The banker loving, baby-eating Tory party thread (regenerated)

[OutByEaster?]

It was a very Blair-y speech looking at it - his influence on the Tory party is underestimated. 

 

[peterms]

Strong piece from Kirkup in the Torygraph.

Quote

...

I’m afraid I can’t be kind about this speech and those words about immigration. I object, politely but strongly.

My objection is based on a simple, old-fashioned belief that politicians, like anyone else in a position of power or responsibility, should tell the truth, saying things that are factually accurate rather than things that just sound right.

The truth is that there is little solid economic evidence that British people are indeed “out of work or on lower wages because of low-skilled immigration”...

...Instead of shades of grey, she offered black and white. She told people who simply suspect and fear – based on sentiment, not fact -  that or others are poorer or out of work  because of immigration that they are right.  Her essential message: your feelings matter more than the facts...

...If this all sounds familiar from politics elsewhere today, it should.

Because in her  remarks on immigration and employment today, Mrs May was employing the post-truth politics of Donald Trump.  

I know these are challenging times for politicians, who all need to find ways to respond to the forces that have driven the rise of populist anger in politics across the West.  But is this really what we should expect from Britain’s Prime Minister these days?  

Is it really too much to expect the head of our government to address the most pressing issue of the day by leading, not pandering? 

 

She's not fit to lead the country.

She's not even fit to lead the Tory Party, and that's a pretty low bar.

[StefanAVFC]

It's a dangerous precedent to set. The truth isn't important anymore. People aren't interested in what is actually true. They want to hear baseless statements and lies which fuel their agenda.

Again, not claiming that all 52% of people who voted to leave did so for terrible reasons, but a good amount did. Based on fear and lies (inb4 Tony mentioning 'Project Fear')

[MakemineVanilla]

It was a very good speech by May which held a big lesson for Labour: if the Tories are prepared to tell a few porkies to give the impression that they are further left than they actually are, then Labour need to learn to tell a few porkies about being further to the right than they actually are, and then do the opposite once they get themselves elected.

It is obviously difficult for Labour because their core members are more dogmatic and vain about their virtue signalling than Tory voters, so creating their Trojan horse looks impossible.

As Robert Ford, Professor of Political Science at the University of Manchester, said on Radio 4 yesterday, people of the political left have far more negative stereotypical views of the Tories than the other way round.

He went on to say that many left-wing Labour supporters would not want their child to marry a Tory, and that they would consider their child's wish to marry a UKIP supporter, as the same as marrying someone with a criminal record.  

Mad lefties need to spend more time trying to learn from the Tories and less time despising them.

 

[tonyh29]

1 hour ago, peterms said:

The truth is that there is little solid economic evidence that British people are indeed “out of work or on lower wages because of low-skilled immigration”...

Sir Stephen Nickell  says Hi

I guess it goes back to my previous post , there is plenty of evidence both for and against  out there , it just depends which version one chooses to accept as the truth ... is that agenda based or is it based on people examining all the evidence  .. well that's the million $ question

 

 

[tonyh29]

45 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

It was a very good speech by May which held a big lesson for Labour: if the Tories are prepared to tell a few porkies to give the impression that they are further left than they actually are, then Labour need to learn to tell a few porkies about being further to the right than they actually are, and then do the opposite once they get themselves elected.

It is obviously difficult for Labour because their core members are more dogmatic and vain about their virtue signalling than Tory voters, so creating their Trojan horse looks impossible.

As Robert Ford, Professor of Political Science at the University of Manchester, said on Radio 4 yesterday, people of the political left have far more negative stereotypical views of the Tories than the other way round.

He went on to say that many left-wing Labour supporters would not want their child to marry a Tory, and that they would consider their child's wish to marry a UKIP supporter, as the same as marrying someone with a criminal record.  

Mad lefties need to spend more time trying to learn from the Tories and less time despising them.

 

obsessed would be a fairer way to put it

the not marrying a Tory has to be one of the most bigoted thing I've ever read , surely he's made that up  ?

[Rugeley Villa]

58 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

It was a very good speech by May which held a big lesson for Labour: if the Tories are prepared to tell a few porkies to give the impression that they are further left than they actually are, then Labour need to learn to tell a few porkies about being further to the right than they actually are, and then do the opposite once they get themselves elected.

It is obviously difficult for Labour because their core members are more dogmatic and vain about their virtue signalling than Tory voters, so creating their Trojan horse looks impossible.

As Robert Ford, Professor of Political Science at the University of Manchester, said on Radio 4 yesterday, people of the political left have far more negative stereotypical views of the Tories than the other way round.

He went on to say that many left-wing Labour supporters would not want their child to marry a Tory, and that they would consider their child's wish to marry a UKIP supporter, as the same as marrying someone with a criminal record.  

Mad lefties need to spend more time trying to learn from the Tories and less time despising them.

 

Exactly how they come across. Just as bigoted as the far right.

[peterms]

32 minutes ago, tonyh29 said:

Sir Stephen Nickell  says Hi

 

And Jonathan Portes says Hi Sir Stephen.  And he also says of Nickell's paper

Quote

...the new paper implies that the impact of migration on the wages of the UK-born in this sector since 2004 has been about 1 percent, over a period of 8 years. With average wages in this sector of about £8 an hour, that amounts to a reduction in annual pay rises of about a penny an hour.

Now 1 percent, even over 8 years, is not nothing, especially to relatively low paid workers. But it stretches credulity to suggest that other things – the level of the minimum wage, the decline in trade union power, technological and industrial change – have not had far bigger impacts on pay in these sectors. 

In other words, the research confirms what we already thought.  Immigration may have some, small, negative impact on wages for some low-paid workers.  But  the idea that immigration is the main or even a moderately important driver of low pay is simply not supported by the available evidence. Politicians who claim the contrary are either so obsessed with immigration that they are blind to more important issues - or they are merely trying to divert attention from their failure to propose policy measures that would actually make a meaningful difference to the low paid.

 

[HanoiVillan]

51 minutes ago, Rugeley Villa said:

Just as bigoted as the far right.

Disliking people for their political beliefs is not equivalent to disliking people because of the colour of their skin, for obvious reasons. 

[MakemineVanilla]

The reaction to the Tory plan to find out how many foreigners companies employ seems inconsistent with the attitudes expressed when similar attempts were made in the cause of racial and gender equality.

Back in 1996 the T&G brought a case of racial discrimination against the Ford Motor Company because there were no black people working in the Ford Truck Fleet, to make their case they needed to count how many black people worked in the division - there were none.

Years ago, any company which wanted to supply goods and services on a government contract would get a visit by some government official to make sure the tendering company had a mixed race workforce - a very good idea I would have thought.

The Labour party have their own plan for forcing companies to publish the earnings of every employee to fight sexism and the blue-eyed-boy syndrome, which most lefties think is a good idea.

So why, you might ask, is it wrong to investigate whether companies discriminate against British workers?

If a company hires foreign workers as an actual policy, surely that is just as wrong as if they hired only British workers as policy?

Characterising attempts to investigate the hiring policy of companies as Aryanization is just typical Lefty self-indulgent over-dramatisation.

Edited October 6, 2016 by MakemineVanilla

[tonyh29]

1 minute ago, peterms said:

And Jonathan Portes says Hi Sir Stephen.  And he also says of Nickell's paper

 

if 1 % is nothing then perhaps he'll give me 1% of everything he earns   

 

the ONS claim to have issued something like 697,000 new NI numbers to EU people coming here to work  in the period June 2014 to June 2015 ... there has to be an impact with that ? (positive and negative  ) .. the argument was about wages rather than numbers  , but surely , if you have 2 similar matched candidates and  Dáve is prepared to work for £8 and hour and Dave £9 an hour , do companies give the job to the cheaper one ? and then by definition does that not then mean that next time around Dave has to revise his demand and work for £8 an hour ?

 

[chrisp65]

2 hours ago, MakemineVanilla said:

As Robert Ford, Professor of Political Science at the University of Manchester, said on Radio 4 yesterday, people of the political left have far more negative stereotypical views of the Tories than the other way round.

He went on to say that many left-wing Labour supporters would not want their child to marry a Tory, and that they would consider their child's wish to marry a UKIP supporter, as the same as marrying someone with a criminal record.  

Mad lefties need to spend more time trying to learn from the Tories and less time despising them.

 

I listened in on that from my kitchen breakfast bar, it 'felt' true.

I actually decided to moderate some of my language in some situations.

 

 

 

 

[HanoiVillan]

32 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

The reaction to the Tory plan to find out how many foreigners companies employ seems inconsistent with the attitudes expressed when similar attempts were made in the cause of racial and gender equality.

Back in 1996 the T&G brought a case of racial discrimination against the Ford Motor Company because there were no black people working in the Ford Truck Fleet, to make their case they needed to count how many black people worked in the division - there were none.

Years ago, any company which wanted to supply goods and services on a government contract would get a visit by some government official to make sure the tendering company had a mixed race workforce - a very good idea I would have thought.

The Labour party have their own plan for forcing companies to publish the earnings of every employee to fight sexism and the blue-eyed-boy syndrome, which most lefties think is a good idea.

So why, you might ask, is it wrong to investigate whether companies discriminate against British workers?

If a company hires foreign workers as an actual policy, surely that is just as wrong as if they hired only British workers as policy?

Characterising attempts to investigate the hiring policy of companies as Aryanization is just typical Lefty self-indulgent over-dramatisation.

Perhaps to your surprise, I actually agree. 

I opposed the idea at first as it seemed like the government wanted a list of names, but if it's simply collecting anonymised data I don't see what the issue is. 

EDIT: Though of course this is an awful lot of that 'red tape' that Conservatives so famously abhor burdening British business with. 

Edited October 6, 2016 by HanoiVillan

[tonyh29]

45 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

The reaction to the Tory plan to find out how many foreigners companies employ seems inconsistent with the attitudes expressed when similar attempts were made in the cause of racial and gender equality.

Back in 1996 the T&G brought a case of racial discrimination against the Ford Motor Company because there were no black people working in the Ford Truck Fleet, to make their case they needed to count how many black people worked in the division - there were none.

Years ago, any company which wanted to supply goods and services on a government contract would get a visit by some government official to make sure the tendering company had a mixed race workforce - a very good idea I would have thought.

The Labour party have their own plan for forcing companies to publish the earnings of every employee to fight sexism and the blue-eyed-boy syndrome, which most lefties think is a good idea.

So why, you might ask, is it wrong to investigate whether companies discriminate against British workers?

If a company hires foreign workers as an actual policy, surely that is just as wrong as if they hired only British workers as policy?

Characterising attempts to investigate the hiring policy of companies as Aryanization is just typical Lefty self-indulgent over-dramatisation.

I started to write something similar yesterday (only with far more spelling and grammatical errors) and then got side tracked  .... so I'll await it's rebuttal in due course with interest 

[peterms]

59 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

I opposed the idea at first as it seemed like the government wanted a list of names, but if it's simply collecting anonymised data I don't see what the issue is. 

 

There's plenty of data about the numbers of foreign workers, which sectors they are employed in, and so on.

Rudd's little brainwave is not about data, it's a purely political act to suggest we should disapprove of companies which employ foreigners.  It's meant to play to the "taking your job" meme.

What would be more useful coming from the government is some honest discussion of the connections between immigration and growth, and the looming problems of a falling birthrate and an ageing population who will need more care and pensions over more years from that declining workforce.  It would be especially interesting to model the impact of losing all the foreign workers in the health and care sectors, and gaining all the pensioner expats back from the Costa del Sol.  Now that's the kind of net immigration change that really would hurt.

Instead of which, we get something meant to stoke bar-room racism for short-term political gain.

[tonyh29]

3 minutes ago, peterms said:

and gaining all the pensioner expats back from the Costa del Sol. 

presumably you won't be commenting about Brexit lies and scaremongering ever again  

 

[Davkaus]

3 hours ago, MakemineVanilla said:

It was a very good speech by May which held a big lesson for Labour: if the Tories are prepared to tell a few porkies to give the impression that they are further left than they actually are, then Labour need to learn to tell a few porkies about being further to the right than they actually are, and then do the opposite once they get themselves elected.

It is obviously difficult for Labour because their core members are more dogmatic and vain about their virtue signalling than Tory voters, so creating their Trojan horse looks impossible.

Mad lefties need to spend more time trying to learn from the Tories and less time despising them.

 

Is this satire? I think it might be satire.

[chrisp65]

1 hour ago, MakemineVanilla said:

The reaction to the Tory plan to find out how many foreigners companies employ seems inconsistent with the attitudes expressed when similar attempts were made in the cause of racial and gender equality.

Back in 1996 the T&G brought a case of racial discrimination against the Ford Motor Company because there were no black people working in the Ford Truck Fleet, to make their case they needed to count how many black people worked in the division - there were none.

Years ago, any company which wanted to supply goods and services on a government contract would get a visit by some government official to make sure the tendering company had a mixed race workforce - a very good idea I would have thought.

The Labour party have their own plan for forcing companies to publish the earnings of every employee to fight sexism and the blue-eyed-boy syndrome, which most lefties think is a good idea.

So why, you might ask, is it wrong to investigate whether companies discriminate against British workers?

If a company hires foreign workers as an actual policy, surely that is just as wrong as if they hired only British workers as policy?

Characterising attempts to investigate the hiring policy of companies as Aryanization is just typical Lefty self-indulgent over-dramatisation.

 

47 minutes ago, tonyh29 said:

I started to write something similar yesterday (only with far more spelling and grammatical errors) and then got side tracked  .... so I'll await it's rebuttal in due course with interest 

There is nothing wrong with knowing the numbers. It's the thinking and the desired end result that need to be watched.

The chatter via the briefing from Rudd's team (that she took particular care to name and thank publicly) was that once we know a small firm is employing foreigners we can shame them and flush them out until they bring british workers up to standard at their own cost and employ them instead.

This was not pitched as an equality initiative. Quite the opposite, it was pitched as a threat to use labour which as part of the discussion was described as inferior - or else. Or else we will publicise you as a haven, by definition, for bloodsuckers stealing jobs and crashing the health service. 

It was not the same thing, it was not a comparable thing.

Even if they'd attempted to dress it up as some form of positive discrimination then there would have been more of an argument for it not simply being a knee jerk offering to people that see foreigners as the problem.

But it wasn't dressed as positive discrimination, it was simply flushing out the employers of foreigners. If she can't see that, she's woefully underqualified to be a Home Secretary.

 

She had the platform to herself, she wasn't restricted by soundbites, it was a speech of a duration of her choosing, on subjects of her choice, with accompanying briefing notes and lobbying of her choice. It was all completely under her control to deliver whatever message she wanted. What the media picked up in that section was something that smells like shit, reads like shit and sounds like shit. I guess there's every chance they were all wrong and it was a misunderstood chocolate gateaux.

 

 

 

 

[darrenm]

I don't understand how Rudd can be so out of step with the inclusive thinking of her PM

[peterms]

43 minutes ago, tonyh29 said:

presumably you won't be commenting about Brexit lies and scaremongering ever again  

 

Liam Fox tells us that part of our negotiating hand is not guaranteeing EU citizens' right to remain.

I wonder if he has thought at all of the impact of losing all our EU immigrants and regaining all our EU emigrants.  Still, as an ex-GP, we could no doubt force him back into the workplace to help cope with the onslaught on the health service.  He's do less damage there.