Rob, I don't want to be rude but you are really out of touch. Do you have any idea of the demographics of the immigrants if all restrictions were removed.? They would be very heavily biased towards low skilled large extended families from Africa and the Middle East. The strain on education and the NHS would be huge and if was unrestricted it could run into hundreds of thousands or more. I have voted and worked for Labour for 45 years .I very much doubt that I will vote for Corbyn.
CT, I am surprised that you of all people have swallowed the Daily Mail's scaremongering unquestioningly. Extraordinary politics of fear. They say you get more conservative as you get older. Case in point.
It's not a matter of C/conservative. I am above all a social liberal. My fear is an influx of people whose natural inclinations are to deny people their freedom on the basis of their gender and/or sexuality. Women's and LGBT rights have been hard won over the last fifty years. I would be very happy with Atheist refugees.
It doesn't offend me in the slightest! It made me smile that you were making it easy - I've already made the point that you have succumbed to the Daily Mail style fear-mongering. You just proved that point. Irrational fear, that's all it is. I can't change your mind on this, because your fear is irrational, so nothing I can do. Debate over.
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But just how irrational is people's concern over immigration? What Corbyn appears to be saying is this: Just open the gates, bring us your huddled masses. There is no recognition of what the numbers might be and who they might be. If you were a man in say Libya, Tunisia or Syria and you were having to work twelve hours a day seven days a week to support a large family the UK will look like the promised land. You could quite reasonably expect to work forty hours a week and have a substantially higher standard of living. The problem is of course that housing, jobs, health care and education won't exist to cope with the numbers that might come. Because let's be clear Corbyn isn't saying that we should just take the refugees but also those who, quite understandably, see this country as an opportunity for advancement. We have no idea how many would be attracted here, it might be five million, what do you do then? The Left have always embraced simplistic economics. I ran a business for nearly forty years and I tried to use the profits to improve the lives of my employees and their families because I considered that I had enough. But it didn't alter the fact that I had to make hard decisions at times of recession. People on the left seem to think that employers are all wealthy but some are and some are not. I made a bloody good living but I doubt that over my career I made much more than MrsCT who is a schoolteacher. As a Labour councillor I represented a ward that had never been anything but safe Tory. People voted for me because I didn't scare them. Corbyn will frighten the Mail readers to the core. For once they maybe have something to be frightened about. It isnt 1975 any more its 2015. A huge middle class grieves over a dead child on a beach one day then gets on with out blinging their neigbours the next. Age doesn't make you conservative necessarily but it does make you cynical - with very good reason.
We will have to see what actual policies come out from the new leadership, but the fac that so mnay of the current frontbench are resigning suggests that thye feel pretty uncomfortable with the prospect of what might happen. If they have that opinion then it does not bode well for the party outside of Westminster and the population at large.
You're ducking the irrational part. The irrational part is you go from not knowing whether there will be any impact to then speaking as if we're going to have the Great Horde of Attila descending upon our under-prepared country. There is absolutely no evidence that this will happen. In any event, immigration policy only has a partial impact on net immigration (as shown by net immigration going up in the last two years...) But there's no point having this discussion, because as far as you are concerned, irrationally, it is going to happen. So all your consequential points make perfect sense. In any event, I suspect it's a hardline policy for the internal campaign, much like the extremists in the Republican primaries. It will be fine-tuned and tweaked to sound more electable. Immigration and migrants are good things, he's right. But that's just simply not electable and that's another reason why it simply won't happen and therefore is an irrational fear.
I think it's incredibly petulant, personally. I'm particularly disappointed that Yvette has ruled herself out of being part of his shadow cabinet, especially as in his acceptance speech he said that he wanted to adopt an inclusive approach across all wings of the party. I think she could have had an important part to play and could have at least sat down and talked with him.
1) Sorry, but what is 'Great Britain'? It is a fiction of the English who want to believe that the 'United Kingdom' really exists and has the support of people outside the Home Counties. Without a media scare campaign, Scotland would most likely have voted for independence, and next time around almost certainly will. Scotland and Wales are colonies run by an English (Tory) administration (one MP in Scotland I believe, two or three? in Wales). There are cities in the North of England where anyone who admits to being Tory is likely to be run out of town. Britain as a meaningful, unified political unit is dead. 2) Which 'Great Britain' do you think these perfidious left-wingers are destroying? The Britain that gave refuge to more than 50,000 Huguenots? The Britain which offered the right of free speech to people like Marx and Voltaire? The Britain which took in thousands of people who were fleeing Nazi Germany? It may surprise you to know that some of us do not see the essence of Britishness being this nasty, narrow-minded xenophobia which now seems to have become the lowest common denominator of all political parties and reaches its apotheosis in the crass, belligerent, anti-foreigner, uneducated ignorance of UKIP.
How can you be so cruel? Using all those big words to him, he's only just learned how to do proper joined-up writing! Shame on you!
So what you are saying effectively is that we should not believe Corbyn when he says that he is going to allow unlimited immigration because he just said it to get elected? I'd like to believe that because although I resigned from the Labour Party today ( I joined in May 1970) it would still allow me to vote for them, which if they maintain his claimed policy I certainly won't. Net immigration is a nonsense because if a middle class family leaves to take up work in the USA or to retire to The Dordogne and are replaced by a Muslim family from the Middle East, or more likely three or four young single men then that's perfectly ok. Personally I think that it's bad enough having any sort of religious people in the country telling others what to do on behalf of their own particular sky pixey. The Huguenots,Jews etc were entirely different, they had no aspirations to convert their hosts to their religion.
