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There’s something about this phrase that just makes me scream with laughter

Earl Attlee, a Tory heridatary peer

16 thoughts on “There’s something about this phrase that just makes me scream with laughter”

  1. Surreptitious Evil

    More pendantry 🙂

    I’m sure even the first Earl Attlee could spell “hereditary” properly. Okay, he possibly used it as a swear-word …

  2. Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, said that lower economic growth is a price worth paying to radically cut immigration.

    … without comment.

  3. Matt L
    Not quite what he said. The question was if the price of reducing immigration was lower economic growth would you still do it.
    Nige: It’s very unlikely it would, but yes.

  4. I’m too lazy to go through this properly, but the agitprop from the immigrationists in the article seems to be focussed on aggregate GDP rather than GDP per capita, so even if they’re right, it’s trivial to the debate.

  5. Mind you, it would be interesting to see how many of the things demanded in the 1945 Labour Party manifesto were in the 2010 Tory one.

    I mean not Clause 4, obviously. But I bet there were some.

  6. So the story now is that mass immigration is tremendously good news for our UK plc.

    All those smiling Eastern European baristas and African cleaners are contributing more than they and their families consume in housing benefits, tax credits, education and health care, and so on.

    They’ll pay for our state pensions in our decrepitude, in fact.

    I rather doubt it.

  7. Actually the UK needs to keep up immigration particularly of people under 30 to keep the pyramid scheme of the State Pension from failing as the population ages. After all pyramid (ponzi) schemes rely on constantly getting in new entrants to fund the payments to early adopters.

    Also if population is falling and GDP is falling the standard of living on a GDP per capital basis remains constant (and can even grow).

  8. The implication of your comment, Mathew L, is that there is no contribution of immigrants so small that the UK would be better off without them. In fact, that immigrants are a good thing in themselves even if they bring no economic benefit.

    I doubt you would find many voters who would agree.

  9. “I doubt you would find many voters who would agree.”

    But you’ll find 3 political parties & 3 or 4 national newspapers who’d a agree. Not saying you do much in the way of democracy in the UK, anyway, but…

  10. All those smiling Eastern European baristas and African cleaners are contributing more than they and their families consume in housing benefits, tax credits, education and health care, and so on.

    They’ll pay for our state pensions in our decrepitude, in fact.

    I rather doubt it.

    ‘Fraid I don’t agree, Steve; I fear Offshore has it right. The replacement rate for fertility in the UK is 2.1 or thereabouts, and in 2011 for live births the total fertility rate was around 1.96, in other words, we are not replacing ourselves. We need people under 30 to work and pay taxes so that our generation doesn’t starve or freeze to death for lack of a state pension.

    Now, there is a possibility that the majority of children born are destined to be bright, hardworking people who will overwhelmingly be net contributors to society and the taxation system, in which case we’re fine.

  11. @Sam
    There’s a flaw in your argument. Subsequent generations have, historically, been more productive than preceding generations. There’s no reason you can’t have a reducing population with a rising per cap GDP, takes care of your pensions.

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