
Why would making our own immigration rules stricter, force those people back? It would certainly have no influence on me, it's not as if China can make their rules and stricter in response.
It wouldn't, however those in mainland Europe could be deported back to the UK if we were to leave the EU (depending on how long they've been a resident there).
Migrants don't just do the 'jobs brits won't do'. An accountancy job at our place recently received 72 applications - from mostly qualified british people. It was awarded to a Bulgarian (and lovely she is too).
But decent people spend a fortune getting off thier arse and getting qualified in a profession and now face all this extra competition, from people who have only relatively recently rocked up in the Country.
I think it's a huge issue in Accountancy - one only needs to attend an exam sitting to see the huge numbers of those evidently not born here.
So its not exclusively a case of 'they're only doing/taking jobs ours won't do'.
Of interest too, I think, is the number of Brits living permanently abroad. Different reports quote different numbers but, broadly, there's around 5.5mn of us it seems. 1.3mn in Australian alone. Then there's 0.75mn in the USA, 0.7mn in Canada and 0.3mn in New Zealand. In Europe, there are 0.4mn in Spain, 0.25mn in Ireland, 0.2mn in France and 0.1mn in both Germany and Italy. There are 4 Brits in San Marino and even 294 living in North Korea.
I don't think our infrastructure could cope if they all came home, that's for sure!
Why would making our own immigration rules stricter, force those people back? It would certainly have no influence on me, it's not as if China can make their rules and stricter in response.
It wouldn't, however those in mainland Europe could be deported back to the UK if we were to leave the EU (depending on how long they've been a resident there).
Why is that? Stopping further open immigration from the EU does not entail deporting existing residents.
A good book that explains how UKIP has targeted voters from both Labour and the Torys. As has been mentioned above many Labour voters especially in the North have begun to switch allegiance to UKIP.
Funny that the cover up of mass rape isn't going down well on northern door steps. Labour should promise to import a couple of million more Pakistanis to help them see the error of their ways.
People seem to be ignoring or unaware of the fact that the SNP have already said they're not interested in a coalition with Labour. Even my historically staunch Labour Party activist family members up there who voted "no" are struggling to say anything positive about Labour.
SNP don't need the coalition. Labour are going to get battered up there in the next elections. SNP support will be even stronger, effectively the only party, and they will gradually gain more independent powers until they have another yes/no vote which this time they will easily win. Good luck to them. I'm jealous, at least they have a choice that is different.
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The trouble has been and remains, that a vast number of British young people have been fooled into thinking that a University degree will lead to a wonderful career, a huge salary and security for life. Hence, when this fallacy is exposed and they find themselves with a pretty worthless 'degree' and £20/30,000 in debt, many are reluctant (to put it mildly) to go out working in the fields harvesting asparagus and cauliflower, to clean public toilets or to sweep the streets for a living. As the cliché has it, immigrants are prepared to do such jobs, at least in the short term.
Also, so long as the UK can import medical doctors, IT experts, nurses and other skilled personnel 'on the cheap', there is less and less incentive to upgrade the UK secondary education system to train and educate UK born and based young people in skilled and in demand professions.
Any moves to reduce immigration must include a contract to provide better education and benefits for UK residents and an 'agreement' from UK residents to do the jobs that only immigrants are prepared to do. I wonder if this will ever be the case.
Labour is promising to give every youngster 'who qualifies' an apprenticeship and to make sure that immigrants cannot claim UK Public benefits for the first two years of residence. If this includes NHS treatment for free is not clear.
If Miliband and co. really want power, they should make a better show of advertising such policies and leave alone the futile arguments about whether Dave Cameron is or is not a coward for refusing to take part in debates on the telly.
In regards to the "running out of room" argument though. We could look at plenty more issues closer to home i.e the amount of empty/abandoned housing in our cities, the huge increase in foreign owned property, the reluctance to encourage business growth outside of London, the slow and reluctance of investment in transport infrastructure. All these things should be a much higher priority than any discussion on immigration causing us to run out of room.
As I've said before around this issue. The government are quite happy to receive all the benefits that immigration brings but are unwilling to spend anything in return. "Look we're bringing down the deficit" whilst at the same time ignoring any sort of investment the country as a whole desperately needs.
1) Urbanisation affects green spaces in ways you cannot imagine. Even the small amount of urbanisation that has occurred over the last two centuries is causing irreparable damage to our countryside.
2) Building a new town or city isn't as simple as 'there's a big field in Wales, let's build there' as you also have to build plumbing, sewage, gas and electricity supplies there as well.
3) the effects of increasing the size of existing cities not only affect the health and wellbeing of those living in the city but also damage the surrounding countryside as well.
The only reason why we're building more and forcing population growth is so we can all get richer and fatter, but in the long term we are doing serious damage to ourselves and our countries. One day we will wake up and realise that we can't eat or drink money.
Most people would recognise that infrastructure in all its forms including schools and hospitals, not just roads and railways, is straining a bit under the present population levels and it seems to me the state does not have the money to invest in this when its already borrowing nearly £100 billion a year that realistically it can never repay. Both Labour and Tories are talking of reducing Govt spending so how do you provide that infrastructure? What will you cut out? Or where else is it thought the resource for this will come from?
I genuinely fail to see the attraction in relentlessly increasing the headcount in our little island and why some people are so intent on that. Please explain and convince me?
As I've said as well the government needs to be doing more in terms of investment for the country. The anti immigration enthusiasts also fail to see the problem in simply cutting off immigration. With our ever increasing aging society what will happen to the growing number of pensioners? With a lower percentage funding their pensions do you think that will not be cut? And in terms of the NHS, it has been shown that EU immigrants are net contributors to the system. That means they are funding services such as healthcare for the "native" people of this country.
If you want to use rural land you have to build infrastructure. What do you do first, send people there with a tent or build some houses? If you build some houses there needs to be jobs and roads and schools and hospitals. I know some will argue that money can be found for everything, but that money has to be borrowed because we spend more than we collect. Cue tax the rich bastards.....
Presume you have offered your garden to the council so they can build social housing and you would like to see Greenwich Park turned into a housing estate with a motorway through Blackheath village to join up with the A2.
"Would you then agree that the problem isn't with immigration, as such, but it is that the government are not spending enough in terms of infrastructure?"
At the risk of contradicting myself, some elements of infrastructure have money waiting to be thrown at it by the private sector. Infrastructure is an investment in real assets that can deliver a secure long term return e.g Dartford Crossing. It's planning rules that prevent houses being built, and without houses no infrastructure will appear, it's a chicken and egg situation.
It's the lag between creating demand for public services and meeting demand, which is the key issue, finding the money is secondary. Spending on the NHS and Education will be the last piece of infrastructure, in the meantime there will be pressures on the existing resources. Like I said it's the imbalance between population and services and it isn't a simple overnight fix.
If you are happy that the overpopulated areas suffer and blame government for not spending enough that's a cop out that solves nothing.
#not a lot of people know that
Yes, I agree - immigration does, in the short term, have economic benefits. Immigrants are net contributors to society on an economic level and do help with issues such as the ageing population, but again this is all short-term.
Immigrants settle here and have children. Those children are not classed as migrants and are economically inactive until reach working age. We also have millions of job-seekers already in this country and every job a migrant takes, someone already here has to survive off the taxpayer. Then, once the migrant retires, they will then become a pensioner and they will not longer be net contributors. The long-term economic costs of immigration are simply not factored in to the short term benefits, which is why myopic pro-immigration enthusiasts can't seem to see why some people are against further increasing our population size.
Immigration doesn't solve the ageing population question, it just rolls the problem forward until tomorrow. 1 million tax-paying migrants will one day become 1 million pensioners at a cost to the taxpayer.
The answer isn't simply stopping immigration, as the workforce does lack the necessary skills that this country currently needs, but re-evaluating how immigration is managed and monitored. In the meantime, the current workforce needs to adapt to the two main issues facing our labour market:
1) Too many skilled occupations unfilled due to lack of training and education
2) Shortages of unskilled labour due to people's unrealistic expectations as well as exploitation of those within the unskilled labour field
In an ideal world, we would have a surplus of skilled workers and a shortage of unskilled workers, using short-term migrant labour to plug gaps in so-called 'undesirable jobs'.
The ageing population issue can only be solved by addressing the fact that a lot of people approaching retirement have completely unrealistic expectations of what they are entitled to once they reach retirement age. There are massive pension funding gaps in older schemes, especially in the public sector, largely caused by the over-generosity of the schemes and that the members of those schemes have put very little into those schemes compared to what a modern scheme would demand in terms of contributions. Nothing about society is sustainable - immigration, population growth, or our expectations of employment or post-retirement living standards.
Why would they form a coalition? If they hold the balance of power they can use it at every debate. Every single minutie of policy and a bill will have to pass the "Scotland test". Nothing will be passed unless it means more money going to Scotland in some way or other. Extra £100m for education - only if half it goes to Scotland! Let's increase pensions by 1% - only passed if its 2% in Scotland etc etc.
This would be the worst of all results
;-)
And if they retire to their homeland, they will receive a pension, but none of that money will be spent in the Uk, this is a time bomb.
An accountancy job at our place recently received 72 applications - from mostly qualified british people. It was awarded to a Bulgarian (and lovely she is too).
But decent people spend a fortune getting off thier arse and getting qualified in a profession and now face all this extra competition, from people who have only relatively recently rocked up in the Country.
I think it's a huge issue in Accountancy - one only needs to attend an exam sitting to see the huge numbers of those evidently not born here.
So its not exclusively a case of 'they're only doing/taking jobs ours won't do'.
A good book that explains how UKIP has targeted voters from both Labour and the Torys. As has been mentioned above many Labour voters especially in the North have begun to switch allegiance to UKIP.
I don't think our infrastructure could cope if they all came home, that's for sure!
I agree with much of your post but it does assume that all the immigrants over the last 10 years will stay in the UK until they retire. I think that is unlikely and has been shown that many stay for short periods of time before returning home.
I also slightly disagree with the overpopulation issue. Some areas suffer from overpopulation such as London but many areas of the country do not. As I've said previously the government need to regenerate these areas and encourage businesses to locate to them and thus encouraging many natives and immigrants to not cram into a few areas. In turn would ease the housing situation in London and the South East. Now obviously I'm not in dream land and I know this is unlikely to happen, governments are extremely short term focused, they have little desire or incentive to create such long term plans. Add to that that they are more than happy with increasing house prices and I honestly can't see an end coming to those particular problems.
Even my historically staunch Labour Party activist family members up there who voted "no" are struggling to say anything positive about Labour.
SNP don't need the coalition. Labour are going to get battered up there in the next elections. SNP support will be even stronger, effectively the only party, and they will gradually gain more independent powers until they have another yes/no vote which this time they will easily win.
Good luck to them. I'm jealous, at least they have a choice that is different.