UK Politics Omnishambles: Page 150 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One more in the Tolly

UK Politics Omnishambles

Qwiss

Coombs ha snap.

RowJimmy

Hard-working immigrants in particular.

Pepe LeFrits

Super rich people leaving the country because of high taxes has always struck me as being so obviously bogus.

Like, you're a billionaire who has grown up in London, your friends and family are there, you're in your later life so change is getting harder, and the government tries to increase your by tax burden by a few percent so you're going to turn your life upside down and go live in America or fucking Dubai? Does anyone really believe that?

JazzG

awooga83 I'm not really familiar with that report. I know from my own experience 4/5 people have left this country. Also from speaking to friends and family. My sister in law works for a big accounting firm, she has talked about her clients who have either gone or will be leaving soon, I have a cousin who is a mortgage broker who works with estate agents who sell big country homes, that market is dead because foreign buyers aren't interested and wealthy people within this country aren't interested either. I have friends who work in the city and they are all saying the same. My best friend is a Doctor who has said 3 or 4 fellow doctors have gone, these are NHS doctors who did private work on the side who have packed up and gone. I work in the building industry and knew a big Chinese developer who is no longer interesting in doing work in this country.

I'm not basing my opinion on what the Telegraph says, which might come as a surprise to some on here....

Mirth Corporate interests. If you really want to get to grips with the migration rate, tackle the businesses that push for cheaper labour and couldn't abide by a strong labour market in 2022. These 'wealth creators' of yours have done more to turbo charge immigration than anyone else.

I've got no problem with immigration, I have however got a problem with what is happening here. My parents are immigrants which might surprise a few here. Any healthy economy needs immigration to thrive. What is happening right now isn't just businesses flooding low skilled workers in, it is governments who are just as guilty, propping up their GDP numbers and a lot of these low skilled workers are now acting as a drag on the economy.

Coombs Yes of course they are and the people who run businesses, put their neck on the line and employ those workers are, let me guess parasites in your view? I'm not standing up for corporations, I'm talking about people who might employ 10-30 people who are getting a shit deal from this country right now

Pepe LeFrits I think you are terribly mistaken if you don't think that is happening right now. I don't know any billionaires but I know of a few who have left and these people aren't super rich.

Burnwinter

What are the actually existing politics of migration? Here's a few points for you (in the style of a stentorian "14 Theses" type thing …)

Migrants don't regulate migration. State-enforced "deterrents" to migration are always chasing a symptom and not the conditions causing that symptom. That may be all a nation-state can do, but that points to the inadequacy of pursuing a nation-state model to regulate the transnational economy. At the end of this historical sequence, there will be no common sense left to back up "deterring" migration unless we are all killing each other.

Pepe LeFrits Super rich people leaving the country because of high taxes has always struck me as being so obviously bogus.

At the moment mostly money migrates and workers don't. As Peps is saying, very rich holders of capital don't need to migrate as a result of the system of visas and borders that afflicts the rest of us. They live in London and pay tax in Panama. But the global labour force is partitioned. In this world, workers in poor countries are mostly stuck behind their borders. Capital, resources and consumer goods (and in extremis, bombs) are mobile. Along with security and freedom, access to better labour markets is one big incentive for workers to migrate. Despite the familiar political obsession with migrants, the unregulated movement of capital is more prevalent and more of a problem.
The conditions that produce and orient migration are changing fast. Since globalisation got going, money and goods have become more mobile. Workers in the historical "imperial core" (or "first world") have benefited from an influx of cheap consumer goods. "Periphery" workers have gradually benefited from the offshoring of labour from the core. This offshoring has done huge damage to mass worker politics in the core—a main reason why so much of politics is now decisively anti-worker. Early on in this process, there were strong incentives for workers in the periphery to migrate to the core, but these are less now. These categories of "periphery" and "core" (or "developing" and "developed", or "global south" and "global north" etc) are blurring and muddling.
Short of upheaval, workers in historical core countries will have increasing incentives to migrate. For instance, I meet many Australians who already work fly-in, fly-out from Bali or Thailand and spend their salaries offshore. For instance, there are growing numbers of European migrants in Australia and a lot of them would dearly love to stay. There will be more of this. The next couple of generations in Australia will only own their homes if there's a major social and economic upheaval, or they inherit wealth. If you live in a core country, then the imaginary figure (an arrogant one) your core working class politics sustains of a "developing world" full of "unskilled migrants" desperate to "get in" and compete with you for the riches … you don't actually have … is going to be further and further from expressing your interests. And it's a very long way now.
The impact of migration on worker quality of life in core countries is overstated relative to many more important factors. That same current of exclusionary, nativist (Trumpist, chauvinist, Red-Wallist, common-sense-ist, whatever you want to call it) core working class politics overstates the current significance of migration to average quality of life. It achieves this by naturalising false premises in its logic, such as "we can't build more housing" or "if we tax rich people whose money has low marginal utility and redistribute their wealth to the mass of consumers it will hurt our economy". That's how you get bullshit neo-Malthusian politics (also common on the left wing) and bullshit about "wealth creators".
Economic inequality and underinvestment in the the productive forces are a major risk to quality of life in core countries. The people overseeing the rise in inequality, austerity policies and systematic underinvestment in social reproduction—especially working class education—are not migrants. Core workers are being de-skilled and put in a position where they will struggle to pivot with a changing global economic configuration. Generations are being sold out all over the world. Make no mistake, it's the holders of capital and their top officials and salary-people doing it—all the while pointing at migrants, Brexit, undocumented workers, etc. Discredited deficit politics continues as generations of core workers who could be history's "best and brightest" are left to wither. These disenfranchised kids are drawn to parasitic fascist clowns like Trump and Farage. They become the fringe political addicts of spectacles of sadistic social punishment such as Stephen Miller's deranged campaign of ICE raids. In the worst timelines they will become the future brownshirts of things worse than Trump or Farage.
More open borders will ultimately protect core workers from joining surplus populations. There are already massive geographies of the historical core where there isn't a viable economy. The misery of these "hinterlands" is an important reason for the appeal of figures like Trump. Many of Trump's "red states" are, for the time being, economically marginal and uncompetitive, and depend on subsidies from the US Federal government they are taught to hate. These tendencies can get worse. If technological change were to automate more labour and usher in an economics of abundance, our current societies are very poor for coping with large surplus populations or sharing that abundance. If that change is coming, core countries will be forced to change. Core workers allying themselves with international workers facing these same challenges is vital. It's already past time to start catching up so ordinary people can have the reins of production again. In history this was the only way workers got the quality of life they're now mourning. Rest assured, it was not the "wealth creators" who gave us the eight hour day.

Good luck with your own thinking, that's mine …

Mirth

Pepe LeFrits the super rich are leaving because of the non dom tax rule changes. The thing is, under those tax rules, the super rich that qualified weren't paying a particularly high proportion of tax anyway

This group is certainly not impacted by a 1% change in NI contributions.

awooga83

JazzG My best friend is a Doctor who has said 3 or 4 fellow doctors have gone, these are NHS doctors who did private work on the side who have packed up and gone.

I've seen doctors who leave as well but they invariably do because of a choice of a better opportunity in some cases abroad. That's another example of the economic system in action it's but really a sign of anything other than the UK can't offer that.

As for foreign property buyers that are a massive contribution to unaffordable housing and area another aspect that has damaged the UK and they don't create wealth for the wider UK on any meaningful scale and navy don't even live here a lot of the time.

Coombs

JazzG Yes of course they are and the people who run businesses, put their neck on the line and employ those workers are, let me guess parasites in your view? I'm not standing up for corporations, I'm talking about people who might employ 10-30 people who are getting a shit deal from this country right now

Migration policy has little to do with the small business owner, except by providing a source of affordable labor. Economic policies favoring large corporations do have a negative effect, though.

Pepe LeFrits

JazzG I think you are terribly mistaken if you don't think that is happening right now. I don't know any billionaires but I know of a few who have left and these people aren't super rich

I'm not talking about GPs leaving. Everyone knows people who have emigrated. I've emigrated. I'm talking about this nonsense argument that gets thrown up any time there's talk of tackling inequality and making the super rich pay a fair amount of tax. They'll leave! No, they won't.

JazzG

Corbyn writing in the Telegraph, NIMBYs putting their differences aside!

I'm not sure how I feel on allotments, I've personally always thought they were a waste of space but I know some people who are quite attached to their allotment.

GooneriC

Its not only the super rich leaving the country and it's not only for economic reasons. I wouldn't want to move back there at all , and I'm leaning towards selling all our properties in UK and reinvesting somewhere else. The rot starts at the top , a morally bankrupt and detestable PM and others in his government . Don't even mention the current opposition. When you combine all of that , a lot of middle class people are leaving because there are better living and working conditions elsewhere.

Burnwinter

File under "yeah, we vetted the guy and decided he was enough of a deranged fascist to work for us":

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/aug/16/nigel-farage-adviser-uk-would-be-better-off-if-it-had-not-fought-nazi-germany

Pepe LeFrits

Lad sounds like a headbanger but that's really shitty by the Guardian. He didn't say, at least going by what they've quoted, that Britain would have been better off if it hadn't fought in WW2.

Qwiss

Pepe LeFrits

“We impoverished ourselves for decades, we didn’t finish paying the loans off to America until 2006. Our economy stagnated, we lost an empire, and we are pushed around by America. And Germany, a country we beat, has been richer than us since the 1970s.

“Alternative history is interesting; if Britain had not fought in WW1 and WW2, it would not have had to rely on America for economic support, and it would have had the independence to act accordingly. Britain could have developed India, Cyprus, Fiji, Malta, Saint Lucia, Seychelles, the Bahamas, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Ireland and New Zealand. In the coming meritocracy, perhaps Britain could regain some of these nations.”

That really does sound like he's saying that.

Pepe LeFrits

Qwiss he's saying WW1 and WW2, which is a completely different thing.

Burnwinter

https://jackanderton.com/read/a-self-interested-british-foreign-policy/

The Third-Anglo-Afghan War in 1919, when the Emirate of Afghanistan invaded India was another war in a far-off land that ultimately was in vain when India was given independence in 1947. The British ruling class had allowed men to die for a region they just gave away less than 30 years later. In the context of the Empire, our expansion of land and resources wasn’t even developed to its full extent, our foreign policy even when engaged in imperialism was to take the land and then just leave it effectively undeveloped. In 1918, the Empire supplied only 2% of the world’s production, and Britain relied on the US for 80% of its supplies. What is the point of owning colonies if you do not use them to your advantage?

Kid's a fascist, nationalist nutcase with a silly and offensive view of history. Britain used trade policy to systematically deindustrialise India (and industrialise Britain) from the mid 18C. But more to my point Reform are a joke for hiring this kid who blogs about "immigration going to zero", "Britain is not a European country" and so on. These aren't serious people.

Mirth

Typical Guardian - giving people they dislike a platform because the rage bait drives clicks.

Burnwinter

Mirth Nice try, but being real it's in the public interest to know Reform campaigns with people whose worldview is that the British Empire wasn't sufficiently extractive, not because of the rage but because they're a fucking joke.

Mirth

Burnwinter if you say so but this plays nicely into this kid's hands. His past role was running Nigel Farage's TikTok account and I can assure that Reform are increasing gaining traction amongst the under 25s (from a small base) and people like this are the reason why. I agree that these are not serious people but that's not a prerequisite to wield power.

I remember a time when the mantra on the internet was 'don't feed the troll' these days it's more 'how can we profit from the troll?'

Burnwinter

Mirth

I'm not a "sunlight is the best disinfectant" guy who thinks public debate solves ideological crises.

Thing is the Brexit politics of "Britain needs change", "stop immigration", "we should be a meritocracy", "this country is being run as a charity", "just a concerned citizen" and so on has well over ten years' foothold by this point. Doesn't do any harm to tell people what's under the hood of it all: conspiracism and racism.

Reform UK is still an electoral contender despite Brexit not delivering on any aspect of what Leave promised. And least of all for young people.

Conciliating or skirting right populism fails. Ridiculing this kid on TikTok would be politically sound let alone doing it in the Guardian, ditchwater rag that it may be.

Mirth

Burnwinter ha! that's funny because I was going to say in my previous post is that your approach of trying to expose this kid as a person of ridicule is something that's already been tried. In 2016.

By all means, stand up to populism and challenge them - but do it on your terms and don't fall into their traps/soundbites. You think you're going into to call out their racist conspiracies but what you'll end up debating is Imperial Preference and the virtues of a war fought nearly 100 years ago. At that point, you've made your point but lost the debate.

Meanwhile, in 2025, Reform led councils are struggling to lead and improve their local communities because a) they have no experience b) their talent pool is inch thick and a mile wide. This would legitimately concern a big part of the local Reform voter base but so far no other party has been able craft it into an attack that sticks.

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