The Conservative Party

[bluethrunthru]

amazing how so many of Johnsons mates are piss pots - sex pests of nonces.......

Boris Johnson pal set to be banned from bars in Parliament after drunken row

Tory peer Kulveer Ranger, who was an adviser to Boris Johnson, is set to be suspended for three weeks from the House of Lords, as well as a year's ban from the bars

www.mirror.co.uk

 

[Vic]

Sunak waking up to farming concerns, but can't resist suggesting that people on benefits should go and pick veg and fruit. Lots of blackberry farms in the inner cities.

 

[Brewster's millions]

Sunak waking up to farming concerns, but can't resist suggesting that people on benefits should go and pick veg and fruit. Lots of blackberry farms in the inner cities.

Do all people on benefits live in the inner cities?

 

[bluethrunthru]

This twat

Sunaks' wealth rises to £651m in latest Sunday Times Rich List

Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty are richer than King Charles, according to The Sunday Times.

www.bbc.co.uk

is doing this

Unpaid carers shocked at having to repay thousands

Two ex-ministers say the government should pause demands for large sums of money from benefits overpayments.

www.bbc.co.uk

whereas this is still unresolved 2 years down the line

Government to sue Mone-linked PPE firm for £122m

The firm won contracts to supply protective equipment after being recommended by peer Baroness Mone.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[bluethrunthru]

 

[Vic]

Do all people on benefits live in the inner cities?

Don't get silly.

Unless you're after a job as a work coach.

 

[metalblue]

Have you had any dealings with the companies that have the outsourced contract (or their subcontractors) or spoken to someone who has?

For the most part they aren't really coaches, they're salespeople. They are there to pressure sell and bully or manipulate the long term unemployed into getting off the caseload and just getting any old job. That doesn't mean people should just waste away on universal credit for the rest of their lives.

They should do the minimum to satisfy the DWP and get away with it and the maximum they can do for their own employment goals and aspirations. By doing the latter they are more likely to get stable employment and stay out of the revolving door of insecure employment and job centre plus.

What's the advice for someone who is struggling on 16hrs a week? Try and stand out positively in your company (or organisation) and apply for another role or go somewhere else. Maybe there's personal circumstances why someone hasn't already done that rather than being a lazy waster.

What you’re identifying is issues with the coaches rather than the concept itself. I don’t see this as saying folk are lazy wasters either. They aren’t, they work, now if all these coaches do is point them to other jobs that pay more - which I think is what you’re saying - then there isn’t a lot of coaching going on and you’d have to question why are they called coaches.

This service shouldn’t be about just get a different job, it should be signposting to further education, or teaching skills that equip them to see their own value, etc etc. I know what you’ll say, funding, it’s always the problem, but these sort of services can pay for themselves when correctly targeted with the right people.

 

[Mr Kobayashi]

What you’re identifying is issues with the coaches rather than the concept itself. I don’t see this as saying folk are lazy wasters either. They aren’t, they work, now if all these coaches do is point them to other jobs that pay more - which I think is what you’re saying - then there isn’t a lot of coaching going on and you’d have to question why are they called coaches.

This service shouldn’t be about just get a different job, it should be signposting to further education, or teaching skills that equip them to see their own value, etc etc. I know what you’ll say, funding, it’s always the problem, but these sort of services can pay for themselves when correctly targeted with the right people.

What you are describing is the level of service that used to exist or at least was the ambition.

That is no longer the case and will continue to be the case under a Tory administration.

The service is outsourced it's delivered according to a sales sector style model, not the type of careers advice and guidance that used to exist.

So we are now talking about hypotheticals and imagining services that used to exist before Tory austerity.

We all know what the point of this policy is, it's to cut welfare by pushing people into just giving in or falling foul of sanctions.

It's like victims of romance fraud going back for the 10th time expecting a different result.

 

[BrianW]

Nothing you posted there explains why the feckless here can't do these tasks without employing what is effectively slave labour and kicking the problem down the road.

Retirement age people are already working until they die.

There's a hell of a lot of excuses for selfishness going on there mate.

'The feckless' - ah, nothing like a dose of contempt for your fellow humans.

Many of the long-term employed have all manner of issues that need addressing if they are to be of use. Drug addiction is quite common. Low self-esteem. Various forms of illness, including psychological ones. The need to provide child care or to care for older and disabled relatives. If you think all this can be sorted out with a wave of a magic wand you are kidding yourself.

The level of unemployment is low by historic standards and the labour market is tight. This is despite quite high levels of government-approved immigration. As in approved by the government. Not by Jeremy Corbyn. Not by the imaginary 'Blob'. Not by me. By the government, responding to market demand. Do you not understand these elementary concepts?

Most of our native unemployed do not have the skills/education to provide the workers we need most. It's as simple as that. Some could possibly be trained up. But it will take money and time.

As I said, if you seriously want to reduce immigration, you need a plan. A plan that acknowledges that there will be issues for the economy, tax rises and later retirement for all. Anything less is specious bollocks. Like Brexit was. (Another thing we did off-the-cuff without any real plan).

If you want to go down that road, fine. I have no objection in principle. What I object to is unplanned policy damaging our economy and causing chaos. Make no mistake, making a massive reduction in immigration is a fundamental change in the way our economy functions. It means massive government intervention and higher costs. It will also have to be phased in, as you cannot train doctors (for example) overnight.

 

[mexico1970]

'The feckless' - ah, nothing like a dose of contempt for your fellow humans.

Many of the long-term employed have all manner of issues that need addressing if they are to be of use. Drug addiction is quite common. Low self-esteem. Various forms of illness, including psychological ones. The need to provide child care or to care for older and disabled relatives. If you think all this can be sorted out with a wave of a magic wand you are kidding yourself.

The level of unemployment is low by historic standards and the labour market is tight. This is despite quite high levels of government-approved immigration. As in approved by the government. Not by Jeremy Corbyn. Not by the imaginary 'Blob'. Not by me. By the government, responding to market demand. Do you not understand these elementary concepts?

Most of our native unemployed do not have the skills/education to provide the workers we need most. It's as simple as that. Some could possibly be trained up. But it will take money and time.

As I said, if you seriously want to reduce immigration, you need a plan. A plan that acknowledges that there will be issues for the economy, tax rises and later retirement for all. Anything less is specious bollocks. Like Brexit was. (Another thing we did off-the-cuff without any real plan).

If you want to go down that road, fine. I have no objection in principle. What I object to is unplanned policy damaging our economy and causing chaos. Make no mistake, making a massive reduction in immigration is a fundamental change in the way our economy functions. It means massive government intervention and higher costs. It will also have to be phased in, as you cannot train doctors (for example) overnight.

I'm not talking about people who are unwell just the people who we have who are too lazy to do a shift, just because someone wont work doesn't mean we should import more.

Again, importing more people to complete menial tasks is kicking the problem down the road. why are we treating the 3rd world like babby factories?

As I said mate, selfish.

 

[BrianW]

I'm not talking about people who are unwell just the people who we have who are too lazy to do a shift, just because someone wont work doesn't mean we should import more.

Again, importing more people to complete menial tasks is kicking the problem down the road. why are we treating the 3rd world like babby factories?

As I said mate, selfish.

My question is simple.

The present, Conservative government would get huge political capital from slashing immigration. So why, in fact, have they increased it compared to the time when we were in the EU?

They have complete control over the number of visas issued.

There must be a reason they don't go down the road you seem to want. Fancy that! I suspect it's because they are realistic enough to understand that after the Brexit debacle, it's not on to fuck the economy still more.

By the way, all I have said is that to cut immigration substantially you need a plan. I haven't said that no such plan should be devised. But then again, I'm not in the business of raging at clouds.

 

[mexico1970]

My question is simple.

The present, Conservative government would get huge political capital from slashing immigration. So why, in fact, have they increased it compared to the time when we were in the EU?

They have complete control over the number of visas issued.

There must be a reason they don't go down the road you seem to want. Fancy that! I suspect it's because they are realistic enough to understand that after the Brexit debacle, it's not on to fuck the economy still more.

By the way, all I have said is that to cut immigration substantially you need a plan. I haven't said that no such plan should be devised. But then again, I'm not in the business of raging at clouds.

Get a fucking plan then, just bringing more potential old people in is kicking the problem into the long grass. Somewhere down the line in this leisure laden Utopia we were sold someone must have mentioned coffee and wiping backsides.

Or we could be honest and say that socialist principles are fine as long as we can pontificate whilst all the immigrants come here and do all of our shit jobs whilst the incumbent young people have time to think about the meaning of life and what shapes their navels are.

 

[Alan Harper's Tash]

Bloke gets angry as no one has developed a plan for him.

Maybe there isn’t a functional model for the country where immigration isn’t needed.

We’ve tried shouting at the boats. What’s next?

 

[SkyBlueFlux]

Finland is actually a good country to look at if people are actually interested in solving homelessness - which in this country we are not. They have only about 3,000 homeless people in the whole country, and <1,000 long-term homeless. Their strategy of actually providing compassionate social support, preventative healthcare and no-strings-attached accommodation has been a net economic benefit to the country to the tune of tens of millions. This is simply because it reduces the strain on emergency services having to repeatedly treat or police homeless individuals.

We will never do this here, because at heart we are a country built on spiteful policies (as are most European nations, to be fair). We are happy to actually lose money and allow communities to suffer on principle so that somebody doesn't get something for free.

It's the same with the whole Norway prison system which has a recidivism rate less than half of our own, it's a policy that would never get past voters here, no matter how much it benefits the country. People, rightly or wrongly, hate the idea of it.

(apologies for the source, but it is probably the best write-up of the situation I could find)

A Paradigm Shift in Social Policy: How Finland Conquered Homelessness

For years, the number of homeless people has been rising in Europe. But not in Finland. The country's Housing First program aims to eliminate the problem by 2027. But how?

www.spiegel.de

 

[metalblue]

What you are describing is the level of service that used to exist or at least was the ambition.

That is no longer the case and will continue to be the case under a Tory administration.

The service is outsourced it's delivered according to a sales sector style model, not the type of careers advice and guidance that used to exist.

So we are now talking about hypotheticals and imagining services that used to exist before Tory austerity.

We all know what the point of this policy is, it's to cut welfare by pushing people into just giving in or falling foul of sanctions.

It's like victims of romance fraud going back for the 10th time expecting a different result.

Nobody gets sanctioned with this change. It’s part of the light touch regime. Job centres aren’t outsourced either are they? I would agree if they are only trying to shove you in to a different job for the sake of getting you off their caseload then that’s not really great for the individual.

What I can say from first hand knowledge is a friend of mine had a stroke last year, in her 40s, doctors weren’t optimistic about her recovery. Incredibly 14 months down the line she’s back at work with a package in place that is supporting her getting back to work in her old job to the tune of £30k to cover some equipment she needs but the bulk is to cover her getting taxis to the office over the next 3 years (when she’s not working from home). That’s a DWP system that’s working, that doesn’t feel like it’s underfunded, so it’s not all doom and gloom and broken out there - but she did need to push for these things herself, no one else was going to, which does point to a system with low morale.

 

[SkyBlueFlux]

Bloke gets angry as no one has developed a plan for him.

Maybe there isn’t a functional model for the country where immigration isn’t needed.

We’ve tried shouting at the boats. What’s next?

This is one of my bugbears about the whole immigration debate. It's absolutely steeped to the hilt in discussions that have no built-in pragmatism.

We hopefully all agree that some immigration is necessary and beneficial (as City fans we would be quite hypocritical not to see this), and we all agree that open borders is probably not sensible as it has the potential to overwhelm our infrastructure.

So somewhere between 0 and a million net migrants per year there is an optimal amount of immigration where we get the benefit of skills and labour, but our infrastructure is also achieving a net benefit. Then to pair with that there's also probably an optimal cross-section of immigrants skilled/unskilled, no. of dependents etc.

Yet, every discussion seems to pontificate over these arbitrary extremes of open/closed borders that only a tiny fraction of the population would agree with.

Let some data scientist figure out what that immigration number zenith is and implement an evidence-based policy that ensures we hit it. Everything else just feels totally arbitrary. I have no idea what that number should be, 50,000? 100,000? 500,000? 30% skilled workers? I can't contribute to a discussion where the objective hasn't even been ascertained. My problem is that this government also seemingly doesn't know that objective, or at least haven't communicated it in transparency.

The topic of processing refugee claims is - in my opinion - a totally separate discussion to this, but the two often get conflated, mainly thanks to the Tories deliberately conflating them.

 

[Alan Harper's Tash]

This is one of my bugbears about the whole immigration debate. It's absolutely steeped to the hilt in discussions that have no built-in pragmatism.

We hopefully all agree that some immigration is necessary and beneficial (as City fans we would be quite hypocritical not to see this), and we all agree that open borders is probably not sensible as it has the potential to overwhelm our infrastructure.

So somewhere between 0 and a million net migrants per year there is an optimal amount of immigration where we get the benefit of skills and labour, but our infrastructure is also achieving a net benefit. Then to pair with that there's also probably an optimal cross-section of immigrants skilled/unskilled, no. of dependents etc.

Yet, every discussion seems to pontificate over these arbitrary extremes of open/closed borders that only a tiny fraction of the population would agree with.

Let some data scientist figure out what that immigration number zenith is and implement an evidence-based policy that ensures we hit it. Everything else just feels totally arbitrary. I have no idea what that number should be, 50,000? 100,000? 500,000? 30% skilled workers? I can't contribute to a discussion where the objective hasn't even been ascertained. My problem is that this government also seemingly doesn't know that objective, or at least haven't communicated it in transparency.

The topic of processing refugee claims is - in my opinion - a totally separate discussion to this, but the two often get conflated, mainly thanks to the Tories deliberately conflating them.

Totally agree. We also don’t need to arbitrarily cut numbers by being nasty to students and their dependents. They fund most other student fees, or keep them lower at least.

It’s always reactionary and ill thought out, resulting in long term consequence.

The boat quip was meant for the guy wanting pretty much no immigration and his lack of humanity in his vision. (Which doesn’t have a plan, just the ends without the means)

It's obvious we need immigration. Suggesting otherwise is just silly.

 

[Mr Kobayashi]

Nobody gets sanctioned with this change. It’s part of the light touch regime. Job centres aren’t outsourced either are they? I would agree if they are only trying to shove you in to a different job for the sake of getting you off their caseload then that’s not really great for the individual.

Not the claim handlers no. But employment support is. Google restart programme. Seetec are one of the biggest providers. Seetec Reddit is an interesting read, you'll also get a flavour of the system from the advisors point of view. As I said it's very much about sales, and they have internal leaderboards between staff.

The model is very much Glengarry Glenross.

The government's own release on these changes talks about getting tough on sanctions. Of course it's subject to sanctions.

New rules require 180,000 on Universal Credit to increase working hours

New rules meaning over 180,000 Universal Credit claimants will have to look for more work have come into force today (Monday 13 May), as the Government helps people progress in work and off welfare.

www.gov.uk

What I can say from first hand knowledge is a friend of mine had a stroke last year, in her 40s, doctors weren’t optimistic about her recovery. Incredibly 14 months down the line she’s back at work with a package in place that is supporting her getting back to work in her old job to the tune of £30k to cover some equipment she needs but the bulk is to cover her getting taxis to the office over the next 3 years (when she’s not working from home). That’s a DWP system that’s working, that doesn’t feel like it’s underfunded, so it’s not all doom and gloom and broken out there - but she did need to push for these things herself, no one else was going to, which does point to a system with low morale.

It's good to hear that your friend got support to get back into work but that doesn't really address any of the points made. I didn't say it was about funding that was your take I raised the issue of outsourced companies and the models they operate on.

 

[SkyBlueFlux]

Totally agree. We also don’t need to arbitrarily cut numbers by being nasty to students and their dependents. They fund most other student fees, or keep them lower at least.

It’s always reactionary and ill thought out, resulting in long term consequence.

The boat quip was meant for the guy wanting pretty much no immigration and his lack of humanity in his vision. (Which doesn’t have a plan, just the ends without the means)

It's obvious we need immigration. Suggesting otherwise is just silly.

Agree, besides that, I had a couple of great nights out as a student on my rich international buddies dime. They don't just pay whacking great fees, they also bring money from home and spend fucking tonnes of it in our bars/clubs/shops. One of the Chinese lads on our course bought an entire supermarket out of its ramen so he didn't have to shop for any for the rest of the year. And that's totally normal international student behaviour.

What's more, these are young people who mostly integrate into student life and frequently end up being "culturally British" if they stay after uni. My wife is a good example of that. That level of assimilation is something that the Tommy Robinsons of the world are constantly claiming doesn't exist.

 

[mexico1970]

Agree, besides that, I had a couple of great nights out as a student on my rich international buddies dime. They don't just pay whacking great fees, they also bring money from home and spend fucking tonnes of it in our bars/clubs/shops. One of the Chinese lads on our course bought an entire supermarket out of its ramen so he didn't have to shop for any for the rest of the year. And that's totally normal international student behaviour.

What's more, these are young people who mostly integrate into student life and frequently end up being "culturally British" if they stay after uni. My wife is a good example of that. That level of assimilation is something that the Tommy Robinsons of the world are constantly claiming doesn't exist.

None of that is a typical experience though is it? You are talking about students you're not talking about people who are brought in to this country to do tasks that the population living here right now don't want to do.

Considering the levels of immigration we have had over the last 30 years we should have enough people here to do the shit jobs surely?

You tell a good story but none of it is relevant at all.