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Reply | Reform
at 02:48 3 May 2025
Sorry purists, I wrote out a response to this and it was pretty messy, so I asked ChatGPT to tidy it up...
What I don’t understand about the immigration debate is how it’s fundamentally a supply and demand issue — yet the public and policymakers obsess over the supply side while completely ignoring the demand side.
We had 14 years of Conservative government, with reducing immigration front and centre. We left the EU partly to “take back control” and manage immigration. Rishi Sunak even agreed to pay France nearly half a billion pounds over three years to prevent about 30,000 people annually from crossing the Channel.
And yet, immigration has gone up. In 2009, before the Conservatives took office, net immigration was around 200,000. By the time they left, it was roughly 700,000.
Now we have the growth in popularity of Reform, with Nigel Farage positioning himself as the champion of immigration control — even though he doesn't actually care, hence why he's missed the majority of immigration votes in Parliament.
Why did the conservative government pour resources into the supply side, yet still preside over record immigration levels? If net immigration had been capped at 2009 levels, the total immigration over the last two years would have taken seven years to accumulate. With the amount of effort put into the legally-doomed Rwanda deportation strategy, it's telling that they wouldn't do something so simple as to introduce a yearly net cap.
The answer is: the demand side is harder. Tackling it means dealing with the structural reasons why we "need" immigration. It means fixing the housing market so young people can afford to start families. It means paying health and social care workers properly so these jobs can be filled from the national workforce. It means reforming education so it actually prepares people for industry. None of this is simple, and all of it costs money — money that has steadily been taken from the working and middle classes over the last 50 years through economic policies that protect the capital of the richest in society.
The wealthy — Etonians like Cameron and Johnson, heirs to billionaires like Sunak, millionaires like Farage and Starmer — aren’t going to fix the demand side. They have no incentive to. So we keep up a pretense of treating immigration as a border enforcement issue, while letting in people in record numbers so our institutions and businesses don't fail.
There is racism. I’ve seen it myself in London: on trains, in pubs, from people who seemed politically moderate. We all saw it with the riots. Some voters support the Conservatives or Reform because of racial bias. But reducing the debate to “they just hate brown people” isn’t helpful. It doesn’t acknowledge the structural failures that’s driving people from the centre to the right-wing immigration answers.
So how do we shift the conversation? Because I feel like a voice in the wind. One side refuses to question why their preferred strategies have failed. The other refuses to engage with the concerns of moderate voters drifting rightward, or to offer meaningful structural solutions that go beyond calling out racism. |
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Reply | Net Spending
at 16:18 15 Apr 2025
Wow, Ogbenne has the same or lower value after spending a year out injured.
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Reply | BAXTERBASICS....
at 18:22 4 Apr 2025
Haven't heard this, but I'm taking it as fact. |
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Reply | Delap goal
at 20:36 3 Apr 2025
yep, could well have been career ending if he got a hand to it. |
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Reply | American workers enjoying the tarrif show.
at 17:27 3 Apr 2025
Thanks for this. I shared it on my work chat and people have had a lot of fun with it. It ended with my payroll team regretting that they couldn't announce tariffs on Tuesday for the deficit employee have run up compared to the goods sold to us. |
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Reply | Ipswich Town flair 11
at 14:35 25 Mar 2025
My memory of Gus was of him being faster than Usain Bolt, with zero skill or end product. I nearly put him in my team but decided speed wasn't flair. Has my memory been distorted over time? Or did he have flair? |
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Reply | Ipswich Town flair 11
at 00:01 25 Mar 2025
Wright
Wilnis
Taricco
Thetis (How many other central defenders can score overhead kicks and look at home in an MMA bout?)
Bramble (Dribbling it out of central defence - good times)
Finidi
Petta
Dyer
Peralta
Reuser
Pablo [Post edited 25 Mar 0:02]
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Reply | He not they. (n/t)
at 14:35 24 Mar 2025
How would I know your gender? I don't know your gender and I'm not about to start trying to remember thousands of people's gender on TWTD. They has been used for hundreds of years when you don't know. Grow up. |
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Reply | We assess the quality....
at 16:44 23 Mar 2025
No we don't talk about the quality of goalkeeping in the men's game after every goal, we talk about our quality or the opponents quality of goalkeeping in relation to specific incidents.
You didn't "assess the quality of the women's team, when a goal was scored". You freely said you had no clue what happened in the game and didn't know there was a goalkeeping error. You had no intent on discussing it.You were just making an unnecessary judgement on the basis of not watching this game or the women's game much.
"I'll make an assumption it's [the quality of women's goalkeeping was poor] the same today." - This is a dig and you are being a coward for backtracking.
I don't care if you believe it holds any water in this game. You've made your position clear. You don't watch women's football much and you are here to belittle it. [Post edited 23 Mar 16:45]
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Reply | I was purely talking about....
at 16:11 23 Mar 2025
Don't need this assessment of quality every time there is a post on ITFC women's football.
An update on our score doesn't merit your insights into the quality of women's goalkeeping. [Post edited 23 Mar 16:12]
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Reply | Whenever I see any....
at 16:03 23 Mar 2025
Go start another thread if you want to talk about the quality of women's football from the perspective of not watching it often. |
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Thread | @Guthrum... Relinquish your title!
at 16:28 22 Mar 2025
Just done a DNA test (synonym for fact) and it came back that I'm likely 18% Danish. Surely that's enough to inherit the Kingdom of East Anglia? [Post edited 22 Mar 17:23]
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