I noted this tweet last night from long-standing right-wing MP John Redwood:
Redwood is wrong, of course. He usually is.
'We' will not need to build two cities the size of Southampton a year.
First of all, that is because populations will be widely spread.
Secondly, and rather more importantly, immigrants invariably come here to work, and so in effect, they will provide the resource to build their own accommodation, whether directly or indirectly.
The language used is absurd. The idea that there will be immigrant cities is implied, and that will not happen. But, more importantly, to ignore the contribution migrants can (and always have) made to the UK economy is to be deliberately misleading.
But that is the way of the right.
It is why they really cannot be trusted to manage the economy. If you cannot think of the consequences of actions, you should not be put in charge of managing those actions. Small-minded thinking is their Achilles heel.
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Southampton is a nice place. If immigration was lower but we were building the equivalent of Jaywick every year that *would* be a problem.
His statement makes no grammatical sense. Yes it is true that if there is too much immigration then it is a problem. Else the amount of immigration would not be qualified as being too much. I am not sure he is making this point because ‘then’ seems to be omitted.
A sizable amount of that 500000 are British citizens repatriating themselves in the UK. Including citizens from Hong Kong. Is he saying that British citizens should be turned away from the UK?
The whole argument around controlling net immigration is absurd because the system of control would require blocking British citizens from returning to the UK. If that would occur then it would mean that in the eyes of the UK government British citizenship is meaningless.
This sort of rhetoric is just scaremongering. As if a country with a population of 68 million cannot deal with a change of 0.7%, spread through a year and across the country. And legal migration is about ten times the number of “irregular” migrants. How many are students? How many are from Ukraine?
For comparison, there were 1.1 million live births in 1920 when the population was about 40 million. So that is an “influx” of 2.75% people below working age in one year, all of whom required years of health care and education and food and all the rest of it. Compared to less than 700,000 births in 1976, when deaths exceeded births; and the only other time that has happened in over a century (probably much longer) was 2020. Is the UK unable to deal with 700,000 births every year?
Having “taken back control” of immigration, we still have vacancies for young, fit, well educated and well motivated people, who want to come to live and work in the UK. Why on earth would we want to keep them away?
The UK fertility rate is 1.75. The population equilibrium rate is around 2.1. It appears, in round terms the UK fell below the equilibrium rate in the mid-1970s, and has never recovered. I have no idea where Suella Braverman has found all these putative fruit-pickers from a naturally declining birth rate; without immigration.
She must know the maths doesn’t work. You are right, it is scaremongering; a peculiarly squalid form of scaremongering. In Scotland, at least we know that we need immigration, and cannot afford to pretend that we don’t.
My interpretation of his tweet is that he is saying it will require the equivalent of building 2 cities the size of Southampton. Even in his fevered right wing dreams, I can’t see he really thinks of building 2 immigrant cities (presumably fenced and guarded) to house them.
Of course the soon to be announced immigration figure will be temporarily very high, because of external factors we are helping with, such as the war in Ukraine, and the suppression in Hong Kong, and the violence in Afghanistan.
Still, housing is an issue. As a personal anecdote, I bought my typical Edinburgh tenement circa 1900 flat just over 20 years ago at about 3 times my salary. If I was at the same point in my career now, it would be about 10 times my salary, and no way I could buy it. Even at my current salary, it is 6 times more.
Even without net migration being positive, it would still be sensible to build the equivalent of 2 Southamptons.
Redwood was supposed be an academic – offering some kind of analysis – but long gone, as you demonstrate Richard.
Not sure whether it is just ‘short term thinking’ – it does seem to also be the usual historical ‘invasion’ , ‘we are being overwhelmed’ rhetoric which they probably feel has served them very well over the years.
Their concern seems to be not with reducing immigration – where they could reassure people that the Hong Kong , Afghanistan and Ukraine special schemes will not go on into the long term, but rather to keep promoting the fear of immigration ahead of issues such as health, incomes/ cost of living…
Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak needs an Ethics Adviser to tell him if Suella Braverman broke the Ministerial Code. The point of a Ministerial Code is that Ministers can understand how to do the right thing, without requiring an Ethics Adviser. The Ethics Adviser who is (not really required, save as cover for weak PMs and for Ministers Without Standards), should only be required for complex technical, or inadvertent breaches of the Code. Speeding tickets are not difficult to understand. Furthermore, Suella Braverman has already been obliged to resign once; and Sunak was warned not to appoint her as Home Secretary. Sunak doesn’t need an Ethics Adviser to sack a Minister.
What could possibly go wrong? What is so difficult for Conservative Ministers to understand, when they are confronted by the plain and humble obligations surrounding “ethics”? What does this tell us about Sunak, in so many ways? What does this tell us (yet again) about the Conservative Party?
Either Redwood is the dimmest man ever to become a Fellow of All Souls, or his “small minded” ‘thinking’ is exactly what it looks like – namely trawling up the same kind of covert-racist, gutter-rolling for which his fellow Breximaniacs are already notorious. Either way his utterance simply reinforces the warnings in Nesrine Malik’s very sensible warning piece in today’s Grauniad. This kind of insult to intelligent thought is made normative by the poisonous nature of most of the Press – and such drivel is then made potent by amplification and repetition.
What about the idea that Colin Hines talk’s about and which seems to enjoy some public support which is a population policy.
Then we would have some sort of idea about how many migrants we would be welcoming each year where they would be from – refugees, family members etc and how they would be provided for
The policy would obviously include similar provision for the existing population
Colin and I disagree on this one
… and if Brexit were reversed, everyone under 40 currently renting in the UK would boogie off across the channel and buy for 70K 😉
I am sure they would not
They have always had that chance
As ever with the Tories, fear is the key.
And Redwood is the perennial dimwit whom we have put up with for far too long.
The small-mindedness is a way of running away from the big, insuperable problems the Conservatives dare not face. The UK Statistics Authority Chairman Sir Robert Chote has written to the Treasury over a Tweet used by the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt that manipulatively represented a rise in borrowing forecast in 2027-8, in language that made it appear to the casual or inexpert reader that borrowing was falling (because the rate of increase was falling). Chote’s use of language was of course delicately phrased when he wrote to an MP who had the wit to complain: ““As you suggest, some readers of the tweet may have assumed that the chancellor was referring to the forecast change in public sector net debt between the last full financial year and 2027-28. Greater clarity and context would have avoided this confusion. The Office for Statistics Regulation has therefore spoken with officials at HM Treasury to emphasise the importance of consistently adopting a transparent and accessible approach to communicating statistics and data in line with our guidance on intelligent transparency.”
The reader may be confused; but who confused the reader? if Hunt is going to appeal to his confusion on the matter, then he really ought not to fill the Office of Chancellor. If he is going to appeal to carelessness? It is his Tweet and if he cannot chose his words carefully when writing to the public about debt levels; he really ought not to fill the Office of Chancellor. If he wrote it deliberately? He ought to resign; I can promise him, he will not be missed by anyone.
How about this for small-minded thinking. Be careful how you criticise the government.
https://bylinetimes.com/2023/05/23/i-was-cancelled-by-sunaks-government-for-criticising-them-on-twitter/
If they are that stupid they are nit worth advising