Politics Thread!

[F-ZeroOne]

Is it just remotely possible someone has finally remembered the reset sequence for the current timeline?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c0l9r67drg7t

(Yes I know theres all kinds of ways, once hes finished throwing another hissy fit, he'll be able to get round this but right now I'll take anything I can get).

[KlaxonCow]

Autotune the news reformed just to cover this absurdity:



She's the Attorney General and this is about the Epstein files, but she keeps distracting to how well the economy is supposedly doing right now.

Essentially, the message is one of bribery. Look away from the industrial-scale child abuse network for the rich, and the rich will continue to raise the economy (not that any poor people see any share of that at all).

She's protecting paedophiles and laying down their mafia-like deal. Look away and keep quiet, let the abuse keep happening. And, in return, the rich will keep making more money that might, you never know, "trickle down" to the likes of you and me. All you have to do is sell our children for money and keep quiet about it - how much are you willing to sell your children for?

This is beyond insanity. But I guess the rich are just so used to being able to bribe people to look away, they don't realise that you can't get away with such bribery in the public eye on the scale of the entire planet.

Because this is the thing that'll never be addressed: All the people who've always known about this, and have hidden it and protected it, in return for being paid off by the rich. You don't have Epstein operate on this scale without anyone knowing. They knew, but money kept mouths shut and paid for shills to protect child abuse.

By the way, the DOW dropped after Bondi's performance.

[KlaxonCow]

Rare footage of a politician actually telling the truth for once.

[zip accident]

I had a thought, are we confusing "earned" and "aquired"?

[F-ZeroOne]

Because its working so well in the US:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... -zia-yusuf

Just spitballing some figures, lets say five flights a day with each aircraft having the capacity to take 200 people. So 200 x 5 = 1,000 people, 7 days a week, for about 30 weeks a year, assuming the operation is running continuously. Of course, if you're using larger capacity aircraft that changes the figures somewhat. Which means, assuming you're not transporting everyone in one go, you're going to need somewhere to house around 7,000 people for at least a period of time, in a continuous cycle. Just to put that in perspective, thats roughly the population of size my home town, a smallish semi-rural town, was at in the early 1980s. I'm sure the type of people who protested against HS2 will be delighted at having such a facility, or facilities, on their doorstep. None of this is technically logistically impossible, but to quote a certain video-game character: "Were it so easy." (we'll put aside the potential trouble this will cause among communities being targeted, can't wait for the first NHS nurse to be shot in the back by the BritICE Empire).

I honestly think that if this policy becomes better known, Reform may have just torpedoed their general election chances (the locals, I suspect, are going to be a protest vote).

[KlaxonCow]

Indeed, previously in this thread, I did similar maths in the opposite direction.

If a couple of dozen people are coming over in small boats every single day, then that's 8,760 people a year. So it would take 114 years for a million people to "invade" the UK by small boats at that rate. Over a fucking century.

(This was in response to the suggestion that the UK would be invaded by 400 million people. Which, to be clear, is the populations of the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain all added together. So, you know, at that rate, it would take over 45,000 years. Which is beyond absurd to even suggest, I felt.)

And, of course, that's only looking at the flow in one direction. There's people emigrating out of the UK too, to subtract from the incoming.

But yet we're to believe that this tiny trickle of "small boat" immigrants has greater economic impact - on housing costs and public services - than billionaire hedge funds buying up all the land and property as "investments", and decades of government de-funding of the NHS under "austerity" (culminating in the Reform policy that they would shut down the NHS in favour of an American-style private health insurance scheme - yes, official Reform policy to opt for the known worst and most-bankrupting system on planet Earth).

Seen in perspective, it's quite absurd. As they expect you to believe that the greater economic impact on rising housing costs is the feather-weight addition on demand of immigrants, compared to hedge funds directly buying up land and property - to the tune that some boroughs of London have 20-25% empty residential buildings. Which, again, is absurd for one of the most populated cities on the planet.

This is like coming home to find that your wall has been knocked down. Now, I wonder, is it all these rich white men with sledgehammers who've been bashing the shit out of my wall for years upon years? Or is it a very few "brown people" who've leaned against the wall once or twice?

And we're supposed to buy the narrative that it was the brown people who knocked down the wall. Just don't look over there at the rich white people with the sledgehammers and JCBs, wearing hard hats, who've been hammering the shit out of your wall for decades. No, no. These people are brown and come from other countries where they speak different languages. So it must have something to do with them, as the unknown is scary and confusing to me.

Yes, adding a few extra brown people to the tens of millions of us who live in the UK - I repeat, TENS OF MILLIONS of us - is the fatal blow that causes housing costs to explode and public services to collapse. Not, you know, all the rich people buying up properties as investments, and the constant cuts to public services, under both governments, which were sometimes labelled "austerity" but they also happily happened under Blair's Labour too.

It's insultingly absurd that they expect us to buy the narrative that just adding more people broke everything, when we've been watching them actively breaking shit - directly, with sledgehammers - right in front of our faces for decades.

The brown people next door have as little economic and political power as you do, if not even less.

The folks fucking up the wider economy, as they rig the game for themselves, are the billionaires and the politicians. They very directly control all the money, and the economy and employment - and the economic and employment policies - and whether they can be bothered to pay any taxes to fund or de-fund public services.

I don't know how to make this any more obvious and self-evident. The economy is shit because of the folks with all the money controlling the economy, not the folks without any money who can't control anything.

Your life is worse, to the degree that it has become worse, due to billionaires. Not brown people.

[KlaxonCow]

No, seriously, the Democrats have a President in waiting right here.



Please don't fuck about with Kamala Harris again. Just go with this guy, and Harris can be the VP, if you insist.

He's saying all the right things, focusing on what matters, with a tremendous amount of "rizz". He's like a white Obama, basically.

[tufty]

Never underestimate the Democrats' ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. If he's not pro-big business, pro-Israel, pro status quo, and in the pocket of the MIC, he isn't getting anywhere near the lead. They'd rather have an unconstitutional third Trump presidency than allow anything close to progressive to happen

[F-ZeroOne]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... al-economy

Its always the interactive parts, isn't it? Also, "Sexual Economy" name of my next band etc.

[snaff]

Indeed, previously in this thread, I did similar maths in the opposite direction.

If a couple of dozen people are coming over in small boats every single day, then that's 8,760 people a year. So it would take 114 years for a million people to "invade" the UK by small boats at that rate. Over a fucking century.

(This was in response to the suggestion that the UK would be invaded by 400 million people. Which, to be clear, is the populations of the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain all added together. So, you know, at that rate, it would take over 45,000 years. Which is beyond absurd to even suggest, I felt.)

And, of course, that's only looking at the flow in one direction. There's people emigrating out of the UK too, to subtract from the incoming.

But yet we're to believe that this tiny trickle of "small boat" immigrants has greater economic impact - on housing costs and public services - than billionaire hedge funds buying up all the land and property as "investments", and decades of government de-funding of the NHS under "austerity" (culminating in the Reform policy that they would shut down the NHS in favour of an American-style private health insurance scheme - yes, official Reform policy to opt for the known worst and most-bankrupting system on planet Earth).

Seen in perspective, it's quite absurd. As they expect you to believe that the greater economic impact on rising housing costs is the feather-weight addition on demand of immigrants, compared to hedge funds directly buying up land and property - to the tune that some boroughs of London have 20-25% empty residential buildings. Which, again, is absurd for one of the most populated cities on the planet.

This is like coming home to find that your wall has been knocked down. Now, I wonder, is it all these rich white men with sledgehammers who've been bashing the shit out of my wall for years upon years? Or is it a very few "brown people" who've leaned against the wall once or twice?

And we're supposed to buy the narrative that it was the brown people who knocked down the wall. Just don't look over there at the rich white people with the sledgehammers and JCBs, wearing hard hats, who've been hammering the shit out of your wall for decades. No, no. These people are brown and come from other countries where they speak different languages. So it must have something to do with them, as the unknown is scary and confusing to me.

Yes, adding a few extra brown people to the tens of millions of us who live in the UK - I repeat, TENS OF MILLIONS of us - is the fatal blow that causes housing costs to explode and public services to collapse. Not, you know, all the rich people buying up properties as investments, and the constant cuts to public services, under both governments, which were sometimes labelled "austerity" but they also happily happened under Blair's Labour too.

It's insultingly absurd that they expect us to buy the narrative that just adding more people broke everything, when we've been watching them actively breaking shit - directly, with sledgehammers - right in front of our faces for decades.

The brown people next door have as little economic and political power as you do, if not even less.

The folks fucking up the wider economy, as they rig the game for themselves, are the billionaires and the politicians. They very directly control all the money, and the economy and employment - and the economic and employment policies - and whether they can be bothered to pay any taxes to fund or de-fund public services.

I don't know how to make this any more obvious and self-evident. The economy is shit because of the folks with all the money controlling the economy, not the folks without any money who can't control anything.

Your life is worse, to the degree that it has become worse, due to billionaires. Not brown people.

UK annual immigration numbers for the last 3 years:

2023: A peak of 1,469,000 was recorded for the year ending March 2023

2024: 1,299,000 for the year ending June 2024 (revised upward from earlier estimates)

2025: 898,000 for the year ending June 2025 (provisional estimate, reflecting a downward trend)

The net figures:

2023: 906,000 for the year ending June 2023 (the highest recorded net migration in UK history)

2024: 649,000 for the year ending June 2024 (a decline from 2023, attributed to reduced non-EU+ immigration)

2025: 204,000 for the year ending June 2025 (provisional estimate, two-thirds lower than 2024)

The 2025 net decline driven by record numbers of British leaving.

Source ONS https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation ... r=datasets

[Little stoned kiwi]

I live in a country that's had high levels of immigration for a while. It's not the fault of any of them for wanting a better life and are often exploited for it, to at least suppress wages, sustain the housing market, and grow the economy.
Immigration is a symptom, not the problem.

[KlaxonCow]

UK annual immigration numbers for the last 3 years:

2023: A peak of 1,469,000 was recorded for the year ending March 2023

2024: 1,299,000 for the year ending June 2024 (revised upward from earlier estimates)

2025: 898,000 for the year ending June 2025 (provisional estimate, reflecting a downward trend)

The net figures:

2023: 906,000 for the year ending June 2023 (the highest recorded net migration in UK history)

2024: 649,000 for the year ending June 2024 (a decline from 2023, attributed to reduced non-EU+ immigration)

2025: 204,000 for the year ending June 2025 (provisional estimate, two-thirds lower than 2024)

The 2025 net decline driven by record numbers of British leaving.

Source ONS https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation ... r=datasets

You missed the point.

All those people aren't coming over in small boats. I was specific about it being small boat crossings, which is what all the press and Reform are freaking out about.

But this isn't the problem for the reasons I noted. Even two dozen a day - which is a lot of people to squeeze onto a small boat, as "small" is very much the adjective here - will not amount to anything significant.

So, yes, exactly. The immigration problem is not "small boats". The immigration problem is folks coming in legitimately - tourist or educational visas - and then overstaying. And the biggest demographic that does that? It's actually Americans and Australians. Coming over on study visas and then never going home again.

But, ah, we don't bother talking about that, because those people are white.

This is the same as in America, where Trump does his performative racism, talking about "building a wall" and making Mexico pay for it. Except, exactly the same, the amount of people actually trying to sneak into America over the border like that is a tiny trickle, just like the small boat crossings. The overwhelming majority of immigration into America from places like Mexico is legitimate tourist or educational visas, and then they simply never go home.

But the point still holds. The economy is not controlled by an extra million adding to a population of already 70-odd million. Sure, it doesn't help demand.

But the real problem is billionaires investing in hedge funds that buy up land and property as investments. There are some boroughs of London where 20-25% of residences are empty. Yes, empty in the heart of the capital city. Despite this demand.

They're also responsible for a lot of our boarded up high streets. I knew shop keepers in my local high street who had to close their stores, and they directly told me that it was not a lack of footfall - it was not the competition with "online", which is usually blamed (as they had websites, "click and collect" and home deliveries too) - it was because London-based hedge funds had bought up all the properties on the high street.

That's who they were paying rents to, and those rents kept creeping up all the time. Even when the economy was down the toilet bowl, and any decent landlord would appreciate that you can't raise rents, they just raised rents. It was ever-rising rents - and business rates from the government weren't great either - that killed off these local high street shops. I had that straight from the horse's mouth, as I knew these people and they told me directly.

What killed them off was rents. And the grand problem is that if you're buying up properties as an investment, what you can't have is the value of your investment fall. So, for these "landlords", it's better for them to maintain the value and leave the property empty - lose out on rent income - than it is to lower the rents to get renters in. They won't lower rents to get tenants in, as that undermines the valuation of their investment properties. They're letting the high streets die to protect the value of their property portfolios, and most UK high streets have been bought up by these hedge funds.

I also know some other shop keepers who're different. They own their own properties because these are your more traditional "corner shops", which were houses converted to be shops. One is an actual traditional corner shop, and another is a local computer shop that bought a corner shop (used to be a chippy, I believe, many decades back) and converted it. These guys are doing okay and are able to survive through economic downturns, because they don't have rent. They're also "off the radar" for being bought up by London hedge funds, as they're not on the main high street, but on streets branching off from the high street. You only see their locations as valuable on the ground, but not on a map.

This is the true cause of the housing cost crisis. Billionaires making investments no longer bother with commodities like gold - it's saturated - but they invest and trade in property. Because the thing with land and property is - as the old joke has it - "they don't make land anymore". It's a constrained resource, so it's a thing where the value can only really go up, as demand rises. But it's also better than gold, in that property can be rented out for additional income, on top of the property's intrinsic value as well. It's an investment where you can "double dip". You can make rental income AND the property itself always remains yours to sell off later - and values only rise, because properties are being bought up everywhere as investments, while demand for housing rises and no-one's building enough new houses. It's the perfect storm.

This is directly the reason why housing costs have skyrocketed to unaffordability for most everyone. And the investment landlords are stoked, because you own nothing and must keep paying rent forever.

And, bizarrely, governments even talk and act like rising house prices and rents are a good thing. You see it on those middle class "property" TV shows, where they talk about the value of your house rising being a good thing. Except that this only applies to people who own multiple homes. If you only own one home, then its sale value really is completely irrelevant, as you're living in it. Yes, IF you sold your house then you might make a mint selling it, but then you have nowhere to live, so you've got to buy a house to live in - and, of course, that'll cost you the same mint you just made selling your home.

It's a trapped asset. You can't do fuck all with it, however much equity is contained within it, because you need somewhere to live. There's no point selling it, because you still need a house to live in and the cost of those will cancel out what you just made selling your old home.

Now, if you're an investment landlord, on the other hand, this is a glorious paradise. Because you can buy and sell houses to make a profit, enjoying how the cost of homes and rents keep rising forever, as this is a "commodity" that's separate from the big house you live in. It's useless to the average person that properties keep getting more expensive - because if you're not on the ladder, you're never getting on it. And even if you own your own home, then it's a trapped asset because you need to live somewhere. It's only useful for actual investment landlords who own multiple properties, renting them out.

And the thing is that if you're doing this for investment, then an empty property is often better than lowering rents. You don't want to impact the valuation of the property, so you maintain the high rents - even if the average person can't reasonably afford it - because, really, you're not about the service of providing homes here, you're all about that property being worth more when you sell it than when you bought it. By hook or by crook.

Does the extra demand of immigration help? No, of course not. But that's not the cause of the problem. It's billionaire land and property investments that very directly controlling the market to explode in value - beyond the reach of average people - to make profits out of it all (and the fact that they don't make new land anymore, so it's a constrained resource is absolutely brilliant for rigging the supply vs. demand to make the values forever rise and rise and rise without end).

But the billionaires making these investments also happen to own newspapers and television stations and such, so they point at the brown people: "Look, brown people. They're mysterious and different to you. It must be all their fault". And folks like Elon fund the far right parties that are blaming it all on brown people, so you don't really see who's actually causing the problem.

The point still stands. Who do you think has the bigger economic impact? Billionaire hedge fund property investments that are eating up high streets, and vast swathes of London residential property - yet 20-25% of some boroughs of London have empty buildings (!) - or the addition of hundreds of thousands more people net?

If governments had been building a million social homes every year, since Maggie introduced buying social homes, to replace the stock, then we wouldn't have this problem, as the supply wouldn't have been constrained.

The struggles of the NHS are not really coming from too much demand. Or, at least, it wouldn't be too much demand, if we hadn't seen - for decades - successive governments cut beds, cut doctor and nurses, cut hospitals or consolidate 10 local hospitals into one "super hospital" (but that "super hospital" does not have 10 times the capacity as the hospitals it replaced, so it's a cut in disguise).

Indeed, consider that even if we completely stopped immigration, the problem here is "too many people". So if we stopped foreigners coming in, but then - as someone like Elon promotes and lives by having several dozen children - we just had more babies to raise the population, then that's the same "supply vs. demand" problem. So it has nothing to do with who these people are and where they came from, it's just a general "too many people" problem overall.

Let's look at the numbers:



Oh, look. Once we "took back control" with Brexit, that's when immigration figures shot up through the roof. It was pretty much a "steady state" until the Brexiteers took control of the borders, and then let in unprecedented numbers of immigrants.

So, yes, more recent figures are ridiculously big. But that's not a mistake. Look at the graph. The second the Tories had control over borders and immigration, away from EU policies, then immigration went through the roof.

Why? Because immigrants help keep wages down. The rich elites didn't want to "take back control" of border and immigration policies from the EU because too many immigrants were getting in, but because not enough were getting in to really drive wages down into the ground. They wanted more cheap immigrants and the EU actually got in the way of that profiteering. So they lied to racists, won the Brexit vote, then gained control and you can directly see, from the graph, that the instant they got control, numbers skyrocketed upwards. Get as many "brown people" in here as possible, so wages collapse.

They tricked the turkeys into voting for Christmas. They scare them with pictures of "small boat crossings" which do appear dramatic, but actually amount to nothing in the grand scheme of the problem - just as "build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" is great drama. But the actual immigrants are not scaling fences and walls, they're just flying in on planes, in the legitimate way with visas, then never going home again.

It's all a racist pantomime to trick you into blaming the wrong people for your economic woes. The money system is designed to be zero sum, so if these billionaires are sucking up billions and billions all the time, it's got to be coming from somewhere and it's draining out money from the overall system, so we all have to choose between food and heating. Yet all the energy companies during the "cost of living crisis"? Posting record profits. Never had it so good. Biggest numbers ever.



There's only ever been one war. The class war. It's dressed in different disguises, but it's always the economy, stupid.

[zip accident]

UK annual immigration numbers for the last 3 years:

2023: A peak of 1,469,000 was recorded for the year ending March 2023

2024: 1,299,000 for the year ending June 2024 (revised upward from earlier estimates)

2025: 898,000 for the year ending June 2025 (provisional estimate, reflecting a downward trend)

The net figures:

2023: 906,000 for the year ending June 2023 (the highest recorded net migration in UK history)

2024: 649,000 for the year ending June 2024 (a decline from 2023, attributed to reduced non-EU+ immigration)

2025: 204,000 for the year ending June 2025 (provisional estimate, two-thirds lower than 2024)

The 2025 net decline driven by record numbers of British leaving.

Source ONS https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation ... r=datasets

You missed the point.

All those people aren't coming over in small boats. I was specific about it being small boat crossings, which is what all the press and Reform are freaking out about.

But this isn't the problem for the reasons I noted. Even two dozen a day - which is a lot of people to squeeze onto a small boat, as "small" is very much the adjective here - will not amount to anything significant.

So, yes, exactly. The immigration problem is not "small boats". The immigration problem is folks coming in legitimately - tourist or educational visas - and then overstaying. And the biggest demographic that does that? It's actually Americans and Australians. Coming over on study visas and then never going home again.

But, ah, we don't bother talking about that, because those people are white.

This is the same as in America, where Trump does his performative racism, talking about "building a wall" and making Mexico pay for it. Except, exactly the same, the amount of people actually trying to sneak into America over the border like that is a tiny trickle, just like the small boat crossings. The overwhelming majority of immigration into America from places like Mexico is legitimate tourist or educational visas, and then they simply never go home.

But the point still holds. The economy is not controlled by an extra million adding to a population of already 70-odd million. Sure, it doesn't help demand.

But the real problem is billionaires investing in hedge funds that buy up land and property as investments. There are some boroughs of London where 20-25% of residences are empty. Yes, empty in the heart of the capital city. Despite this demand.

They're also responsible for a lot of our boarded up high streets. I knew shop keepers in my local high street who had to close their stores, and they directly told me that it was not a lack of footfall - it was not the competition with "online", which is usually blamed (as they had websites, "click and collect" and home deliveries too) - it was because London-based hedge funds had bought up all the properties on the high street.

That's who they were paying rents to, and those rents kept creeping up all the time. Even when the economy was down the toilet bowl, and any decent landlord would appreciate that you can't raise rents, they just raised rents. It was ever-rising rents - and business rates from the government weren't great either - that killed off these local high street shops. I had that straight from the horse's mouth, as I knew these people and they told me directly.

What killed them off was rents. And the grand problem is that if you're buying up properties as an investment, what you can't have is the value of your investment fall. So, for these "landlords", it's better for them to maintain the value and leave the property empty - lose out on rent income - than it is to lower the rents to get renters in. They won't lower rents to get tenants in, as that undermines the valuation of their investment properties. They're letting the high streets die to protect the value of their property portfolios, and most UK high streets have been bought up by these hedge funds.

I also know some other shop keepers who're different. They own their own properties because these are your more traditional "corner shops", which were houses converted to be shops. One is an actual traditional corner shop, and another is a local computer shop that bought a corner shop (used to be a chippy, I believe, many decades back) and converted it. These guys are doing okay and are able to survive through economic downturns, because they don't have rent. They're also "off the radar" for being bought up by London hedge funds, as they're not on the main high street, but on streets branching off from the high street. You only see their locations as valuable on the ground, but not on a map.

This is the true cause of the housing cost crisis. Billionaires making investments no longer bother with commodities like gold - it's saturated - but they invest and trade in property. Because the thing with land and property is - as the old joke has it - "they don't make land anymore". It's a constrained resource, so it's a thing where the value can only really go up, as demand rises. But it's also better than gold, in that property can be rented out for additional income, on top of the property's intrinsic value as well. It's an investment where you can "double dip". You can make rental income AND the property itself always remains yours to sell off later - and values only rise, because properties are being bought up everywhere as investments, while demand for housing rises and no-one's building enough new houses. It's the perfect storm.

This is directly the reason why housing costs have skyrocketed to unaffordability for most everyone. And the investment landlords are stoked, because you own nothing and must keep paying rent forever.

And, bizarrely, governments even talk and act like rising house prices and rents are a good thing. You see it on those middle class "property" TV shows, where they talk about the value of your house rising being a good thing. Except that this only applies to people who own multiple homes. If you only own one home, then its sale value really is completely irrelevant, as you're living in it. Yes, IF you sold your house then you might make a mint selling it, but then you have nowhere to live, so you've got to buy a house to live in - and, of course, that'll cost you the same mint you just made selling your home.

It's a trapped asset. You can't do fuck all with it, however much equity is contained within it, because you need somewhere to live. There's no point selling it, because you still need a house to live in and the cost of those will cancel out what you just made selling your old home.

Now, if you're an investment landlord, on the other hand, this is a glorious paradise. Because you can buy and sell houses to make a profit, enjoying how the cost of homes and rents keep rising forever, as this is a "commodity" that's separate from the big house you live in. It's useless to the average person that properties keep getting more expensive - because if you're not on the ladder, you're never getting on it. And even if you own your own home, then it's a trapped asset because you need to live somewhere. It's only useful for actual investment landlords who own multiple properties, renting them out.

And the thing is that if you're doing this for investment, then an empty property is often better than lowering rents. You don't want to impact the valuation of the property, so you maintain the high rents - even if the average person can't reasonably afford it - because, really, you're not about the service of providing homes here, you're all about that property being worth more when you sell it than when you bought it. By hook or by crook.

Does the extra demand of immigration help? No, of course not. But that's not the cause of the problem. It's billionaire land and property investments that very directly controlling the market to explode in value - beyond the reach of average people - to make profits out of it all (and the fact that they don't make new land anymore, so it's a constrained resource is absolutely brilliant for rigging the supply vs. demand to make the values forever rise and rise and rise without end).

But the billionaires making these investments also happen to own newspapers and television stations and such, so they point at the brown people: "Look, brown people. They're mysterious and different to you. It must be all their fault". And folks like Elon fund the far right parties that are blaming it all on brown people, so you don't really see who's actually causing the problem.

The point still stands. Who do you think has the bigger economic impact? Billionaire hedge fund property investments that are eating up high streets, and vast swathes of London residential property - yet 20-25% of some boroughs of London have empty buildings (!) - or the addition of hundreds of thousands more people net?

If governments had been building a million social homes every year, since Maggie introduced buying social homes, to replace the stock, then we wouldn't have this problem, as the supply wouldn't have been constrained.

The struggles of the NHS are not really coming from too much demand. Or, at least, it wouldn't be too much demand, if we hadn't seen - for decades - successive governments cut beds, cut doctor and nurses, cut hospitals or consolidate 10 local hospitals into one "super hospital" (but that "super hospital" does not have 10 times the capacity as the hospitals it replaced, so it's a cut in disguise).

Indeed, consider that even if we completely stopped immigration, the problem here is "too many people". So if we stopped foreigners coming in, but then - as someone like Elon promotes and lives by having several dozen children - we just had more babies to raise the population, then that's the same "supply vs. demand" problem. So it has nothing to do with who these people are and where they came from, it's just a general "too many people" problem overall.

Let's look at the numbers:



Oh, look. Once we "took back control" with Brexit, that's when immigration figures shot up through the roof. It was pretty much a "steady state" until the Brexiteers took control of the borders, and then let in unprecedented numbers of immigrants.

So, yes, more recent figures are ridiculously big. But that's not a mistake. Look at the graph. The second the Tories had control over borders and immigration, away from EU policies, then immigration went through the roof.

Why? Because immigrants help keep wages down. The rich elites didn't want to "take back control" of border and immigration policies from the EU because too many immigrants were getting in, but because not enough were getting in to really drive wages down into the ground. They wanted more cheap immigrants and the EU actually got in the way of that profiteering. So they lied to racists, won the Brexit vote, then gained control and you can directly see, from the graph, that the instant they got control, numbers skyrocketed upwards. Get as many "brown people" in here as possible, so wages collapse.

They tricked the turkeys into voting for Christmas. They scare them with pictures of "small boat crossings" which do appear dramatic, but actually amount to nothing in the grand scheme of the problem - just as "build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" is great drama. But the actual immigrants are not scaling fences and walls, they're just flying in on planes, in the legitimate way with visas, then never going home again.

It's all a racist pantomime to trick you into blaming the wrong people for your economic woes. The money system is designed to be zero sum, so if these billionaires are sucking up billions and billions all the time, it's got to be coming from somewhere and it's draining out money from the overall system, so we all have to choose between food and heating. Yet all the energy companies during the "cost of living crisis"? Posting record profits. Never had it so good. Biggest numbers ever.



There's only ever been one war. The class war. It's dressed in different disguises, but it's always the economy, stupid.

I don't think it's class as such. I'm a multi-class person, my father was working class, my mother middle, I don't think class is that relevant.

Trump and Gates et al aren't that posh, they're USAian, and some of our upper class are are poor.

Tax the wealthy for sure.

And it's immigration not the boats that matters.

The immigrants are visible. It doesn't matter whether they are white or black, there are too many, and our deprived are seeing them bypassing those deprived on the path to relative wealth.

Farage campaigns in Jaywick, who else does? If the only ones supporting the deprived are fascists, the deprived will be almost forced to vote fascist.

The NHS ia a marvel (currently underfunded) but a wonder of many splendours.

The Greens have the tax the rich policies, but are way too keen on migrants, while Reform won't tax the rich and want to destroy the NHS. Labour are currently more on target than anybody else, but probably won't tax the rich and probably won't increase benefits which in combination are what is needed to help with deprivation.

The middle income people saying "welcome" to migrants are not the people who will actually be interacting with them, the migrants will be shoved in with the deprived who won't like that a bit.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2136jnjx1o

You're right that it's a failure of housing, but that mainly comes from Thatcher's "right to buy" which as far as I can tell hasn't yet been repealed, and it wouldn't be such a big problem if a million migrants weren't being housed in the "buy to rented" houses that exist.

We (Europe) need to see Trump's USA as a significant potential military threat, as well as Russia, and very much expand our defences.

[tufty]

The immigrants are visible. It doesn't matter whether they are white or black, there are too many, and our deprived are seeing them bypassing those deprived on the path to relative wealth.

No, the deprived are being told they're seeing them bypassing them on the path to relative wealth. That lie is being told to them by the rich, and the ultra rich. Some immigrants do enter on a path to relative wealth, but they are the ones who are bringing skills that are required, skills that the deprived don't have (not through their own fault, of course, the deprived are deprived not only of wealth, but largely also the path to wealth via learning required skills). But the ones who are visible are the ones who come here and live in abject fucking misery.

Typically, we're talking about asylum seekers. They are housed (unless they can financially support themselves), in shared housing and have no choice where they are put. Housing for asylum seekers is fucking horrible, but it's a step up from a cardboard box under a bridge. They aren't allowed to work, so they are given a living allowance. This, again, is not massive. It is /up to/ 49 pounds a week, but the average is under 30 pounds. If they are in catered accommodation, which the majority are, they get a maximum of £8.86 per week. And yes, they get free health care, because it's not good karma to let them die. This can go on for a while, mostly because the asylum system has been gutted. If their claim is granted, though, they're on their tod. Off up the road you go, you can work, you can claim benefits, and you can stay for 5 years unless you're granted IRL. That's your fucking lot. Find your own place to stay, fund it yourself. If your claim is rejected, you get the right to fuck off.

[Harlequin]

I found the refugee-in-England experience depicted in the 2020 film His House, particularly in the first act, surprisingly educational.