Politics Thread!

[(o)(o)]

Center right wins with 1% more than centre left.
The noisy far-right gets 18% of the votes, 8% more than last time, claims a lot of things such as without them the centre-right is nothing.
Center-left concedes victory to the centre right and declares they will be leading the opposition.
Center-right will be forming government without noisy far-right.
Noisy far right thinks they will be winning the next elections.

For now it depends how one looks at it. If 18% is a lot of people it also means that 82% went there to vote for someone else.

Ow, the noisy far right won in the Algarve with 1% more than centre left.

Hitler only ever got 34% or something like it. Beware.

37%.. not an absolute majority, but huge numbers of seats vs moderates.. they had a lock

[KlaxonCow]

I've made this observation before, but it is now becoming undeniably obvious.

The thrust of it being that, in the past, with less taxpayers and a lower tax burden, the UK was able to support a vastly more comprehensive set of public services.

There were more local hospitals, more police stations, more ambulance stations, more fire stations.

I remember, in the small town where I came from, there being a central police station in town and then a number of smaller "police houses" in the surrounding areas that compromised the town. There are now no police stations in the town, with it all being deferred centrally to the nearest city.

Similarly, I remember there being a number of smaller local hospitals. Indeed, I was born in one, which specialised in maternity services, which no longer exists. But, again, all the local hospitals have vanished, to be centralised into one "super-hospital" in the nearby city.

One hopes to never have a heart attack, because even if the ambulance appeared instantly - which, of course, is never going to happen these days (and the last time I needed to call an ambulance in an emergency, was told that there was an 8 hour waiting time) - then it's still a good 15 minute drive to this centralised hospital, even with the ambulance using its "blues and twos" to not have to wait in any traffic congestion. Even if the ambulance was there instantly and the roads were all completely empty, it could not race to the nearest A&E faster than 15 minutes. And there are definitely even worse places to be located within the catchment area of this centralised city hospital.

(And while the NHS and police are able to gain the headlines for their struggles, this trend also exists for all public services, even if they do not garner the front page headlines, such as fire stations, public libraries and so forth.)

But I probably do not need to provide any examples. You all have your own, many times over.

The underlying issue, though, is where is all the money going?

In that there are many more taxpayers than in the '50s, paying the largest post-war tax burden ever - vastly more money than ever before is being collected from us - yet public services are on their knees and local councils are going bankrupt, managing vastly fewer local public service assets.

It does not make sense. Like, is there someone who's just eating the money? Because it's not just that taxes go up, it's that what they're paying for is going down as well. The vast chasm of disparity here needs explanation. When the tax burden is orders of magnitude larger than the past - as it's not just that the tax burden is high, it's that there is simply a much bigger population of taxpayers paying it as well - yet the public services delivered by them have become so threadbare, through repeated cuts, that they are all sitting on the verge of collapse.

This is really the primary focus of where the post-war neoliberal consensus is catastrophically failing.

Indeed, the neoliberal / Tory criticism of socialism - that without competitive pressure, it becomes lazy and wasteful and stops innovating because when you're paid by the state, no matter what, then why try harder? - is clearly not solved by whatever it is that privatisation and governments, intent on efficiency and reducing waste, are doing. Austerity has done nothing whatsoever. Because here we are again, requiring "austerity" once more, apparently.

(It's "the definition of madness", right? To be doing the same thing over and over again, yet expecting different results. Even though they've, as yet, not happened even once. But, with religious fervour, let's keep doing it until, surely, at some point, Zeus will hear our plight?)

Strictly speaking, during the pandemic, through furlough and other mechanisms, the Tories implemented communism for about a year or so. The State paid everyone's wages and profits.

I fear that there's something more fundamental going on economically, as this is not just the UK but a global phenomenon, where the world economy is just constantly getting worse. But with the focus on immediate local concerns, no-one's noticed - like proverbially "boiling the frog" - that there's an overall economic collapse also going on in the background.

More and more people, paying more and more, forever getting less and less and less, over several decades.

Is the economic system itself actually stable? Long term inflation is forever devaluing all currencies all the time everywhere, yet this is accepted as "normal". That's just how it works. We just expect to get a pay rise, to compensate for the fact that our money forever gets more and more worthless, as the money supply forever increases, as the rich elite invent new non-existent money from nowhere - if not explicitly printing it, inventing it through more and more debt everywhere.

The consensus has basically been to essentially ignore it for decades. But it increasingly can't be ignored and nothing is reversing it, so it's continually getting worse. Indeed, it's "normal", so no-one is even contemplating a solution, as it's not even acknowledged as being a problem... despite the roof collapsing above our heads. Just ignore it. Pretend like it ain't happening.

And this is beyond party politics. In that Labour are committed to doing exactly what the Tories are doing economically. The Marxist battle has been irrelevant for decades and it's now just openly non-existent (not, I stress, that I'm a Marxist - though I think he diagnosed the "Robber Baron" problem correctly, I think his proposed solution is fundamentally wrong).

What the fuck is going on? And I don't just mean the finances either. Like, it's not just how the fuck is this happening, it's how the fuck is no-one even asking these questions or pointing out what's very obviously happening here?

There is a massive elephant in the room and no-one's reacting to it at all. Just carefully walking around it. Not looking at it. Must not acknowledge the elephant.

[zip accident]

I've made this observation before, but it is now becoming undeniably obvious.

The thrust of it being that, in the past, with less taxpayers and a lower tax burden, the UK was able to support a vastly more comprehensive set of public services.

There were more local hospitals, more police stations, more ambulance stations, more fire stations.

I remember, in the small town where I came from, there being a central police station in town and then a number of smaller "police houses" in the surrounding areas that compromised the town. There are now no police stations in the town, with it all being deferred centrally to the nearest city.

Similarly, I remember there being a number of smaller local hospitals. Indeed, I was born in one, which specialised in maternity services, which no longer exists. But, again, all the local hospitals have vanished, to be centralised into one "super-hospital" in the nearby city.

One hopes to never have a heart attack, because even if the ambulance appeared instantly - which, of course, is never going to happen these days (and the last time I needed to call an ambulance in an emergency, was told that there was an 8 hour waiting time) - then it's still a good 15 minute drive to this centralised hospital, even with the ambulance using its "blues and twos" to not have to wait in any traffic congestion. Even if the ambulance was there instantly and the roads were all completely empty, it could not race to the nearest A&E faster than 15 minutes. And there are definitely even worse places to be located within the catchment area of this centralised city hospital.

(And while the NHS and police are able to gain the headlines for their struggles, this trend also exists for all public services, even if they do not garner the front page headlines, such as fire stations, public libraries and so forth.)

But I probably do not need to provide any examples. You all have your own, many times over.

The underlying issue, though, is where is all the money going?

In that there are many more taxpayers than in the '50s, paying the largest post-war tax burden ever - vastly more money than ever before is being collected from us - yet public services are on their knees and local councils are going bankrupt, managing vastly fewer local public service assets.

It does not make sense. Like, is there someone who's just eating the money? Because it's not just that taxes go up, it's that what they're paying for is going down as well. The vast chasm of disparity here needs explanation. When the tax burden is orders of magnitude larger than the past - as it's not just that the tax burden is high, it's that there is simply a much bigger population of taxpayers paying it as well - yet the public services delivered by them have become so threadbare, through repeated cuts, that they are all sitting on the verge of collapse.

This is really the primary focus of where the post-war neoliberal consensus is catastrophically failing.

Indeed, the neoliberal / Tory criticism of socialism - that without competitive pressure, it becomes lazy and wasteful and stops innovating because when you're paid by the state, no matter what, then why try harder? - is clearly not solved by whatever it is that privatisation and governments, intent on efficiency and reducing waste, are doing. Austerity has done nothing whatsoever. Because here we are again, requiring "austerity" once more, apparently.

(It's "the definition of madness", right? To be doing the same thing over and over again, yet expecting different results. Even though they've, as yet, not happened even once. But, with religious fervour, let's keep doing it until, surely, at some point, Zeus will hear our plight?)

Strictly speaking, during the pandemic, through furlough and other mechanisms, the Tories implemented communism for about a year or so. The State paid everyone's wages and profits.

I fear that there's something more fundamental going on economically, as this is not just the UK but a global phenomenon, where the world economy is just constantly getting worse. But with the focus on immediate local concerns, no-one's noticed - like proverbially "boiling the frog" - that there's an overall economic collapse also going on in the background.

More and more people, paying more and more, forever getting less and less and less, over several decades.

Is the economic system itself actually stable? Long term inflation is forever devaluing all currencies all the time everywhere, yet this is accepted as "normal". That's just how it works. We just expect to get a pay rise, to compensate for the fact that our money forever gets more and more worthless, as the money supply forever increases, as the rich elite invent new non-existent money from nowhere - if not explicitly printing it, inventing it through more and more debt everywhere.

The consensus has basically been to essentially ignore it for decades. But it increasingly can't be ignored and nothing is reversing it, so it's continually getting worse. Indeed, it's "normal", so no-one is even contemplating a solution, as it's not even acknowledged as being a problem... despite the roof collapsing above our heads. Just ignore it. Pretend like it ain't happening.

And this is beyond party politics. In that Labour are committed to doing exactly what the Tories are doing economically. The Marxist battle has been irrelevant for decades and it's now just openly non-existent (not, I stress, that I'm a Marxist - though I think he diagnosed the "Robber Baron" problem correctly, I think his proposed solution is fundamentally wrong).

What the fuck is going on? And I don't just mean the finances either. Like, it's not just how the fuck is this happening, it's how the fuck is no-one even asking these questions or pointing out what's very obviously happening here?

There is a massive elephant in the room and no-one's reacting to it at all. Just carefully walking around it. Not looking at it. Must not acknowledge the elephant.

I think in this case we can blame the Beatles.

The indecies probably needed to be index linked to somewhere above the then limits, but at the top level 19 for tax, 1 for the taxpayer is probably about right.

There's also the tory obsession which you observe with axing govenance, which has particularly castrated the monopolies and mergers commission. And the revolutionaries love it, because to them, anything that leads to revolution, such as out of control twits at the top having too much money, is a good thing, because blood and guts in the street is the main part of the fun of a revolution, and dang the poor folk dying in the crossfire because they aren't true revolutionaries, because real poor folk don't like the blood and guts.

I do wonder whether the USA is going to overthrow the new king of Haiti.

[KlaxonCow]

There's also the tory obsession which you observe with axing govenance, which has particularly castrated the monopolies and mergers commission. And the revolutionaries love it, because to them, anything that leads to revolution, such as out of control twits at the top having too much money, is a good thing, because blood and guts in the street is the main part of the fun of a revolution, and dang the poor folk dying in the crossfire because they aren't true revolutionaries, because real poor folk don't like the blood and guts.

Yes, the religious zealotry of ideologues hardly helps the situation.

For both causing this "definition of madness" in the first place, to believe the ideology that austerity and cutting services is a good thing to be pursued at all costs, with no regard to ever bothering to observe the reality that, like, it doesn't actually work.

Or the ideological beliefs that there's no requirement for philanthropy, as Adam Smith absolutely did make a moral imperative (it's been lost in all the distortions since, but Adam Smith was a moral philosopher and "the Wealth of Nations" uses a broader definition of the word "wealth" that goes beyond money and refers to its health and wealth of well-being, wealth of spirit and so forth), recommending that explicit philanthropy could be "the rising tide that raises all ships". Something that many a foundation stone around the UK testifies to, as we find the names of early industrialists, following Smith's recommendations, contributing public libraries and parks and other services to their local communities (indeed, before the state stepped in to run all public services, it was Smith's philanthropic recommendation here that were the original 'public services').

Smith's logic is actually really bloody simple. I'm rich. I build a factory. I employ the local people in my factory. I get yet more rich from selling my factory's products.

I then take a chunk of the profits I've just accrued to purchase a building in the local community and give my workers a public library. This philanthropy can be seen as "enlightened self-interest". I'm not just being nice to the townsfolk for the sake of being nice to them. As they use this public library, they learn. They become more knowledgeable and exercising that knowledge, they become more skilled. Basically, this is the original version of "staff training", although more generic in just educating them all-around, rather than only being a 2 day course on "how to lift heavy boxes safely" only.

And then I take some of my profits, and I give the townsfolk a public park. They can relax there - de-stressing them - and play sports there - improving their physical health - and, yes, you can see the "enlightened self-interest" here already. I'm ensuring that, being in better health and spirits, they take less sick days.

Indeed, though such thinking was a bit beyond those early industrialists - so we don't see many actual examples of this - I might consider giving the community a local hospital / clinic / pharmacy, so that their medical needs are covered, to take those sick days off right down to the minimum.

And the enlightened self-interest overall here is that I have the most skilled, the most knowledgeable, the least sick, the least stressed workforce around. I'm giving them all the tools they need to reach maximum productivity, to help innovate new and better products and manufacturing methods, etc. - this workforce is working with me, not for me, to make all of us loads of money.

Including, yes, making me richer again. This is "enlightened self-interest", after all, not just being nice to make people like me (though, you know, it does involve me being nice, so they might well think I'm a fucking excellent employer... and there I've also bought myself loyalty, which'll probably also mean that these employees will work hard even outside of their official working hours, off their own back, to make things work because they "believe in the mission").

Now that I'm even more rich, I can afford to cream off some more of that profits and let's invest some more in the local community. Let's buy some computers for the public library and expand its catalogue. Let's add on a swimming pool and tennis courts to that local park. Let's give the local clinic better medical equipment. And you know what? I'm going to build you guys a local community centre, so you can socialise and we can have evening classes there. Let some of my workers enjoy a bit of "life long learning", right?

And this was really what Smith was advocating. If you read him in the flesh, rather than take the distortions that have happened since, he's advocating for this "a rising ride raises all ships". That's actually how he defined capitalism and why, by his original formulation, it could be a force for good to pursue profit. But it was conditional on some of that profit being re-invested back into the local community, to just make everything better, so you make more money, so you can make these even better again, so you make more money.

But somewhere along the way, someone invented "trickle down economics". The notion here was that you did not need to explicitly be philanthropic. I did not need to directly invest in building the community a public library. No, no. When I pursue my own interests in buying an expensive mansion, then I'm implicitly paying builders to build this mansion for me. My money is going to the local community and local businesses when I spent it.

Where Smith was saying "take water from the top and pump it in, down at the bottom, to create a rising tide that raises all ships", the new "trickle down economics" would let the water just naturally trickle down to the bottom. Unenlightened self-interest was now okay. Just being a greedy fuck. It'll all magically and implicitly fall into place for you.

Thing is, this is bollocks. Well, no, to be absolutely fair, I don't doubt that "trickle down" is a real thing and it does implicitly happen. Logic suggests that, yes, when I buy a fast car or expensive mansion, I am implicitly giving my riches to car factory workers and the builders I hired.

But the idea that it is sufficient is complete bollocks. Indeed, we have the measure that proves it isn't. The gap between rich and poor widens, at an ever more rapid pace. If "trickle down" was sufficient then that couldn't be happening. Because that's what "trickle down" is supposed to be solving, and it's not only not being solved, shit is getting worse and worse, at an ever-more-rapid pace.

But, yes, this is the religious zealotry of ideology. The "neoliberal" religion has "trickle down" amongst its doctrines and, thus, it is blasphemous to question it. Even when, as I say, the measure of the gap between rich and poor directly measures whether it works, and it clearly fucking doesn't. Plain as day, it's not working.

And this gives us that "definition of madness". They believe in austerity. It doesn't work. But we believe in austerity, so it must work - let's do it some more, let's do it harder. It still doesn't work. But my god cannot foresake me, I must not be being enough of a greedy cunt for my god Mammon - let's do it even more and even harder. Still doesn't work.

The problem being that the religious nature of the ideological belief blinds them to an obvious truth. Your beliefs are wrong. They don't actually work.

(Or, in complete fairness, maybe your beliefs are not 100% bullshit - as mentioned, I don't doubt that "trickle down" does actually happen, it's just wholly inadequate to be the sole mechanism to close the gap between rich and poor, because it's clearly not fucking working - but you're blinded by your zealotry to question it. To be honest about which bits work and which bits don't. To revise your beliefs.)

As Marx had it - that is, Groucho rather than Karl - "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member". Don't join clubs or groups. Avoid "group think". It's bad for your health and pocket book.

This is where, I believe, the scientific method should step in. It stops things getting "religious". Because it demands evidence, mechanism and verification. I know "trickle down" is insufficient bollocks, because the actual numbers tell me so. I'll listen to any ideology - which is, you know, why I bothered to find out what Adam Smith actually said in the original and it absolutely is not remotely what's put forward as "capitalism" today - but then we put it to the test. See which bits work and which bits don't.

Hold no belief precious. If it doesn't work, then it doesn't work. Be always open to revision.

If someone asks you a question and you don't know the answer, then say "I don't know". The worst plague on humanity is our insistence to give an answer, just to give an answer. Not liking uncertainty, to create a false certainty - a religion. That promises a paradise that, no, it can't achieve because it's based on complete bollocks and nice-sounding lies.

Learn to be comfortable in the space of not knowing. Indeed, enjoy the act of finding out. Be pleased, in that truly scientific way, of discovering you were wrong, because of the new fields of knowledge that await you to be discovered.

But, yeah, I like your assessment. One side is being blindly "religious" and the other side is perversely craving disaster to insert their "religion" in the midst of a collapsed world. Like, praying for Armageddon, so that you can insert your silly worship-the-nuclear-bomb religion in the ensuing Fallout.

There must surely be a mechanism that can prevent this silly "cycle of nonsense" in humanity from ever repeating. I wonder what it might be.

[Orava]

It is about culture, you go to church in Christmas time, you get your children baptised as it is more of an opportunity to introduce them to relatives than any religious significance. In the army you take the oath to God and Fatherland. At age 15 or so you send your children to confirmation camps, two weeks in the forest reading the Bible.

And yes I am a confirmed protestant, I did find the ceremony of confirmation very funny, given wine and bread and being dressed in klan-like white wear.

[Dio]

In that there are many more taxpayers than in the '50s, paying the largest post-war tax burden ever - vastly more money than ever before is being collected from us - yet public services are on their knees and local councils are going bankrupt, managing vastly fewer local public service assets.

In a few obvious places the money goes less far than it used to, sometimes a very great deal less far. The health and care system (the latter the responsibility of local councils) is the most obvious place to see this; the great improvements in public health and the reduced number of people working in industrial jobs that literally killed you young (mining, most obviously, but many others - go look at the census data for the Rhondda, there are basically no adult males over the age of 60). Costs in that system have risen dramatically with increased expectation of care standards and the vastly greater variety and costs of medicinal drugs.

For the rest, I strongly suspect housing costs are a major factor. Housing was a relatively small percentage of family budgets before the 80s, with the enormous council house pool and the hard limits on mortgage numbers keeping house prices and rents low. Against that it should be noted that pre-70s working-class housing stock was of poor quality, including many slums that were notoriously awful to live in, and that occupation tended to be quite high.

And those increased costs are I suspect one of the primary drivers of the substantial increases in wages over time.

Similar effects apply to all land and buildings, not just housing (industrial and commercial workplaces are orders of magnitude better and safer places to be now than then).

So I'd say the starting point is "Anything that requires either people or buildings costs a lot more now than it used to." But I'm sure there must be a lot of books written on this.

[snaff]

Is the economic system itself actually stable? Long term inflation is forever devaluing all currencies all the time everywhere, yet this is accepted as "normal". That's just how it works. We just expect to get a pay rise, to compensate for the fact that our money forever gets more and more worthless, as the money supply forever increases, as the rich elite invent new non-existent money from nowhere - if not explicitly printing it, inventing it through more and more debt everywhere.

The consensus has basically been to essentially ignore it for decades. But it increasingly can't be ignored and nothing is reversing it, so it's continually getting worse. Indeed, it's "normal", so no-one is even contemplating a solution, as it's not even acknowledged as being a problem... despite the roof collapsing above our heads. Just ignore it. Pretend like it ain't happening.

Western civilisation was built upon the gold standard which permitted economic progress for centuries until it was dropped to allow governments to appropriate resources for their world wars. From the removal of the last gold link to the US dollar in 1971 economic inequality has dramatically widened as all productivity gains accrue to the establishment through the mechanisms you describe.

A return to the gold standard would not be possible in modern times as technology permits too much collusion and control between the banks and governments that would be responsible for backing the currency, and wholesale undermining of the standard would simply repeat to serve their narrow interests.

This is why a completely inflation-proof currency was created in the form of Bitcoin. With nobody in control its supply is absolutely fixed at 21 million units. The rules of Bitcoin are like the rules of chess, completely distributed among players and nobody can change it without their move being declared invalid by their peers. Because the world cannot change Bitcoin, Bitcoin will change the world.

As money has become debased, non-monetary assets such as housing have become monetised. Now the rich must own multiple houses to preserve their wealth, thus inflating prices meaning the poor can afford none. As Bitcoin becomes the store of wealth that money should be it is demonetising the things we need to live and housing will return to being simple a thing to live in that can be bought on a fair wage. The stock market will return to being a vehicle for business investment instead of a casino.

Without inflation the elite will be starved of their funding for control and perpetual wars, and their institutions will collapse. They will not want to go quietly but their easy money has conditioned them to extreme weakness with paper-thin skills and ideologies. The global majority has already detached from the worst of them, but we will feel the upheaval most in the West.

[tufty]

As Bitcoin becomes the store of wealth that money should be

https://www.investopedia.com/tech/how-m ... y-bitcoin/

The combined value of bitcoin … 0.11% of the world's money … about 3.4% of the value of all above-ground gold reserves.

It's currently much higher in price, but it's still a fraction of a percent of the global money supply. Even at today's inflated price its total value is only around 30 times what Elon Musk pissed away on buying twitter. But about 20% of that is lost forever, and overall, about 70% or so of bitcoin is simply not traded. So there's maybe - slightly more than Elon Musk's "on paper" personal wealth of bitcoin being traded. It's penny-ante stuff for daytrading twats.

As you started off talking about the "gold standard", we should perhaps compare the volatility and liquidity of the markets in bitcoin and gold. The gold markets have extremely high liquidity, it requires a massive number of trades per percentage change of price, and this is in large part why investing in the gold markets is a common hedge strategy. The same cannot be said of bitcoin. Volatility is almost the flipside of this, in that gold's pricing is extremely stable compared to bitcoin.

Bitcoin is almost exactly the opposite of the "gold standard", and considering it as a "store of wealth" is laughable.

[PFVA]

Apparently mandatory military service may come back in some EU countries including France.

I think that a United European military force has always been talked about. Who used to oppose that was the US.

Interesting times.

I'm old enough to remember mandatory military service.

[Orava]

The current UK political culture reminds me of Mr Hitlers words:

"Tell a lie loud enough and long enough and people will believe it."

[PFVA]

Another fraud being investigated: a businessman receiving about 40 million €uros in EU funding by the creation of some extra fake companies.

In the meantime it seems the noisy far right will be getting 2 of the 4 reps the immigrants living abroad elect.
They based their campaign on fighting the widespread corruption.
I personally don't believe they will do it but the promise made their popularity increase.

[zip accident]

There's a vote on May 2nd for councillors and a police chief, but this time we need photo id with us at the pollling station, and that's going to apply to every future poll too (until they change it again).

[KlaxonCow]

Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was in the cabinet at the time, just casually admitting that photo ID was a Tory attempt to gerrymander the vote.



Imagine being so thoroughly corrupt - and getting away with it for so long - that you actually start forgetting that you're not supposed to openly admit to criminal activity in public.

[KlaxonCow]

Standard political bullshit.

Hype up a problem, sell yourself as the answer to that problem to the electorate so you win the election, then don't actually fix the problem - in fact, make it worse - because then you can sell yourself as the answer to that problem again for the next election, seeing as that lie worked so well the first time around.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68626430

Say one thing, do another? The government’s record rise in net migration

Think back to the 2019 election campaign. Quite reasonably, you may not remember every detail of the Conservatives' manifesto - but perhaps you do recall one promise: to reduce immigration.

Think back further, to 2016 and the Brexit referendum. Then there was a promise to "take back control" of the UK immigration system. And since it left the EU in 2020, the UK does have more control.

But the numbers of people who've moved here didn't go down, they went up.
Since the Brexit vote and the Conservatives' victory in 2019, the 12 months to June 2022 saw the fastest population growth since the 1960s. Current projections from the Office for National Statistics put the UK on course for 74 million people by 2036 - six million more than there are today.

You'd be well within your rights to ask how that could be? The answer, according to the ONS, is largely immigration.
[...]
Indeed you'd be forgiven for thinking small boats are a major part of why immigration is up. But they aren't.
[...]
But it's not small boats that are driving an increase in immigration - it's choices made by the government.
[...]
In 2022, [net migration is] estimated to have reached an all-time record of 745,000.

Then, there's the number of visas issued to people relocating to the UK. Last year there were more than 1.4 million.

For context, last year almost 30,000 people arrived by small boat.

I predicted, way back after the vote, that Brexit would prove to be ironic.

That, in fact, the racists would find migration going up, not down.

I predicted why slightly wrongly - as I imagined that, in our self-inflicted Brexit economic self-harm, we'd get so poor that we'd "do a Windrush" and ask the Commonwealth to come over and help bail our arses out of the Brexit economic dumpster fire (mind you, there's still plenty of time for that to happen and further for our economy to turn to shit to warrant it). That it would get so bad, that we actually explicitly invite the migrants to come over, as it's happened many times before in British history to do exactly that.

Even at my most cynical, I didn't think that the Tories would just, you know, directly choose to increase net migration. To not even try. To not even pretend to give a shit. To immediately pull the old political trick I opened with of making out that you're the solution to a problem to win an election, and then not actually attempt to fix that problem - because why would you get rid of the thing that's helping you win votes?

Like, in old school politics, you at least attempted to pretend that you were trying to fix the problem but - oh dear! - try as we might, it's just not working. What a shame, as you'll just have to vote for us again to give us another 5 years to try to fix the problem. Just keep voting for us and I'm sure we'll eventually fix the problem that won us your vote, so that you won't have to vote for us again.

But, nope, just nakedly, they've done nothing. Let it get worse by deliberate policy. In fairness, the racists who think "brown people" are the problem, while AI, robots and computers steal their jobs, are very stupid. There probably is no need to put up a pretence. They won't even notice.

It's insane, though, that the corruption is so brazen and open. But I get it - if no-one actually gives a shit to notice or respond, why bother even hiding it? And, well, they're not. Just say "small boats" a lot and, with utter contempt, they reckon that's enough to trick the riff-raff into voting for their own economic destruction. Sad thing is, so far, they've actually been right on that.

[PFVA]

Regarding immigration, the EU is studying the option of negotiating with some Noth African countries to keep the migrants there in exchange for financial support. It's similar to what already exists with Turkey. For now the agreements would be with Egypt and Tunisia. Greece and Italy are involved fm the European side.