Post by notoriousnobbi on May 9, 2024 21:32:38 GMT
Maybe they’ll bite the bullet and have another referendum on EU membership?
What does EU membership have to do with any of this? Our MASSIVE population increase has been happening both while we were members of the EU and while we were not. Indeed, one of the reasons people supposedly voted Brexit was to try and gain some control over our runaway net immigration. Since this didn't happen (basically because nobody in the government, bar one or two exceptions, turned out to have had even the slightest interest in controlling it), why do you think rejoining the EU will make one iota of difference to our net migration? It's certainly not going to give us any more control than we have already!
But I would certainly agree that immigration has become by far the most important issue - no 'probably' about it - and is the root cause of our infrastructure and services straining at the seams, our housing crisis, our low wages and our dreadful productivity growth. And we sleptwalked into this situation for fear of being considered 'insular' or 'racist' if we didn't embrace the idea of mass immigration somehow providing economic benefits by some mysterious means or other.
The difference is that the EU does not like to measure movements within the EU (FoM) by the same metrics as the immigration from outside of the EU, so one could say that one element of the many elements how to obscure the figures is dropped by having left the EU.
The economic benefits by some mysterious means were quite easy to see: Inside their circles Tories don't give a damn about migration figures. They argue that investing in domestic workforce is too expensive as long as the global markets offer cheaper alternatives and using them keeps the wages down. As they serve the "ruling class" the wellbeing of normal people (let alone migrants...) is not relevant to them. They justify their behaviour to themselves by describing the normal British population as undeserving to be invested in as they are (allegedly) "lazy". I'm not making this up, "lazy" is mentioned in "Britannia Unchained".
The illegal part of migration could be tackled by measures against employers of "black market" jobs. But that would mean investing in civil service / police forces that tackles that. And regarding the And it would be against the interests of the employers who want to exploit the migrants. For the LEGAL part of migration I'd like to see a database on working visa with informations about where they are from and in which sectors they do work and how long the visa is. That would be a START for a discussion.
It is also dishonest by some Tories to count international students and their relatives as they are paying much more education fees than Britons and thus help financing the British universities.
What is missing in the discussion completely is that the EU indirectly helps keeping migration figures down with treaties with Tunesia, Lebanon, Egypt, ... (There are only few routes directly to Britain that don't touch the EU.)