This is because politicians who fill the country with immigrants do so because they don't care in the slightest about the population and it shows in all facets of governance.

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myrmidon 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Hard disagree on this. Immigration was the only realistic option to shield against demographic collapse and stabilize unskilled labor supply for decades, and it is no suprise that politicians took it.

I honestly think that if politicians had blocked this (reform style) in 2000, the resulting economic slowdown and increasing cost for labor intensive products would've seen them voted out in short order.

I do agree that negative consequences of the approach were played down/underestimated/neglected, but painting it as pure uncaring negative is just disingenuous.

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baiac 4 hours ago | parent [-]

"stabilising unskilled labour" in this context means dumping the salaries of the natives, making it so unskilled sectors no longer provide a living wage.

	▲	myrmidon 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but local supply of labor was looking even worse than now back then, and cost of labor intensive stuff like daycare, nursing homes/residential care have gone through the roof, still. Just look at how Brexit alone affected lorry driver wages; if you cut immigration 25 years ago, you'd have seen the same effect across multiple sectors magnifying each other (because labor supply is simply insufficient), and there is a lot of people that would have suffered from higher costs in all those sectors without getting any compensation. As a "sanity check" for this: If the UK economy did not "need" immigrant labor, you would expect significant unemployment and very high difficulty in finding unskilled labor jobs. Neither is the case.

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exasperaited 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Net migration in the UK is falling, and fast. It grew under a party that is ideologically closer to Reform than the government currently in power.

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ben_w an hour ago | parent | next [-]

IMO, statistical fluke, more likely a few years of delayed migrations post-pandemic got squeezed together and it's now back to the previous trend: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c246ndy63j9o

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cbeach 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Net migration is only falling because of record high numbers of British and European people emigrating, against a backdrop of huge (800K+) levels of gross immigration.

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graemep 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Firstly, why do you lump British and European together? Because they are the same "race" in your eyes?

Non-EU net migration has fallen sharply too.

It proves what was always obvious to anyone who looked at it, that high net immigration was temporary, especially the peak post covid and the special scheme for Ukrainians.

	▲	cbeach 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Levels of EU vs non-EU immigration has been a particular subject of interest for the UK before and after Brexit. And note also that the UK and EU share high-quality education systems, Western Judeo-Christian culture and Western-aligned geopolitics. Recent waves of immigration from countries in the Middle East and North Africa are importing wholly different culture, geopolitics, and crucially, we are importing from countries with measurably lower standard of literacy and numeracy. These are objective facts, and they are not criticisms or judgements on the character of those who are migrating. I would make exactly the same choices as our Pakistani, Somali and Eritrean friends, if I were in their position.

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jjgreen 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sick of living with Nazis more like