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UK Politics: rooting for the vegetables


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32 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

As I said before, you can’t just cut off immigration from a system that has become so dependent on it for so long and not expect issues.

What good could only come about through cutting off immigration?

32 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Also, I think we’d all agree NHS workers are under paid and over worked right? Does Raja think we are doing enough to encourage British people to become doctors or nurses? Why do we need to be so heavily reliant on foreign workers? 
 

you can pay NHS more  and let more immigrants come.

Its not an either or.

But I suspect you’re only feigning concern for the unfair pay for NHS.

32 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

It almost always comes down to the problem that it’s easier and cheaper to just bring in people from abroad than actually deal with the bigger problems.

 You can deal with bigger problem and bring people in.

32 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Why invest in automation or long term planning when you can just get loads of cheap foreign workers.

Why not do all three?

Immigrants spend money government could use to invest in necessary government safety nets and geniuses to innovate.

32 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Why deal with the actual causes of an aging population when you can just do a quick fix by importing more people?

What are these causes and What’s your solution to them besides less immigrants?

 

Please List specific policies you want to see enacted besides a lower cap on immigration.

32 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Successive governments have had little appetite to deal with any of it, just papering over the cracks and talking about GDP and growth. 

Yes, even the governments understand listening to the  culture war hysteria around immigration isn’t practical economically.

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With everyone else, even Boris and Nads, I think if they're implicated in security breaches and other things of a dishonest nature it's because they knew what was going on but thought they'd get away with it, but with Braverman I genuinely believe that she just can't keep the difference straight. Getting some of these vibes:

 

 

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56 minutes ago, Raja said:

Not sure if comments have been deleted, but I agree that this specific thing isn't something I would write & I think is not correct. However, there is a long history of anti immigrant & xenophobic comments that I haven't forgotten.

Fair enough. In my defense part of the statement wasn’t really geared to HOI.

It was more listing a general concern of immigration from the cultural warrior right that can’t really be assuaged through talk of economic benefits of immigration.

Apologies for the offensive hyperbole.

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1 minute ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

It was more listing a general concern of immigration from the cultural warrior right that can’t really be assuaged through talk of economic benefits of immigration.

That I agree with. The research is fairly clear, and there has been lots of people. People just choose to ignore it.

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It doesn't really matter if Braverman's appointment will be as short-lived as Sunak can make it, nor that it was a necessary deal to get her support and the support of her faction. She is ill suited to be a minister of any kind and therefore a weak point that the opposition can target for as long as she's in cabinet. Until Sunak actually makes a substantial decision as PM the opposition might as well attack those who have been in cabinet under all three PMs for their past, and of course attack Sunak for what he did or didn't do as chancellor.

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On the topic of the effect of immigration on the effect of wages, I think the first thing to say is that evidence is very mixed as to what the effects actually are, and we should be very cautious of making hard and fast claims about it. Pretty much every study has serious problems with the way evidence is gathered and taking into account the numerous factors that affect wages:

https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/the-labour-market-effects-of-immigration/#:~:text=Empirical research on the labour,effects on high-paid workers.

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It is important to recognise that the analysis of the labour market effects of immigration faces a number of methodological challenges. For example, as migrants often go to areas that are experiencing economic growth and strong labour demand, immigration can be both a cause and consequence of changes in wages and employment. This makes it difficult to establish causality.

Another problem is that international immigration into a certain area may cause some workers to leave that area and migrate to other parts of the country or abroad. Whenever this happens, the labour market effects in a certain area are dissipated across the country which makes correct measurement through local labour market analysis more difficult.

There can also be difficulty in distinguishing whether migrants are actually impacting the wages of UK-born workers, or whether the figures for the average wage are being changed as a result of migrants growing as a proportion of the workforce whilst being paid less (or more) than non-migrants, without them necessarily affecting actual wages UK-born workers receive (Nickell & Salaheen (2015) address this problem in their analysis).

A fourth methodological challenge arises from the quality of data on migrants, and especially specific subgroups of migrants, which are often based on small samples of the population and can thus lead to significant measurement error.

Empirical research has employed various methods and econometric techniques to address these issues, but none of them are perfect and some difficulties and caveats always remain.

Its also a pretty complex issue. Some will claim that immigration has no, or positive effects on wages, but that doesn't acknowledge that the effects are not evenly balanced. Lower skilled workers will often see a reduction in wages where as higher earners might see an increase. 
 

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Research suggests that immigration has small impacts on average wages of UK workers but that the impacts are not evenly distributed: low-waged workers are more likely to lose while medium and high-paid workers are more likely to gain

Then this article from Full fact on immigration effects on wages:
https://fullfact.org/immigration/immigration-and-jobs-labour-market-effects-immigration/

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  • UK research suggests that immigration has a small impact on average wages of existing workers but more significant effects for certain groups: low-wage workers lose while medium and high-paid workers gain.
  • The wage effects of immigration are likely to be greatest for resident workers who are immigrants themselves.
  • Research does not find a significant impact of overall immigration on unemployment in the UK, but the evidence suggests that immigration from outside the EU could have a negative impact on the employment of UK-born workers, especially during an economic downturn.
  • The impacts of immigration on the labour market depend on the skills of migrants, the skills of existing workers, and the characteristics of the host economy. This means that research evidence on the labour market effects of immigration is always specific to time and place.
  • For both wages and employment, short run effects of immigration differ from long run effects: any declines in the wages and employment of UK-born workers in the short run can be offset by rising wages and employment in the long run.

And as the article states, it also depends on whether immigrants are coming and competing for jobs from UK workers or taking roles that compliment existing workers. That in itself is a complex topic because it depends what you mean by compliment. Are fruit pickers complimenting UK workers by taking roles that UK workers won't do, or are UK workers not becoming fruit pickers because the job pays badly and has poor working conditions. Chicken and Egg.. (should have used poultry farmers for that example) 

Also access to lots of cheap immigration has another effect in altering the industries and goods and services that a country produces. 

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Changes in wages and employment are not the only ways in which an economy responds to immigration. There are at least two other adjustment mechanisms, including changes in the mix of goods and services produced in the economy, and changes in the technology used for producing them.

If your country has access to lots of cheap low skilled labour then of course it is going to produce more companies and businesses that need cheap low skilled labour, they each drive each other. 


Again from this article from the BBC
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46918729
 

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Reality Check verdict: Current research suggests there was a small, negative impact on the wages of low-skilled workers, which was outweighed by other factors such as the impact of the financial crisis and rises in the minimum wage.

 

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The Bank of England said that the biggest impact had been for semi-skilled and unskilled workers in the services sector, where they estimated that a 10 percentage point increase in the proportion of immigrants working in the sector would have been associated with a 1.88% reduction in pay.

A 10 percentage point increase in immigrants working in a sector is a lot.

The Office for National Statistics estimates that between 1997 and 2018, the proportion of non-UK nationals working in the UK rose from 3.7% to 10.7%, an increase of seven percentage points over 21 years.

But, of course, that is an overall figure, and the impact on some individual sectors and regions will have been considerably bigger.

But what was also interesting is that supply and demand can affect the wage cost for business, and we saw it with HGV drivers who got a 10-20% wage increase recently during the 'crisis'. But also here from that BBC article shows when you have a shortage of labour some industries are forced to pay more:

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The National Farmers' Union estimates that in 2017 there was a 9% increase in wages compared with 2016, reflecting a shortage of seasonal workers.

That doesn't always hold for every industry because wage increases are often quite sluggish and not dynamic, companies are often set up to make profit margins based on very low wage costs and cannot pass costs onto customers (or won't, we currently are living in a world where most things are much cheaper than they should be because costs are low and maybe we should re-examine that.)

And then just talking about whether immigration has a positive effect on GDP is contentious, it might have an overall GDP positive effect, but GDP per capita fell between 2008 and 2020 during a period of large scale immigration. There is also the argument that immigration is key to the UKs productivity, yet UK productivity has been flatlining for quite some time, despite mass immigration so it's hard to point that as a saviour of our economy either.

So overall, I think the positive effects of immigration towards the economy are exaggerated, the negative effects on wages are ignored, even if they aren't huge. But I think the overall effect of mass immigration is to put a sticking plaster on a much larger problem that affects the UK and allows things to carry on as normal, without ever addressing the key problems. Like why is our economy so reliant on low paid foreign workers?  It isn't simply that UK workers are lazy, its that jobs are not appealling and don't pay enough for the very high costs that UK residents have to endure (especially with a housing market such as it is)

And that isn't blaming immigrants for the UK's problems either, I know that is always the accusation when these discussions happen. But when you don't have open honest conversations about these topics you get.. Brexit! You get far right parties being the ones to step in and talk about immigrants and they will certainly be taking the extreme racist POV that many fear. 

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It's pretty clear at this point that Braverman not only breached the code but has lied about it since. But, again, the claims to 'integrity' that Sunak is making were never credible or sincere. 

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It does sound...inspired(?) by the drum line from the Gary Glitter song 'Rock and Roll', but changed up enough to make it not a direct copy.

One of our political parties used an "inspired by" piece of music based on Eminem's 'Lose Yourself' for its election campaign ad. Eminem's label sued them for copyright breach and won. It didn't help that the musician who made the music piece titled it "Eminemesque".

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8 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

It does sound...inspired(?) by the drum line from the Gary Glitter song 'Rock and Roll', but changed up enough to make it not a direct copy.

One of our political parties used an "inspired by" piece of music based on Eminem's 'Lose Yourself' for its election campaign ad. Eminem's label sued them for copyright breach and won. It didn't help that the musician who made the music piece titled it "Eminemesque".

Yeah, and be familiar to a lot of people who’re too young to have heard Glitter due to its inclusion in Joker.

So while it’s a rip-off and no money goes to Glitter, it’s still a PR own goal. 

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2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

If the worst headlines Sunak gets are ‘he used a song which sort of sounds like a Gary Glitter song if you really strain your ears’ I’m sure he will be happy.

It’s another bad headline, when he’s still getting pelters over Braverman. When we’re approaching winter and a lot of people freezing. He needs some good headlines.

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41 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

It’s another bad headline, when he’s still getting pelters over Braverman. When we’re approaching winter and a lot of people freezing. He needs some good headlines.

It’s a shit ton better than any headlines Truss was getting. It’s hard to imagine a single person giving a shit about this story, it’s so inconsequential I’m surprised we are even talking about it. 
 

I doubt the Braverman thing will damage Sunak at all, she is a placeholder to appease the right of the party, and will be gone at some point.

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