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Hasn’t the UK in whole been suffering enormously the last couple of years due to its own self-inflicted policy decisions? It isn’t just a lot of red tape inhibiting new development from taking places but across all sectors there’s a massive national underinvestment in research, infrastructure and basic labor productivity. I’ve heard of the tax system being so punitive over there that it’s choking the fuck out of otherwise ambitious people. I’ve read of cases of doctors getting taxed in excess of 60% for taking on more shifts (there were other qualifying factors as well), but it would kill my motivation too. University graduates are also no longer the golden ticket to success they once were. That’s increasingly having an impact here in the US too.
All of these things are true, but they hit much harder and are more difficult to avoid when there's less money in the system overall.
You said it yourself: the tax system is punitive, and there's massive underinvestment. So either you have to raise taxes to pay for investment, continue to underinvest, borrow to invest, or explain to the pensioners and the disabled that the government is going to significantly reduce the support they receive in order to give the money to posh boys like me so we can become rich(er).
That last has to be followed by looking for your genitalia because the mob has cut them off and nailed them to a tree in Rutland haha.
They could cut the 'import Afghans and house them in hotels secretly with gag orders' budget... Or refrain from giving Mauritius money and land.
There's no shortage of money in the UK, the British government just knowingly allocates it towards bad ends.
Come on, you know it’s not that easy. I have no love for our current government but the Afghans are coming of their own accord.
The options are:
The general public won’t stand for 1 and 2, the left and half the right won’t stand for 3, so we get 4.
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Edit: the Mauritius stuff really is unforgivably stupid. Stopping it certainly won’t save Britain but spending the 10bn it’s going to cost us on 50m small business investment per year for 20 years would certainly be nice. Doesn’t change the fundamentals though. Britain isn’t poor because the government is wasteful, it’s poor because the alternative is letting people freeze/starve/die of illness while we could save them and choose not to, and we aren’t prepared for that.
No, it's not merely the random Afghans that make their own way that I'm talking about but the ones that the government went out of their way to resettle in the UK, ostensibly because some idiot leaked some data. It was thought the Taliban might do recriminations against Afghans that worked with British forces there. Realistically the Taliban have other concerns.
That's what I'm talking about. I think the UK should have spent those billions on British people, not Afghans.
I'm sorry, then I misunderstood you. I thought you were talking about 'asylum seekers' in general and using Afghans as shorthand.
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Turn backs worked extremely well for Australia. And I really doubt that the public would erupt into anger that these poor defenceless 25 year old men were getting sent back to the hellscape that is...France.
Also, the government did literally import Afghans in secret, in addition to letting them come across in small boats.
The turnbacks worked in Australia because they towed the boats out into international waters, and left them with enough fuel to reach only Papua New Guinea. I guess we could technically do the same with France - and would even be up for trying - but the French have a lot more tools to make their displeasure known.
If Britain didn't make their displeasure with France known, why would it go the other way around? If the French are so displeased, they can stop letting these people into France to begin with.
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They're coming "on their own accord" because they know they will be welcomed by the government.
If the general public can tolerate how the rape gangs were being handled, surely they can handle either of these two. At the very least it's worth a try.
What's the logic here? Too expensive?
Also what happened to "send them back directly where they came from. Don't ask any questions, don't bother with process, just send them back"? There's no way a plane ticket costs more than these hotels.
Violation of their human rights to be sent to a potentially unsafe country. For some any country bad enough to deter people from showing up and making asylum claims is too bad to send potential refugees to. Rwanda is either too bad or too expensive for not being bad enough.
The home countries may not want to receive them back, assuming they didn't burn all identifying documents. Which they do.
I don't think this would apply to "half of the right" like he said.
Afghanistan is willing, from what I understand.
There's always genetic analysis, I suppose.
The right wing electorate was always the most favorable (a quick glance at Yougov had it ~70% approval). At best you can maybe say that the right wing elite were the ones split on doing what it took to confront the judiciary and activists. But even that doesn't seem to be true anymore. I don't think I've ever heard anyone spit the common cliches and platitudes like Jeremy Hunt and even he suggested simply leaving the ECHR and changing the law
There'll be internal resistance to it too, going by past evidence on the grounds that it doesn't work perfectly I'm sure.
And, of course, a country will likely feel it easier to reject someone whose citizenship was verified in some speculative way than if you caught them with passports and all.
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Broadly my model is that 95% of the Labour party and 35% of the Tory party don't want restrictions on 'refugees' no matter what, so they're a dead loss. 3 is therefore viable but very difficult to get through Parliament in its current configuration.
The public does want something done, but balks if it's visibly violent or leads to deaths. So 1 and 2 are out.
is difficult practically. There are three questions: how do you get them on the planes, how do you make the planes carry them, and how do you make the destination let the planes land / take them off the planes?
Mostly the relevant countries don't want these people back and / or it would be unpopular to be seen to take them back. So dedicated transports are unlikely to be permitted to land. For weaker countries you could always start landing unapproved somewhere, but that is difficult and expensive and technically an act of war. If you can't do that, you could put them on passenger jets, but that's expensive and you need a minder to supervise them and passengers / airlines are likely to protest or grandstand.
Not saying it's impossible with enough will, but it's not straightforward. By and large it doesn't beat the Rwanda plan.
I'd like to see some evidence that this is an organic property of "the public", rather than a media environment imposed top-down. Again it would be a bit odd if their reaction to it would be greater than the reaction to the rape gang scandal.
The same way you do with every deported individual.
In the case of Afghans, the Taliban is perfectly happy to take their people back, it's the western governments that don't want to do it.
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Yeah, and that's the problem I was alluding to. Because these policies failures compound among one another. I can’t imagine immigration is helping this along either, unless you’re relying on them as a permanent underclass to finance your way out of crises. Good luck resolving that problem. There’s even been an exodus of people out here where I am in the US, moving into other states that are less socially and economically hampered by bad policy.
Agree on all counts. My initial post was more responding to @WhiningCoil by explaining a little bit of why sometimes systemic context means that Indian Bill Gates can't drop out of his obviously pointless schooling and start achieving great things. A lot of things have to go right in your country before 'drop out of school, change the world' becomes an option even for the best of us. In a landed aristocracy things are different - you gate your geniuses by accident of birth but those of them who are lucky get the resources to do something useful with their time.
Unless his suggestion is that Indian geniuses should drop out of school and apply immediately for emigration since that is their ultimate goal anyway, but AFAIK visas are gated on credentials not IQ so that doesn't work.
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