UK Politics

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So ends the Keirbot’s immigration week: literally everyone hates it. Possibly even him (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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It seems the left dislike Starmer because he's tacking to the right, and the right dislike Starmer because he's not Farage.

Thoughts?

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Starmer, but also Labour as a government as a whole, has really felt like they are trying to do a Tory Best Of / Greatest Hits of the Last Decade tribute.

The Tories have been doing austerity and tending further and further to the right for a while, which seems to have fairly obviously contributed to them losing the election. No idea how anyone looked at that and thought "good idea".

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The narrative keeps being "there's a significant % of the population that's attracted to the populist extreme right and we need to appease them" as if that will make them come back into the fold.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

I think the narrative is "we convinced a bunch of Tories to cross over to us because the actual Tories shat the bed and we think their votes are more valuable/reliable than the twenty something left-leaning radicals who would rather complain about ideological purity than turn up to vote".

I'd like to see some actual polling data for how many Labour voters are defecting directly to Reform.

[–] JasSmith 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Well he has to do something or Reform is guaranteed a win in 2029. Have you seen Labour’s polling? Reform has a 7% lead on Labour. It’s nuts. Immigration is now the most important issue for voters. Above literally everything else. 95% of the country wants immigration lower than it currently is. Prime Ministers can get away with being useless on a LOT of issues, but when 95% of the country agrees on something, giving them the middle finger is a one way ticket to being voted out with no confidence by the weekend. Do you know how hard it is to get 95% of the public to agree on something? I’ve never seen an issue with higher homogeneity on any issue in any democracy in my entire life. Just to be clear, this isn’t an outlier.

It’s clear most people don’t support Reform, but damn near everyone wants lower immigration.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

That’s only because they cancelled the populist ‘left’. Bernie/Corbyn were the compromise.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

None of the changes made much sense. He raised the qualification bracket for jobs coming in from RQF 3 (A-Level) to 6 (Degree Level) but I don't know who would be able to meet the insane threshold of 39k per year for a sponsorship with an RQF 3 job. As for shortening the time period for the graduate visas, doesn't make sense, I don't think that recent graduates are causing much of a problem.

The problem I think most people have on the ground are the people who come in that aren't civilised. They take advantage of systems to get in here, claim benefits, and commit crimes. Making it harder for the people who want to play by the rules isn't going to help that. I think quality of immigrants is better than quantity. It would be better to let in 500,000 immigrants who want to work and contribute to the country and obey the law and eventually assimilate in some sense, versus 10,000 who want to take advantage of everything we offer and leech off of us and lower the quality of life and existing communities.

I think racists are also too stupid to see the difference, either.

The UK is basically already impossible to get into if you don't have high paying specialised work, or the intention to study. The only alternative is to claim to be an asylum seeker... Which wouldn't make any sense if you're coming from France.