General Chat

Lets not forget that some British families have made their homes in the EU.

Despite no longer living here, they too are claiming UK child benefit!

There may be 20 000 signed on to JSA but that is not really the issue.

Recruitment can cost a lot of money. These sort of jobs are not usually recruited one by one with individual applications.

Option (a) use a contractor who will guarantee 7 000 able and qualified workers for the project. Usually more than one agency is asked for a quote including the UK. In this case it would seem that the UK agency could not deliver the required number of people on site at the offered compensation.

Option (b) Place the jobs with JSA and spend weeks and weeks recruiting in the area lots of cost lots of trouble and in the end still a huge shortfall.

I understand that people do not like labour being treated as a tradable commodity but that's the way it is especially for the unskilled and semi skilled. The Nottinghamshire coal field used to have something similar and a few gaffers went from coal face workers to wealthy. It is much the same with immigrant labour.

Cameron either does not understand the EU labour market or he is saying one thing and doing another. Take your pick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMvv3LL94GM

Hi Ann,
I saw that link. But obviously my thoughts are incredibly wrong :-D
I should know that being a female, I'm not meant to have either an opinion, nor quote from a newspaper, as 'someone' knows everything. Rather than point out that what I thought wasn't quite right, he'd rather make a snide comment :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D

I wonder if his nose is getting longer after each speech?

I think its a great start if it happens :-D :-D

Where did I say you were wrong ?
Have you ever tried as a PA to hire a lot of people?
Not being a human resources animal luckily it has never been my lot to hire en masse though I have seen it done.

It is very easy just to fall back on some asinine excuse as ignorant youth , clueless old age , ethnic or gender identity and so on. Why not try putting your point without any of the baggage or deriding people?

fwiw I am a member of the uber discriminated group the WASPs as well as being ancient but I get by. Ask OFITG life is a bunch of roses when you are over 60.

There won't be any curbs on EU immigration. As Cameron has just found out the business and political obstacles are insurrmountable. It is not much easier for non EU given the horse tradng with India for instance.

I agree with Cameron though that obsessing about this issue is nuts.

bof

shame they didn't do it years ago ;-) ;-) ;-)

"Why not try putting your point without any of the baggage or deriding people?"

Pot, kettle, black.

Gosh you also seem to believe you know exactly what my job was/jobs were as well. I expect you're right, I obviously had no clue.

I noted one thing that was missing from David Cameron's speech on immigration and that was an apology for failing to honour the previous promises he made about controlling immigration.

He says he wants to curb the number of people coming here from the EU and other countries, to take advantage of our generous in work benefits, well, if he really wants to reduce the amount spent on in work benefits, perhaps he should concentrate on doing something about low wages and unaffordable rents, it is the tax credits that are given to people in work that are driving up the benefits bill while at the same time these subsidise those organisations that do not pay their workers enough to make ends meet.

There are no accurate figures available to show that benefit tourism is a real problem, but there are various reports which state that most immigrants who come to the UK actually come here to work. The majority of immigrant who have come here have not made the decision to move to the UK lightly, they have done this after giving much thought to making their decision, and figures show that the majority of those who have made the decision to move to the UK - have contributed greatly to our economy.

I think that David Cameron may regret making this speech, apart from not including an apology for breaking his previous promises on immigration, he may find that using this speech as ammunition to deal with the threat his party faces from UKIP - what he may have done is actually given UKIP more ammunition that they can use to attack him ;-)

Well it would indeed by very nice if Tesco ASDA and the fenland farmers could be persauded to add £ 500 / month to the pay check of their min wage people thus doing away with tax credits.

If it were so easy Geo Osbourne would have taken action long ago.

The hard economic truth is that in an open economy wages for the unskilled and semi skilled will always tend to drift downwards while the incomes and assets of the more wealthy will tend to increase. Have a look at the USA over the last 50 years!

Labour ( as in unions not the party) has found that the only way around this is a mix of legislation and union organisation with a closed shop if at all possible. The only part of the labour movement which has managed to maintain a quasi closed shop is the public sector. Even there local government & the NHS ( Unison, NALGO ) are being outflanked by agency contracts and outsourcing, the teaching unions by "assistants" leaving just the central civil service cast(l)e.

Margaret Thatcher took away much of the ability of trade unions to protect their members' earnings. Over the last 30 years av earnings have declined in real terms except for the highly skilled whether on the shop floor or clerical.

So with a totally unregulated labour market things would be really tough for the low paid. Tesco et al would not up their wage offer indeed it would probably fall below the min. wage. Gordon Brown decided to offset the trend using a mix of tax credits / min wage / housing benefit. The result has been a massive transfer of money from the well off to the poor and the avoidance of Dickensian style misery. For this and keeping the UK out of the €uro G Brown is castigated. Strange thing politics. ( Thatcher and Cromwell, both keen grinders down of the poor, get statues. )

All well and good but other EU countries esp eastern Europe are far less generous hence the large number of people who have come to work in the UK.

As OFITG says it is the potent appeal of jobs + the minimum wage which is the magnet not in work benefits. For skilled people ( over half the immigrants ) the wage differentials of > 100% are irresistible.

Yes, it is damaging east Europe economies. They will have to increase wages at some point and it is this that will eventually fix the problem. It will take a generation to do so.

So after a lot of huffing and puffing and no ifs buts and whens the mouse has been produced ... denial of in work benefits for 4 years in a future coalition govt - but only if Romania and others agree. This will not make the faintest impact on EU immigration. It will really rub up the Poles the wrong way and is stupid as the Poles politically tend to be right wing !!!!!

As OFITG says the main impact will be to put wind in the sails of UKIP.

The elephant in the room of the UK economy is the abysmal state of education and especially primary education. Far too much is not even mediocre. Don't blame the teachers they are doing their best but without some pretty big changes in funding then the immigration train wreck will go on and on. The revival and popularity of skilled craft apprenticeships is a ray of sunshine.

"Contol of borders" is simply not possible for an open democratic country. It is a fascist concept.

RolloTheRed - you make a lot of valid points in that post - having read and listened to various commentators opinions on David Cameron's speech - own goal comes to mind and it is rumoured he has a new advisor - Corporal Jones from Dad's Army :-D

Might be a little off topic but this is an interesting article, follow on from the "is there no one left in Britainwho can make a sandwich" headline.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/14/outrage-among-northampton-over-sandwich-jobs-insult

The original "Common Market" was half a dozen or so Countries which were very similar economically and culturally, even if they have had a few scraps in the past.
Convergence and free movement was therefore not a big issue.
The eastward expansion has brought in many Countries whose present stage of development is not compatible with the founding members.
With Turkey aiming to join, those differences will be even more marked.

Another issue is the use of the "net migration" figure and "tens of thousands" as a target. That net figure currently comprises, in round terms, 600,000 inward migrants and 400,000 leavers. I don't know the exact breakdown but suspect that a large proportion of the inward migration is from outside the EU and the outward migration is largely indigenous British and EU nationals returning home after working here for a time, thus resulting in a gradual and permanent change in the ethnic make-up of the population.

Wow xenophobia is alive and kicking here on Genes.

Will this policy of Camerons work both ways and all ex-pats living in EU sunnier climes be forced to come home!!!!

I was on the phone to Sky a few nights ago and was speaking to a lovely young American lad. We got chatting and it turned out he was actually from Lithuania, he had cultivated a perfect US accent, as he found people judged him on his accent.

What a sorry state of affairs. How sad are we?!?.

Well said Dazed :-)

Brian's comments about the founding of the EU are wildly out.

The 6 founding countries did not have anything like a rough equality of standard of living. Most of Italy and half France was miles behind. They still are. There was a lot of Italian immigration to Germany.

Turks. From the mid 1950s Germany had a massive labour shortage. Millions (literally) of young Turks migrated to Germany and now comprise a significant chunk of the population. Germany has recently changed its nationality law to make it much easier for Turks to obtain German nationality and choose to have dual nationality. Thus to say the prospect of Turkey joining the EU would have an impact is plain silly as 4 million people of Turkish origin already live in German !!! The sky has not fallen in neither has there been blood on the tracks. OTOH the German soccer side has taken advantage :-)

fwiw a. the treaty says up front very clearly that the primary objective is political "ever closer union" not a common market.
b. free movement of people also in the founding treaty.
If people preferred to read the Daily Express rather than read the treaty resume - which was sent to every UK household free then too bad.

For accuracy, according to the most recent Migration Statistics Quarterly Report released by the Office for National Statistics(ONS), the Net Migration to the UK in the year ending June 2014, was 260,000, an increased from 182,000 in the previous year.

Some 583,000 people immigrated to the UK in the year ending June 2014, a statistically significant increase from 502,000 in the previous 12 months. There were statistically significant increases in immigration of EU (up 45,000) and non-EU (up 30,000) citizens.

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/migration1/migration-statistics-quarterly-report/november-2014/index.html

The figures suggest that Net Migration is now approximately 16,000 higher than it was when the coalition government was formed in 2010 :-(

This report on the referendum that took place in Switzerland on the issue of immigration is quite interesting:-

Voters in Switzerland have decisively rejected a proposal to cut net immigration to no more than 0.2% of the population, partial results suggest.

Data from a majority of the country's 26 cantons show about 74% voting no in Sunday's referendum.

Supporters of the measure argued that it would have reduced pressure on the country's resources. Opponents said it would have been bad for the economy.

Around a quarter of Switzerland's eight million people are foreigners.

The measure would have required the government to reduce immigration from about 80,000 to 16,000 people a year.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30267042