Remainers seem utterly unable to grasp the very simple fact that if, in order purely to enrich yourselves, you bring ten million people into the country without building any of the infrastructure – houses, schools, hospitals etc – that are needed to accommodate them, then sooner or later the people whose social assets you are demolishing are going to rebel.
Instead we get a seemingly endless succession of spurious explanations like this.
Exaggeration weakens arguments, usually, but can play to a crowd.
Nonetheless there can be little doubt a failure to grasp the mettle on immigration policy a decade or more ago has played a significant role in the current doom spiral we are riding. However it was not just a few Remainers who failed to grasp what was needed, but many Leavers too. The issue is much more complicated than either side generally communicates or admits. The UK needs immigration. Our birth rate makes it essential and will increasingly so. Immigrants tend to be younger and more productive, if allowed to be. That drives Growth. The question is how it is managed effectively and fairly. Some Remainers were guilty of not properly confronting the issue. It just felt unfair. Many Leavers have been guilty of not moving beyond using the issue as a political weapon to actually an effective balanced policy.
Exaggeration?
“The UK needs immigration. Our birth rate makes it essential”.
UK GDP per capita has fallen dramatically in the years since the Blair government opened the borders.
Governments promote mass immigration because it increases GDP and therefore the tax take. The middle class fetishises it because it pushes up house prices and rents whilst suppressing wages. Not because we ‘need’ it.
1.68 replacement compared to a 2.2 needed for population to remain stable. A declining, and perhaps even more important – aging – population cannot sustain itself. Insufficient tax base, insufficient workers, insufficient carers even – exactly what we confront now in the care sector. Population and immigration management is complicated, and it doesn’t appear to benefit from over-simplification and crude headlines.
Nonetheless a growing irony for many anti-immigration over-simplifiers (some of whom also Brexit supporters albeit not all) is they face an old age dependent on a care sector where they should count themselves lucky if there is sufficient staffing to help them eat, drink and wash. Of course the inevitable ‘fading of our senses’ in old age means we may never fully grasp the consequences.
Or here’s a thought. We could stop paying those of working age who prefer to be paid for not working.
Radical, I know… Hell, probably even “Far Right”. But you never know, it just might work.
Money alone will not get the menial work done nor the children conceived.. for that you need virile/fertile females and fit men: in a word: immigrants! We Irish did it for you for 100 years but now, like you, we couldn’t be ars¤d anymore.
Here’s a radical thought – get the inactive to work and pay carers a decent wage. We don’t need to destroy our society and replace a large fraction of the population to do that. Exaggeration? Well it has already largely happened in London.
They are not living off the taxpayer. And the rents and share dividends arise because they, or at least someone connected or related to them, has worked for it. As for inherited wealth, the alternative is confiscation by a government who will sp@ff it on parasitical benefit scroungers and pointless projects. Why would anyone work hard if they couldn’t leave their money to their children or whoever they wish?
The communist alternatives you suggest have been tried, and always end in failure, and often in the Gulag.
We are talking about state spending on huge levels of economic inactivity. People living off dividends etc are not among those, however envious some may be. Of course a fully socialist society would be far better, as it has always proved everywhere…… Err…
Perhaps you have slight yearning for the Republic of Gilead? Perhaps unfair, but you offer no suggestions as to a ‘pro-natal’ policy nor how this manifests dividend within a reasonable timescale?
If it wasn’t for the 20 million Irish (ectraction) in your midst you’d have no children at all in England! Not even they, now fully Anglocised could be bothered either… Hence the need for fertile immigrants and their willing (to work and breed) menfolk. Get real! D8 the math!
If you use immigration to drive population growth you then need to supply more houses, food, water, energy, sewage treatment, schools & hospitals.
This is agreeable to the providers of houses, food, energy etc.
It is not compatible with conserving the countryside, the wildlife, the environment or even a cohesive nation.
The currently fashionable notion of ‘re-wilding’ could only happen with a falling population.
The mystery of the Conservatives is; what is it that they conserve?
Not the environment, the historical tradition; not a language, a religion or anything much. They’d like to keep an hereditary monarchy, and that’s about it.
The king has to be a direct descendant of George I and it doesn’t matter where everybody else is from.
To build houses you need workers: immigrants! To harvest food you need manual labourers: immigrants. To breed children (you’re unable/unwilling to do it yourselves) you need fertile/virile people: immigrants. We Irish did it for you for 100 years but now we’re all too posh to push (thrust: give birth: work manually) so even in Ireland we have huge numbers of immigrants – generally very welcome as they do menial low paid jobs, produce children and thereby add greatly to our burgeoning economy! Join the dots. Get real..
The very last thing the country needs is immigration. Immigration forces down wages and productivity, it gives the electorate an expectation that they can continue to enjoy levels of prosperity that simply have not been earned, and allows our politicians and elites to avoid facing up to problems that only get worse with delay while at the same time eroding the social cohesion that we need in hard times.
A falling population is not the cataclysm that everyone seems to want it to be.
Falling population is not a cataclysm if its age profile is in balance. If it’s gradually getting older it can present significant challenges.
The thing is immigration, what’s needed, what’s fair etc is a complex public policy issue which requires serious thought.
For or Against is a bit ‘primary school’.
You’re mistaken: the prosperity HAS been earnt: not by the indigenous population (you are correct on that) but by the immigrants! They generate wealth and share only in part. They pay their taxes.. we fat lazy cats enjoy the benefits..
I think you’d be hard pressed to find net migration peer reviewed stats that show 10m in 20 yrs, but granted it will be a number of million.
You distorted the point to suggest the argument was all needed as Carers (although indisputably we are going to need alot more than we have now), but that aside the issue is we also need ‘economically active’ proportion to balance an aging population. We are now unlikely to find the balance through our own birth rate, so it does present us with a real conundrum. A conflict, to link back to the Article, that the Tories are really struggling to square. And in fact many developed countries have exactly the same dilemma. The challenge is who can find the sweetspot.
Please go and lecture in the shanty towns around Calais and Dunkirk. Warn them about the xenophobia and racism that awaits them in hellish England.
Then they will live happily forever in the eternal home of liberte, fraternite, egalite that is la Belle France
In the same 10 year period 2.5 million of your own emigrated for better weather, nicer livestyle, better health care, lower cost of living etc. You call them expats but the technical term for them is IMMIGRANTS..
A good many have settled in Ireland too – all very welcome as they bring their wealth and pensions with them.
Expats is the term for anyone who is living in a country other than the one they were born in. To the country they have settled in, they are immigrants. There isn’t, as leftists tend to imply, a negative connotation to one and a positive connotation to the other.
Demographics! To sustain a large population of nonproductive, expensive geriatrics you need a much larger productive, nursing, carer population to pay for, and handle it all.. Without immigration your old folk will starve, freeze and die of disease for want of care. Euthanasia can also work, with assisted suicide etc. There aren’t many other options I’m afraid.
Regrettably, I would trust the supermarkets’ assessment of the current population level. They were working on provisioning a population of 80 million, five years ago. I would say, that’s enough for an overcrowded island (one of the two most densely populated countries in Europe) with infrastructure an NHS and other services overwhelmed.
‘Essential’ in such a charged topic is a hugely loaded term. The UK has had millions added to its population, overwhelmingly through immigration, during the last 20 years. Are issues of huge demographic and cultural change of no consequence? If we want the world’s population to reduce, as we do or certainly will at some point, then at some point we DON’T want to simply replace the (unborn) ‘native’ population with immigrants. We will have to work longer etc, but it is a choice. Japan notably is an advanced country which believes its culture worth preserving and has not gone down the route of mass immigration of unskilled labour.
The choice is as simple as it is stark: either you English do menial work for low pay and breed new children: or import immigrants who will do both for you! There is no middle ground that I can see. You’re either working or you’re not: you’re either pregnamy or you’re not.
Paul MacDonnell
1 year ago
Wanting to return the higher rate of tax to where it was when Gordon Brown was PM is now officially “hard right” and “radical”. Soon it will be “literally fascist”.
The fact is that the Tory Party spent the 1990s apologizing for its economic succeses of the 1980s. It seems that most of the thinking classes in the UK – including the good professor here – had and continue to have implanted into their mind an entirely false memory of Thatcher and what she was about. To them she was an ideological Cruella de Vil who enjoyed killing puppies for their fur. In truth most of the thinking classes are too young to remember her and so the only explanation is that the memory of Thatcherism was planted in their brains by right-on parents, teachers, and later university professors who repeated to them, respectively, in nursery rhyme, social and relationship studies, and Critical Theory-influenced texts, the TRUTH that Thatcher was EVIL and and her period in office was just as if the Nazis had won WW II. Whereas she was, in fact, a well-founded response to a vicious and semi-criminal public sector trades union culture hell bent on turning the country into the old GDR. Similarly the entire popular culture was a part of this – every comedien, media commentator, and anyone in the arts all publicly hated Thatcherism.
So here we are with these meretricious articles on Unherd posing as nuance that say, in effect: we want corporatism and social democracy which places the state at the centre of ecomomic life regardless of the consequences. You want economic freedom. Presumably you also want child labour, internet pornography, and environmental destruction. We are reasonable and centre ground. You are extreme.
The man at the gate when it crashed open was Michael Portillo. After he lost his seat in Enfield-Southgate he went into shock at the vitriol that was poured onto him from the left – in particular the arty left. He could stand having his political career destroyed. He could not stand being hated by the cultured intelligentsia so he set about engineering a Damascene conversion into a nice old codger who talks about trains. That said, Portillo is still willing to stick to his political guns so far as sound economics is concerned so perhaps I’m being unfair. But he certainly lost his taste for the fight.
The reality is that (to borrow a phrase from William Buckley) Britain would be better governed by the first 500 shoppers entering Lidl in any small town in the UK this Saturday than by the middle-brow former inmates of Oxbridge colleges who, like dancing dads, have inherited institutional power in this country and set about instrumentalising cool things like behavioural insights, neo-Keynsianism, and critical race theory to make us “modern”.
The only hope for the UK is that reality should set about its work.
Portillo said later he only went into politics to be ‘famous’.He is interesting though as i doubt anyone would guess he was a Brexiteer from his continental railway BBC programmes.He was always overrated though.The 2001 Leadership Contest should have been over at the start.Instead his arrogance and complacency allowed IDS to pick up MP votes from him.
j watson
1 year ago
The more Neo-Liberal wing of the Tory Party was constrained until the issue of EU free movement/immigration allowed it to ‘slipstream’ in it’s wake and gain momentum. But it was always a contradiction that would unravel at some point. Those who wished to leave the EU for more obscure sovereignty reasons would have remained a minority without the issue of immigration. There were legit issues about EU mandate/governance but that’s separate discussion. The point is alone they would not have been enough to generate Brexit.
The contradiction was access to cheap labour fuelled so much of British low productivity capitalism whilst the Single Market removed more red tape than it ever imposed. Truss/Kwarteng are correct in diagnosis that UK productivity has to massively jump to replace these benefits but completely wrong in how that may be done and the political optics of their preferred path. France and Germany have many problems, but it should be of much greater intrigue why their productivity ratio is much higher. It’s certainly not because they have more v rich. They’ve less, but they have a stronger ‘middle’. They invest more in education, and in Germany they don’t immediately pauperise those losing their job – social insurance maintains them at higher level of income whilst they access funded retraining and they are given good time to do this. Thre are many other elements worth pondering and learning from. It is something in our cultural arrogance that we seem to be myopic about obvious things we can learn from our near neighbours. We jump too soon to the US form of capitalism forgetting that will never be culturally acceptable in the UK.
To go back to the cause of the wrong path we took 6 years ago – we generally remain ignorant of the clauses that could have been fully applied to limit free movement – advertising all jobs locally first; minimum capital required to enter and stay in UK, and of course disincentives/incentives for employers to not rely so much on cheap labour. It was because the Tory party was conflicted. A chunk of the party didn’t want to change much as drunk on cheap labour whilst the other saw the opportunity to slipstream it’s more radical agenda. The contradiction has not gone away, although it was temporarily boosted by the idiocy of the Corbyn experiment in the Labour party.
Eventually we will find our way back to a more moderate balance including with the EU, because as we are finding there are limits still to what the British public will accept. We remain a nation of moderates, we can be proud of that and all the better for it.
Sadly we are on the brink of a second global financial crash and Great Depression. Maybe then the seemingly moderate Orthodoxy of Balir to Rishi will be exposed as the most criminally reckless immoderate strategy in modern history. Truss and the free marketeers have arrived way too late and – like the deranged rabble Tory party they head – are a total irrelevance. The Debt tsunami created by the 2008 Bank crisis, 900bn QE, the rigged housing and asset bubble, the 400bn madness of furlough and hard lockdown and finally the coup de grace – the neglect of the need for cheap energy caused by mental eco fanaticism – has CRASHED our economy and that of Europe too. Just watch. Rishi and Boris and their ‘whatever it takes’ and net zero philosophy will soon be recognised for what it was; the latest in a succession of magic money tree follies designed to sustain the mirage of wealth – all dependent on ultra low interest rates. When the agony soon comes, Truss will be history. We should point the finger at the real culprits – the multiple guilty reckless and inept political men and women who have driven HMS UK onto the rocks.
Hindsight is a great thing! But you are correct on funny money trees. Somehow, it became believable that wealth could be generated by slight of hand banksters and city gents with no regard for productive capacity, energy generation etc.. The bean counters saw that savings could be made if you let China and India etc do the hard lifting while the aforementioned 3-card trick men could still control everything by controlling the funny money! What a joke.. naked emperors, wizards of Oz and smoke and mirrors!
Thanks j watson. You have brilliantly articulated one of the fundamental contradictions that lie at the heart of Brexit. We did not leave the EU because it was neo-liberal, but rather because it was not neo-liberal enough for the ‘Britannia Unchained’ elements within the Conservative party, who have now come to power piggy-backing on Brexit. These neo-liberal elements aligned with Brexit nationalist sentiments by casting the EU as as a regulatory drag on the free-market, holding back swashbuckling globalist Britannia. However, the philosopher John Gray has recently pointed out that the free-marketeers, if they had been thinking more rationally, would have voted to stay in the biggest and historically most successful free market in the world but have now ended up with very significant trade frictions and a growing current account deficit.
Despite promises that EU funding schemes for science and technology initiatives would be maintained, anyone working in this field can tell you that this hasn’t happened. Investment in innovation has reduced. Levels of immigration are still high, reflecting a lack of investment in local skills and the free-marketeers’ inevitable lean toward a flexible labour market. At elections pre-Brexit, Europe was actually low on the list of the people’s concerns, but the Brexit leadership (which was largely ultra liberal on economics) managed to channel the ire of the non-beneficiaries of globalisation at Europe, conveniently redirecting attention away from deeper underlying structural/educational investment issues that were at the root of low productivity. This was also also masked by by high levels of employment which was often low-wage, insecure and subsidised by in-work benefits. For ex-Remainer Liz Truss, Brexit is now a Trojan horse for a neo-liberal policy agenda, and has allowed her to ‘slipstream’ (great word, thanks j watson) into Downing Street. These contradictions are now unravelling, resurfacing unresolved issues deferred by Brexit..
“ France and Germany have many problems, but it should be of much greater intrigue why their productivity ratio is much higher” Don’t know about Germany but the idea that the French are more productive is a myth that has arisen due to differences in the way they measure productivity.
You make it sound like large scale immigration is a new phenomenon: it isn’t. Ireland has been sending to the UK huge numbers of construction workers, transportation workers and health care workers for generations. And more recently scientists and other graduates..
Now that we’re also to posh to push we don’t so much any more and so you gotta get ’em from somewhere else. It’s the same in Ireland: we have huge numbers of immigrants (+ 55,000 Ukrainians) and we find in a short while they add greatly to our country’s prosperity. Sure we too have difficulties but overall it has proved very positive for us and our economy.
Andrew Horsman
1 year ago
“To begin with, British politics is not facing imminent implosion.”
Not so sure about that. Once people force our politicians to confront searching questions about why excess deaths remain elevated despite “the pandemic” being over, and those questions lead to more questions than answers, the whole thing could unravel very quickly. Everything works, until it doesn’t. The reckoning is coming.
AI rule is what’s coming.. it should be superior to the flawed, outmoded human politician model. Far superior in the case of the UK.. Of course we must have it all signed off by human politicians but that should be a formality most of the time.. except when AI comes up with euthanasia as a solution to care gor the elderly we’ll need to modify the input! ..if we can?
R Wright
1 year ago
A veiled promotion of technocratic rule. No thanks.
Warren Trees
1 year ago
“In relentless pursuit of a low-tax, low-regulation economy,…” What on earth is so horrific about that?
Ask low paid workers suffering work injuries unable to protest: they’ll give you the answer you’re looking for. Ask benefit recipients after they suffer real cuts if you’re still unsure.. if you ask the rich of course they’ll say it’s all jolly fine!
Nick SPEYER
1 year ago
So the author doesn’t like Brexit and doesn’t like the Conservative Party. Fair enough – everyone is entitled to their opinion.
But writing a lengthy piece of completely fictional rubbish (doubtless the author thinks they are clever) to make the their dislike clear is just total idiocy. Zero out of ten, not even ‘one for effort’, as none was made.
The usual remoaner lies – what International agreement has been set aside? Answer – none. The imminent break-up of the Union – how much remoaners would like to see this happen as a ‘punishment’ for Brexit.
The problem with the current Conservative government is that it is not Conservative. MP’s stupidly listen to twitter instead of the people of this country and don’t act to get rid of the vacuous woke lefties who make the BBC and Civil Service a national embarassment.
A budget designed simply to give money to people so that THEY can decide what to spend it on – what shock and horror to the lefty media totally incapable of understanding that people spending is what makes the economy work.
Union exiters would not be “punishing” England for Brexit they would merely be restoring the status quo. Scotland and NI both voted, very sensibly to remain in the EU…
So a hard border between Scotland and the rest of the UK (Scotland’s biggest trading partner by far) would be the status quo? You might also remember that in the Scottish independence referendum it was accepted that had Scotland voted to leave, then it would have been ouside the EU – with an uncertain path to eventually joining it.
You also miss the point that it is remoaners not ‘union exiters’ who want the UK to be ‘punished’ for Brexit.
But you think staying in the EU would have been sensible. Nevermind.
Rob Mcneill-wilson
1 year ago
As a defence of the Eu-philic ideology, the determined thwarting of Brexit and the redistributive tax and spend ideology of the Westminster Consensus, this essay fails completely.
The author doesn’t like change, especially when it conflicts with the failed status quo he agrees with.
…and there was I thinking the Tories had been in government all the those years? Silly me. It was the damn “progressives”.. shocking concept isn’t it? Progressive: who’d want to be progressive? Backwards is the way to go!
Steve Grattan
1 year ago
“The problem here is not a show of allegiance to principle, but the stubborn adherence to principle come what may” “intransigence has become a mark of virtue” …and yet they changed their mind on the 45p tax rate. Sounds to me like they’re listening, they are flexible and they have the courage to change course. Yes courage clearly, since everyone including you is determined to give them no more than a few days to sort out major crises. I’d love to see all you writers, thinkers and journalists deal with any crisis whatsoever and come out with a grand plan that all wouild agree on, that saves people money, and actually works!
..democratic socialism ala the Nordic countries? No good you say? Too much redistribution and high quality services? Too much general satisfaction and not enough for the obscenely rich?
Do they not have any wealthy or poor people in Nordic countries? Is everyone getting the same income, the same standard of living, the same opportunities? I’m all for a fair society but my question remains – where are the lines of redistribution to be drawn and how will you get agreement on the ones you propose? Not cutting the 45p tax band is a nod in the right direction I would suggest, but that’s not what ‘journos’ and the like can get behind. I wonder what their reasons are for that?
Last edited 1 year ago by Steve Grattan
SIMON WOLF
1 year ago
A major reason why the performance of the establishment is so poor is because noone in authority in the UK ever now resigns because of imcompetence.If either Truss or KK had resigned after the 45 p debacle and made a resignation speech hoping that this will set a precedent that might have helped change things but they did not and nothing will change.
Dan Star
1 year ago
We humans always assume we have a clock and we are the clock master. But humans are animals living in a Nature that is not well understood. Some truths: a tax lowers demand for that which is taxed. High progressive tax on income reduces demand for marginal income. That then reduces entrepreneurship. Yes, bills must be paid and sometimes nations must ask the populace to cough it up. The best way to do that is sell bonds. The danger is an unconstrained Central Bank. Let the animals rage.
..you need to add into your mix the fact that money not spent (for the reasons you state) on X is available to spend of Y.. by the government or by industry or the citizen.. The trick is to:
A. see clearly what is required (the end result) +
B. choose the best mechanism to achieve that.
It us clear than, to stimulate growth you need to get those who spend most (of that additional income) on UK produced goods and services. That will NOT come from handouts ir tax cuts for the rich. The rich will squirrel it away off shore or buy new Italian supercars, French yachts or Greek villas or go on 3xotic cruises etc.. none of which will do a thing to stimulate UK growth.
Conversely if you give it to the poorest they will immediately spend it on UK produced food, beer (not French champagne), hairdressers, gyms etc. That spending will repeat upwards through UK retail, wholesale, transportation and manufacturing.
It’s obvious isn’t it? ..but you have to eliminate your antipathy towards the poor in order to be able to think it through properly!
James Kirk
1 year ago
Omelettes and eggs. Only break as many as you need and a 45p tax cut at the wrong moment was an egg too far. So busy crying about egg no 4 they forgot to eat the omelette.
It’s peanuts. Just that the ‘optics’ (as the politicians say) look bad. London is a major financial centre and needs the ‘star’ bankers, or they will go elsewhere. We can all argue whether these bankers deserve the remuneration they get, but that’s the global market – and finance really is global. The whole issue is an irrelevance.
I think you’re forgetting it was the funny money bankers and traders etc who got us (the entire West) into this mess! The credo that production and energy generation are less important than playing financial 3-card tricks with derivatives, futures, shorts and various other slights of hand! We were all conned in 2008 and now again. When will we see this mind-bogglingly expensive sham for what it is? A glabal Ponzi scheme!!
Albireo Double
1 year ago
The Conservatives are now irretrievably controlled by their Centre Left “Progressives”, who I despise beyond measure. This makes things a lot easier for me as I no longer have to bother about whether the party wins or loses. They’re done. What future for a party that can’t deliver policy with an 80 seat majority? Forget it. There’s no coming back from that. Ever.
Assuming some concoction of Labour assumes power, I shall just kick up and enjoy the show while they take the battering. Although comfortably off, I’ve positioned myself so that I don’t have enough in this country to make myself interesting, and therefore vulnerable, to Labour’s taxation.
My drawbridge is up. I recommend the same to anyone else who’s interested. I hope that something worthwhile can arise from the wreckage of the former “Conservative” Party in 12 years or so. But it needs to be new, with a new name, new people, and no trace or taint of what is now.
I’d do it, if I was 10 years younger. It’s not rocket science. Boris’s market is still out there, and it’s plain as a bloody pikestaff what they want. The mystery is why he didn’t give it to them.
You have rather missed my point. I have all the money that I need for the rest of my life. It’s the politics that concerns me. But not very much. As I said, I shall watch labour and the Scots Nationalists make a mess of it all. It won’t damage me.
Liam O'Mahony
1 year ago
Psychology tells us that voters in general prefer politicians to stick to their guns, right or wrong as it shows their “strength” ie more than they appreciate being listened to.
The notion that a politician’s job is to represent their constituents is only partly true. They are elected not mandated. Voters also trust politicians to “do the right thing” based on their morals and integrity as a balance to the voters’ mandate. Ergo constituents are emphatically not 100% responsible for political decisions ultimately or otherwise.
If it were as you suggest it would be a simple matter, (given modern technology) to ask constituents how they the politicians should vote on every issue. This is definitely NOT how Representative Democracy works.
Andrew Boughton
1 year ago
What a superb and subtle piece by Richard Bourke. One merely has to watch the recently aired video of Liz Truss addressing a Lib Dem conference on abolition of the monarchy to see someone rather unhinged in the way Richard herein describes. Almost like an Austin Powers Fembot. I was keen to understand from an interview with Liz published in UnHerd why Dominic Cummins so famously described her as close to barking. No reply to date.
Katy Hibbert
1 year ago
Parliament was summarily and unlawfully prorogued, and suspicion has been cast on various aspects of the judicial system.
Rubbish. Proroguation of Parliament was, and always has been, perfectly lawful. Brenda Hale and her Remoaner cronies made up a law that had not previously existed and retro-fitted it to apply to what Boris’s government was doing. And they did this in order to overturn the largest democratic vote in UK history.
Like all Remoaners, the author misquotes the stuff Gove said about experts. He said people have had enough of experts with three-letter acronyms getting things wrong. Which they do with monotonous regularity. Remember the recession and the flight of bankers to Frankfort?
Student loan forgiveness did not favour Hispanics. It favoured middle class white liberals. As hispanics belong to the poorer part of the population his immigration policies don’t help them either.
“The job of a politician in a democracy is to represent the citizens. [CORRECT] If their political positions change, then his position must also change. [INCORRECT]”.
Instead:
“The job of a politician in a democracy is to represent the citizens. If their political positions change (so that their new changed positions are in conflict with the manifesto on which the relevant politician was elected), then he will be booted out at the next election.”
In a representative democracy, citizens have an opportunity to study a candidate’s manifesto. If they approve of it, they vote for that person. If they don’t approve of it, they vote for someone else, or, they stand for election themselves.
Once they have voted for a candidate, and that candidate is successful, then they have ceded their power to that candidate for the duration of the next parliamentary term. Google the difference between “representative” and “puppet”.
The representative’s job is to be true to his or her manifesto. He or she is not there to be a mere cipher. Blindly agreeing with whatever u-turn your voters come up with mid-term is not representation. If you think your voters have gone rogue, resign or be booted out.
Like many very earnest and perma-outraged Brexiters, you are confusing representative democracy with plebiscite democracy; and you are confusing the role of an MP with that of a puppet. Suggest you read some more Edmund Burke, in particular, his 1774 Speech to the Electors at Bristol at the Conclusion of the Poll.
You need to check out the actual numbers of Hispanics in the USA.. even with African snd Asian votes that wouldn’t elect any President! Maybe they tipped tgd scales but the vast majority of Democratic voters are white.
Richard Bourke wrote, “But this posture is not without irony: [Liz] Truss’s convictions have notoriously fluctuated, forcing her to emphasise the intensity of her conversions.”
The job of a politician in a democracy is to represent the citizens. If their political positions change, then his position must also change.
So, ultimately, the citizens are responsible for the consequences of any policy which the politicians supported and approved.
Take the case of Joseph Biden. He ascended to the presidency of the United States due to primarily the votes of Hispanics and secondarily the votes of Africans and Asians. The 3 demographic groups gave a majority of their votes to Biden.
He then supported policies favored primarily by Hispanics. They include the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of 2021, an executive order to forgive student loans, etc. Notably, the ARPA has a provision that pays off the loans provided by or guaranteed by the United States Department of Agriculture if the farmer can prove that he has non-European ancestry. Specifically, a farmer who has only German ancestry would be denied this financial assistance.
Consequently, Hispanics deserve most of the blame for the inflation caused by these policies and the suffering endured by European-American farmers.
Remainers seem utterly unable to grasp the very simple fact that if, in order purely to enrich yourselves, you bring ten million people into the country without building any of the infrastructure – houses, schools, hospitals etc – that are needed to accommodate them, then sooner or later the people whose social assets you are demolishing are going to rebel.
Instead we get a seemingly endless succession of spurious explanations like this.
Exaggeration weakens arguments, usually, but can play to a crowd.
Nonetheless there can be little doubt a failure to grasp the mettle on immigration policy a decade or more ago has played a significant role in the current doom spiral we are riding. However it was not just a few Remainers who failed to grasp what was needed, but many Leavers too. The issue is much more complicated than either side generally communicates or admits. The UK needs immigration. Our birth rate makes it essential and will increasingly so. Immigrants tend to be younger and more productive, if allowed to be. That drives Growth. The question is how it is managed effectively and fairly. Some Remainers were guilty of not properly confronting the issue. It just felt unfair. Many Leavers have been guilty of not moving beyond using the issue as a political weapon to actually an effective balanced policy.
Exaggeration?
“The UK needs immigration. Our birth rate makes it essential”.
UK GDP per capita has fallen dramatically in the years since the Blair government opened the borders.
Governments promote mass immigration because it increases GDP and therefore the tax take. The middle class fetishises it because it pushes up house prices and rents whilst suppressing wages. Not because we ‘need’ it.
1.68 replacement compared to a 2.2 needed for population to remain stable. A declining, and perhaps even more important – aging – population cannot sustain itself. Insufficient tax base, insufficient workers, insufficient carers even – exactly what we confront now in the care sector. Population and immigration management is complicated, and it doesn’t appear to benefit from over-simplification and crude headlines.
Nonetheless a growing irony for many anti-immigration over-simplifiers (some of whom also Brexit supporters albeit not all) is they face an old age dependent on a care sector where they should count themselves lucky if there is sufficient staffing to help them eat, drink and wash. Of course the inevitable ‘fading of our senses’ in old age means we may never fully grasp the consequences.
The numbers don’t support your view a population increase of 20% ( 10m) has not worked and has hugely damaged the uk services
An argument for an indefinitely increasing population, ad infinitum!
It does increase gdp – but it has reduced gdp per capita . It has overcrowded the uk and made the poor poorer
We need pro natal policies, not immigration.
Because you’d love to give birth
You need both.
Or here’s a thought. We could stop paying those of working age who prefer to be paid for not working.
Radical, I know… Hell, probably even “Far Right”. But you never know, it just might work.
Not a completely potty idea if we include those living off rents, share dividends and inherited wealth.
Money alone will not get the menial work done nor the children conceived.. for that you need virile/fertile females and fit men: in a word: immigrants! We Irish did it for you for 100 years but now, like you, we couldn’t be ars¤d anymore.
Here’s a radical thought – get the inactive to work and pay carers a decent wage. We don’t need to destroy our society and replace a large fraction of the population to do that. Exaggeration? Well it has already largely happened in London.
They are not living off the taxpayer. And the rents and share dividends arise because they, or at least someone connected or related to them, has worked for it. As for inherited wealth, the alternative is confiscation by a government who will sp@ff it on parasitical benefit scroungers and pointless projects. Why would anyone work hard if they couldn’t leave their money to their children or whoever they wish?
The communist alternatives you suggest have been tried, and always end in failure, and often in the Gulag.
We are talking about state spending on huge levels of economic inactivity. People living off dividends etc are not among those, however envious some may be. Of course a fully socialist society would be far better, as it has always proved everywhere…… Err…
Only if they bred children instead: otherwise you’d just save on benefits and stink the place out as their starved, frozen corpses rotted!
Perhaps you have slight yearning for the Republic of Gilead? Perhaps unfair, but you offer no suggestions as to a ‘pro-natal’ policy nor how this manifests dividend within a reasonable timescale?
If it wasn’t for the 20 million Irish (ectraction) in your midst you’d have no children at all in England! Not even they, now fully Anglocised could be bothered either… Hence the need for fertile immigrants and their willing (to work and breed) menfolk. Get real! D8 the math!
Japan hasn’t followed this path.
Pro natal policies? Such as paying each baby producing woman a living wage?
If you use immigration to drive population growth you then need to supply more houses, food, water, energy, sewage treatment, schools & hospitals.
This is agreeable to the providers of houses, food, energy etc.
It is not compatible with conserving the countryside, the wildlife, the environment or even a cohesive nation.
The currently fashionable notion of ‘re-wilding’ could only happen with a falling population.
The mystery of the Conservatives is; what is it that they conserve?
Not the environment, the historical tradition; not a language, a religion or anything much. They’d like to keep an hereditary monarchy, and that’s about it.
The king has to be a direct descendant of George I and it doesn’t matter where everybody else is from.
To build houses you need workers: immigrants! To harvest food you need manual labourers: immigrants. To breed children (you’re unable/unwilling to do it yourselves) you need fertile/virile people: immigrants. We Irish did it for you for 100 years but now we’re all too posh to push (thrust: give birth: work manually) so even in Ireland we have huge numbers of immigrants – generally very welcome as they do menial low paid jobs, produce children and thereby add greatly to our burgeoning economy! Join the dots. Get real..
The very last thing the country needs is immigration. Immigration forces down wages and productivity, it gives the electorate an expectation that they can continue to enjoy levels of prosperity that simply have not been earned, and allows our politicians and elites to avoid facing up to problems that only get worse with delay while at the same time eroding the social cohesion that we need in hard times.
A falling population is not the cataclysm that everyone seems to want it to be.
Falling population is not a cataclysm if its age profile is in balance. If it’s gradually getting older it can present significant challenges.
The thing is immigration, what’s needed, what’s fair etc is a complex public policy issue which requires serious thought.
For or Against is a bit ‘primary school’.
You’re mistaken: the prosperity HAS been earnt: not by the indigenous population (you are correct on that) but by the immigrants! They generate wealth and share only in part. They pay their taxes.. we fat lazy cats enjoy the benefits..
A much overused argument . We did not need an extra 10m people in the last 20 years as carers for the elderly
From what I hear abusers might be a better term
I think you’d be hard pressed to find net migration peer reviewed stats that show 10m in 20 yrs, but granted it will be a number of million.
You distorted the point to suggest the argument was all needed as Carers (although indisputably we are going to need alot more than we have now), but that aside the issue is we also need ‘economically active’ proportion to balance an aging population. We are now unlikely to find the balance through our own birth rate, so it does present us with a real conundrum. A conflict, to link back to the Article, that the Tories are really struggling to square. And in fact many developed countries have exactly the same dilemma. The challenge is who can find the sweetspot.
You need to assimilate immigrants better. Step 1. Lose your xenophobia and racism.
Please go and lecture in the shanty towns around Calais and Dunkirk. Warn them about the xenophobia and racism that awaits them in hellish England.
Then they will live happily forever in the eternal home of liberte, fraternite, egalite that is la Belle France
In the same 10 year period 2.5 million of your own emigrated for better weather, nicer livestyle, better health care, lower cost of living etc. You call them expats but the technical term for them is IMMIGRANTS..
A good many have settled in Ireland too – all very welcome as they bring their wealth and pensions with them.
Expats is the term for anyone who is living in a country other than the one they were born in. To the country they have settled in, they are immigrants. There isn’t, as leftists tend to imply, a negative connotation to one and a positive connotation to the other.
In the time of QE1 England managed very well indeed on a population of 3 million.
Explain why the UK, now with a population of around 60 million, “needs” immigration ?
Demographics! To sustain a large population of nonproductive, expensive geriatrics you need a much larger productive, nursing, carer population to pay for, and handle it all.. Without immigration your old folk will starve, freeze and die of disease for want of care. Euthanasia can also work, with assisted suicide etc. There aren’t many other options I’m afraid.
Regrettably, I would trust the supermarkets’ assessment of the current population level. They were working on provisioning a population of 80 million, five years ago. I would say, that’s enough for an overcrowded island (one of the two most densely populated countries in Europe) with infrastructure an NHS and other services overwhelmed.
Correct! You’ll know that by the number of downticks you get: it’s called the unpalatable truth.. never welcome!
‘Essential’ in such a charged topic is a hugely loaded term. The UK has had millions added to its population, overwhelmingly through immigration, during the last 20 years. Are issues of huge demographic and cultural change of no consequence? If we want the world’s population to reduce, as we do or certainly will at some point, then at some point we DON’T want to simply replace the (unborn) ‘native’ population with immigrants. We will have to work longer etc, but it is a choice. Japan notably is an advanced country which believes its culture worth preserving and has not gone down the route of mass immigration of unskilled labour.
The same applies whether we are in or out of the EU.
Except the UK could not control its borders within the EU.
The fact that it hasn’t done so since leaving is the fault and choice of the Government.
Since 97 c.66% of all migrants were non-EU Citizens.
Plenty of control there – 66% control.
Perhaps: but within the EU you’d have whiye officers to coin a phrase! Now you just have the crazies in charge!
The choice is as simple as it is stark: either you English do menial work for low pay and breed new children: or import immigrants who will do both for you! There is no middle ground that I can see. You’re either working or you’re not: you’re either pregnamy or you’re not.
Wanting to return the higher rate of tax to where it was when Gordon Brown was PM is now officially “hard right” and “radical”. Soon it will be “literally fascist”.
The fact is that the Tory Party spent the 1990s apologizing for its economic succeses of the 1980s. It seems that most of the thinking classes in the UK – including the good professor here – had and continue to have implanted into their mind an entirely false memory of Thatcher and what she was about. To them she was an ideological Cruella de Vil who enjoyed killing puppies for their fur. In truth most of the thinking classes are too young to remember her and so the only explanation is that the memory of Thatcherism was planted in their brains by right-on parents, teachers, and later university professors who repeated to them, respectively, in nursery rhyme, social and relationship studies, and Critical Theory-influenced texts, the TRUTH that Thatcher was EVIL and and her period in office was just as if the Nazis had won WW II. Whereas she was, in fact, a well-founded response to a vicious and semi-criminal public sector trades union culture hell bent on turning the country into the old GDR. Similarly the entire popular culture was a part of this – every comedien, media commentator, and anyone in the arts all publicly hated Thatcherism.
So here we are with these meretricious articles on Unherd posing as nuance that say, in effect: we want corporatism and social democracy which places the state at the centre of ecomomic life regardless of the consequences. You want economic freedom. Presumably you also want child labour, internet pornography, and environmental destruction. We are reasonable and centre ground. You are extreme.
The man at the gate when it crashed open was Michael Portillo. After he lost his seat in Enfield-Southgate he went into shock at the vitriol that was poured onto him from the left – in particular the arty left. He could stand having his political career destroyed. He could not stand being hated by the cultured intelligentsia so he set about engineering a Damascene conversion into a nice old codger who talks about trains. That said, Portillo is still willing to stick to his political guns so far as sound economics is concerned so perhaps I’m being unfair. But he certainly lost his taste for the fight.
The reality is that (to borrow a phrase from William Buckley) Britain would be better governed by the first 500 shoppers entering Lidl in any small town in the UK this Saturday than by the middle-brow former inmates of Oxbridge colleges who, like dancing dads, have inherited institutional power in this country and set about instrumentalising cool things like behavioural insights, neo-Keynsianism, and critical race theory to make us “modern”.
The only hope for the UK is that reality should set about its work.
Portillo said later he only went into politics to be ‘famous’.He is interesting though as i doubt anyone would guess he was a Brexiteer from his continental railway BBC programmes.He was always overrated though.The 2001 Leadership Contest should have been over at the start.Instead his arrogance and complacency allowed IDS to pick up MP votes from him.
The more Neo-Liberal wing of the Tory Party was constrained until the issue of EU free movement/immigration allowed it to ‘slipstream’ in it’s wake and gain momentum. But it was always a contradiction that would unravel at some point. Those who wished to leave the EU for more obscure sovereignty reasons would have remained a minority without the issue of immigration. There were legit issues about EU mandate/governance but that’s separate discussion. The point is alone they would not have been enough to generate Brexit.
The contradiction was access to cheap labour fuelled so much of British low productivity capitalism whilst the Single Market removed more red tape than it ever imposed. Truss/Kwarteng are correct in diagnosis that UK productivity has to massively jump to replace these benefits but completely wrong in how that may be done and the political optics of their preferred path. France and Germany have many problems, but it should be of much greater intrigue why their productivity ratio is much higher. It’s certainly not because they have more v rich. They’ve less, but they have a stronger ‘middle’. They invest more in education, and in Germany they don’t immediately pauperise those losing their job – social insurance maintains them at higher level of income whilst they access funded retraining and they are given good time to do this. Thre are many other elements worth pondering and learning from. It is something in our cultural arrogance that we seem to be myopic about obvious things we can learn from our near neighbours. We jump too soon to the US form of capitalism forgetting that will never be culturally acceptable in the UK.
To go back to the cause of the wrong path we took 6 years ago – we generally remain ignorant of the clauses that could have been fully applied to limit free movement – advertising all jobs locally first; minimum capital required to enter and stay in UK, and of course disincentives/incentives for employers to not rely so much on cheap labour. It was because the Tory party was conflicted. A chunk of the party didn’t want to change much as drunk on cheap labour whilst the other saw the opportunity to slipstream it’s more radical agenda. The contradiction has not gone away, although it was temporarily boosted by the idiocy of the Corbyn experiment in the Labour party.
Eventually we will find our way back to a more moderate balance including with the EU, because as we are finding there are limits still to what the British public will accept. We remain a nation of moderates, we can be proud of that and all the better for it.
Excellent analysis. They should pay you to write an article.
Sadly we are on the brink of a second global financial crash and Great Depression. Maybe then the seemingly moderate Orthodoxy of Balir to Rishi will be exposed as the most criminally reckless immoderate strategy in modern history. Truss and the free marketeers have arrived way too late and – like the deranged rabble Tory party they head – are a total irrelevance. The Debt tsunami created by the 2008 Bank crisis, 900bn QE, the rigged housing and asset bubble, the 400bn madness of furlough and hard lockdown and finally the coup de grace – the neglect of the need for cheap energy caused by mental eco fanaticism – has CRASHED our economy and that of Europe too. Just watch. Rishi and Boris and their ‘whatever it takes’ and net zero philosophy will soon be recognised for what it was; the latest in a succession of magic money tree follies designed to sustain the mirage of wealth – all dependent on ultra low interest rates. When the agony soon comes, Truss will be history. We should point the finger at the real culprits – the multiple guilty reckless and inept political men and women who have driven HMS UK onto the rocks.
Hindsight is a great thing! But you are correct on funny money trees. Somehow, it became believable that wealth could be generated by slight of hand banksters and city gents with no regard for productive capacity, energy generation etc.. The bean counters saw that savings could be made if you let China and India etc do the hard lifting while the aforementioned 3-card trick men could still control everything by controlling the funny money! What a joke.. naked emperors, wizards of Oz and smoke and mirrors!
Thanks j watson. You have brilliantly articulated one of the fundamental contradictions that lie at the heart of Brexit. We did not leave the EU because it was neo-liberal, but rather because it was not neo-liberal enough for the ‘Britannia Unchained’ elements within the Conservative party, who have now come to power piggy-backing on Brexit. These neo-liberal elements aligned with Brexit nationalist sentiments by casting the EU as as a regulatory drag on the free-market, holding back swashbuckling globalist Britannia. However, the philosopher John Gray has recently pointed out that the free-marketeers, if they had been thinking more rationally, would have voted to stay in the biggest and historically most successful free market in the world but have now ended up with very significant trade frictions and a growing current account deficit.
Despite promises that EU funding schemes for science and technology initiatives would be maintained, anyone working in this field can tell you that this hasn’t happened. Investment in innovation has reduced. Levels of immigration are still high, reflecting a lack of investment in local skills and the free-marketeers’ inevitable lean toward a flexible labour market. At elections pre-Brexit, Europe was actually low on the list of the people’s concerns, but the Brexit leadership (which was largely ultra liberal on economics) managed to channel the ire of the non-beneficiaries of globalisation at Europe, conveniently redirecting attention away from deeper underlying structural/educational investment issues that were at the root of low productivity. This was also also masked by by high levels of employment which was often low-wage, insecure and subsidised by in-work benefits. For ex-Remainer Liz Truss, Brexit is now a Trojan horse for a neo-liberal policy agenda, and has allowed her to ‘slipstream’ (great word, thanks j watson) into Downing Street. These contradictions are now unravelling, resurfacing unresolved issues deferred by Brexit..
“ France and Germany have many problems, but it should be of much greater intrigue why their productivity ratio is much higher”
Don’t know about Germany but the idea that the French are more productive is a myth that has arisen due to differences in the way they measure productivity.
You make it sound like large scale immigration is a new phenomenon: it isn’t. Ireland has been sending to the UK huge numbers of construction workers, transportation workers and health care workers for generations. And more recently scientists and other graduates..
Now that we’re also to posh to push we don’t so much any more and so you gotta get ’em from somewhere else. It’s the same in Ireland: we have huge numbers of immigrants (+ 55,000 Ukrainians) and we find in a short while they add greatly to our country’s prosperity. Sure we too have difficulties but overall it has proved very positive for us and our economy.
“To begin with, British politics is not facing imminent implosion.”
Not so sure about that. Once people force our politicians to confront searching questions about why excess deaths remain elevated despite “the pandemic” being over, and those questions lead to more questions than answers, the whole thing could unravel very quickly. Everything works, until it doesn’t. The reckoning is coming.
AI rule is what’s coming.. it should be superior to the flawed, outmoded human politician model. Far superior in the case of the UK.. Of course we must have it all signed off by human politicians but that should be a formality most of the time.. except when AI comes up with euthanasia as a solution to care gor the elderly we’ll need to modify the input! ..if we can?
A veiled promotion of technocratic rule. No thanks.
“In relentless pursuit of a low-tax, low-regulation economy,…”
What on earth is so horrific about that?
Ask low paid workers suffering work injuries unable to protest: they’ll give you the answer you’re looking for. Ask benefit recipients after they suffer real cuts if you’re still unsure.. if you ask the rich of course they’ll say it’s all jolly fine!
So the author doesn’t like Brexit and doesn’t like the Conservative Party. Fair enough – everyone is entitled to their opinion.
But writing a lengthy piece of completely fictional rubbish (doubtless the author thinks they are clever) to make the their dislike clear is just total idiocy. Zero out of ten, not even ‘one for effort’, as none was made.
The usual remoaner lies – what International agreement has been set aside? Answer – none. The imminent break-up of the Union – how much remoaners would like to see this happen as a ‘punishment’ for Brexit.
The problem with the current Conservative government is that it is not Conservative. MP’s stupidly listen to twitter instead of the people of this country and don’t act to get rid of the vacuous woke lefties who make the BBC and Civil Service a national embarassment.
A budget designed simply to give money to people so that THEY can decide what to spend it on – what shock and horror to the lefty media totally incapable of understanding that people spending is what makes the economy work.
Union exiters would not be “punishing” England for Brexit they would merely be restoring the status quo. Scotland and NI both voted, very sensibly to remain in the EU…
So a hard border between Scotland and the rest of the UK (Scotland’s biggest trading partner by far) would be the status quo? You might also remember that in the Scottish independence referendum it was accepted that had Scotland voted to leave, then it would have been ouside the EU – with an uncertain path to eventually joining it.
You also miss the point that it is remoaners not ‘union exiters’ who want the UK to be ‘punished’ for Brexit.
But you think staying in the EU would have been sensible. Nevermind.
As a defence of the Eu-philic ideology, the determined thwarting of Brexit and the redistributive tax and spend ideology of the Westminster Consensus, this essay fails completely.
The author doesn’t like change, especially when it conflicts with the failed status quo he agrees with.
…and there was I thinking the Tories had been in government all the those years? Silly me. It was the damn “progressives”.. shocking concept isn’t it? Progressive: who’d want to be progressive? Backwards is the way to go!
“The problem here is not a show of allegiance to principle, but the stubborn adherence to principle come what may”
“intransigence has become a mark of virtue”
…and yet they changed their mind on the 45p tax rate. Sounds to me like they’re listening, they are flexible and they have the courage to change course. Yes courage clearly, since everyone including you is determined to give them no more than a few days to sort out major crises.
I’d love to see all you writers, thinkers and journalists deal with any crisis whatsoever and come out with a grand plan that all wouild agree on, that saves people money, and actually works!
..democratic socialism ala the Nordic countries? No good you say? Too much redistribution and high quality services? Too much general satisfaction and not enough for the obscenely rich?
Do they not have any wealthy or poor people in Nordic countries? Is everyone getting the same income, the same standard of living, the same opportunities? I’m all for a fair society but my question remains – where are the lines of redistribution to be drawn and how will you get agreement on the ones you propose? Not cutting the 45p tax band is a nod in the right direction I would suggest, but that’s not what ‘journos’ and the like can get behind. I wonder what their reasons are for that?
A major reason why the performance of the establishment is so poor is because noone in authority in the UK ever now resigns because of imcompetence.If either Truss or KK had resigned after the 45 p debacle and made a resignation speech hoping that this will set a precedent that might have helped change things but they did not and nothing will change.
We humans always assume we have a clock and we are the clock master. But humans are animals living in a Nature that is not well understood. Some truths: a tax lowers demand for that which is taxed. High progressive tax on income reduces demand for marginal income. That then reduces entrepreneurship. Yes, bills must be paid and sometimes nations must ask the populace to cough it up. The best way to do that is sell bonds. The danger is an unconstrained Central Bank. Let the animals rage.
..you need to add into your mix the fact that money not spent (for the reasons you state) on X is available to spend of Y.. by the government or by industry or the citizen.. The trick is to:
A. see clearly what is required (the end result) +
B. choose the best mechanism to achieve that.
It us clear than, to stimulate growth you need to get those who spend most (of that additional income) on UK produced goods and services. That will NOT come from handouts ir tax cuts for the rich. The rich will squirrel it away off shore or buy new Italian supercars, French yachts or Greek villas or go on 3xotic cruises etc.. none of which will do a thing to stimulate UK growth.
Conversely if you give it to the poorest they will immediately spend it on UK produced food, beer (not French champagne), hairdressers, gyms etc. That spending will repeat upwards through UK retail, wholesale, transportation and manufacturing.
It’s obvious isn’t it? ..but you have to eliminate your antipathy towards the poor in order to be able to think it through properly!
Omelettes and eggs. Only break as many as you need and a 45p tax cut at the wrong moment was an egg too far. So busy crying about egg no 4 they forgot to eat the omelette.
It’s peanuts. Just that the ‘optics’ (as the politicians say) look bad. London is a major financial centre and needs the ‘star’ bankers, or they will go elsewhere. We can all argue whether these bankers deserve the remuneration they get, but that’s the global market – and finance really is global. The whole issue is an irrelevance.
I think you’re forgetting it was the funny money bankers and traders etc who got us (the entire West) into this mess! The credo that production and energy generation are less important than playing financial 3-card tricks with derivatives, futures, shorts and various other slights of hand! We were all conned in 2008 and now again. When will we see this mind-bogglingly expensive sham for what it is? A glabal Ponzi scheme!!
The Conservatives are now irretrievably controlled by their Centre Left “Progressives”, who I despise beyond measure. This makes things a lot easier for me as I no longer have to bother about whether the party wins or loses. They’re done. What future for a party that can’t deliver policy with an 80 seat majority? Forget it. There’s no coming back from that. Ever.
Assuming some concoction of Labour assumes power, I shall just kick up and enjoy the show while they take the battering. Although comfortably off, I’ve positioned myself so that I don’t have enough in this country to make myself interesting, and therefore vulnerable, to Labour’s taxation.
My drawbridge is up. I recommend the same to anyone else who’s interested. I hope that something worthwhile can arise from the wreckage of the former “Conservative” Party in 12 years or so. But it needs to be new, with a new name, new people, and no trace or taint of what is now.
I’d do it, if I was 10 years younger. It’s not rocket science. Boris’s market is still out there, and it’s plain as a bloody pikestaff what they want. The mystery is why he didn’t give it to them.
Oh dear: ‘someone take your toys away? ..and you were sooo looking forward to your £55,000 as well before the U-turn.. ahh didems?
You have rather missed my point. I have all the money that I need for the rest of my life. It’s the politics that concerns me. But not very much. As I said, I shall watch labour and the Scots Nationalists make a mess of it all. It won’t damage me.
Psychology tells us that voters in general prefer politicians to stick to their guns, right or wrong as it shows their “strength” ie more than they appreciate being listened to.
The notion that a politician’s job is to represent their constituents is only partly true. They are elected not mandated. Voters also trust politicians to “do the right thing” based on their morals and integrity as a balance to the voters’ mandate. Ergo constituents are emphatically not 100% responsible for political decisions ultimately or otherwise.
If it were as you suggest it would be a simple matter, (given modern technology) to ask constituents how they the politicians should vote on every issue. This is definitely NOT how Representative Democracy works.
What a superb and subtle piece by Richard Bourke. One merely has to watch the recently aired video of Liz Truss addressing a Lib Dem conference on abolition of the monarchy to see someone rather unhinged in the way Richard herein describes. Almost like an Austin Powers Fembot. I was keen to understand from an interview with Liz published in UnHerd why Dominic Cummins so famously described her as close to barking. No reply to date.
Rubbish. Proroguation of Parliament was, and always has been, perfectly lawful. Brenda Hale and her Remoaner cronies made up a law that had not previously existed and retro-fitted it to apply to what Boris’s government was doing. And they did this in order to overturn the largest democratic vote in UK history.
Like all Remoaners, the author misquotes the stuff Gove said about experts. He said people have had enough of experts with three-letter acronyms getting things wrong. Which they do with monotonous regularity. Remember the recession and the flight of bankers to Frankfort?
…
Student loan forgiveness did not favour Hispanics. It favoured middle class white liberals. As hispanics belong to the poorer part of the population his immigration policies don’t help them either.
“The job of a politician in a democracy is to represent the citizens. [CORRECT] If their political positions change, then his position must also change. [INCORRECT]”.
Instead:
“The job of a politician in a democracy is to represent the citizens. If their political positions change (so that their new changed positions are in conflict with the manifesto on which the relevant politician was elected), then he will be booted out at the next election.”
In a representative democracy, citizens have an opportunity to study a candidate’s manifesto. If they approve of it, they vote for that person. If they don’t approve of it, they vote for someone else, or, they stand for election themselves.
Once they have voted for a candidate, and that candidate is successful, then they have ceded their power to that candidate for the duration of the next parliamentary term. Google the difference between “representative” and “puppet”.
The representative’s job is to be true to his or her manifesto. He or she is not there to be a mere cipher. Blindly agreeing with whatever u-turn your voters come up with mid-term is not representation. If you think your voters have gone rogue, resign or be booted out.
Like many very earnest and perma-outraged Brexiters, you are confusing representative democracy with plebiscite democracy; and you are confusing the role of an MP with that of a puppet. Suggest you read some more Edmund Burke, in particular, his 1774 Speech to the Electors at Bristol at the Conclusion of the Poll.
You need to check out the actual numbers of Hispanics in the USA.. even with African snd Asian votes that wouldn’t elect any President! Maybe they tipped tgd scales but the vast majority of Democratic voters are white.
..you disapprove of basic facts??
Richard Bourke wrote, “But this posture is not without irony: [Liz] Truss’s convictions have notoriously fluctuated, forcing her to emphasise the intensity of her conversions.”
The job of a politician in a democracy is to represent the citizens. If their political positions change, then his position must also change.
So, ultimately, the citizens are responsible for the consequences of any policy which the politicians supported and approved.
Take the case of Joseph Biden. He ascended to the presidency of the United States due to primarily the votes of Hispanics and secondarily the votes of Africans and Asians. The 3 demographic groups gave a majority of their votes to Biden.
He then supported policies favored primarily by Hispanics. They include the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of 2021, an executive order to forgive student loans, etc. Notably, the ARPA has a provision that pays off the loans provided by or guaranteed by the United States Department of Agriculture if the farmer can prove that he has non-European ancestry. Specifically, a farmer who has only German ancestry would be denied this financial assistance.
Consequently, Hispanics deserve most of the blame for the inflation caused by these policies and the suffering endured by European-American farmers.
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