We are in a bad shape generally in the UK, a lot of this country is pretty behind other g8 nations these days on quite a few key development metrics.
Austerity measures also played a massive part in where we are now. Brexit hasn't helped either.
It's a painful to take a look at cities like London and Vancouver and compare them to SF and Seattle.
I can’t imagine how bad the standard of living in the Uk has got.
The only people living in 4+ bed detached / semi detached houses are people with inherited wealth or huge joint incomes. Doctors, senior software engineers, people who work in finance. Your average middle class professionals, teachers, civil servants, lecturers, journalists and so on, will all have gone down a rung in the ladder. They're doing OK, but probably living in a smaller terraced house or maybe a flat.
1 in 5 people in England were not born there and in central London boroughs around half (or more) of the populations of various boroughs live in social housing. The poverty you describe is not a result of government indifference to poverty, it's sustained and generated by policies designed to ease poverty.
You need a large percentage of the population to have 3-4 kids to be a sustainable country.
Explain the causal effect especially apropos small boat arrivals behind this apparently inevitable gravitational force
You can’t have both negative population growth and 300,000+ people leaving the country every year for very long without massive issues. And those massive issues are going to push even more people to leave resulting in even more issues. Which would effectively force the country to promote immigration even if it doesn’t want immigrants the UK needs them.
Alternatively, if the population growth rate was positive then the country wouldn’t have nearly the need for immigrants to be stable.
What's worse is that, those leaving presumably are capable of making it in "better" economies. So in pure GDP-per capita-producing terms, you just exchanged some natives for worse performers.
That's what happens when you're not in the top of the totem of the immigration market.
It’s fairly common globally for immigrants to then move to another country. But that’s been especially true in the EU.
According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), in the year ending June 2020, an estimated 673,000 people emigrated from the UK. This includes both UK-born and non-UK-born individuals. Of the total emigrants, approximately 316,000 (47%) were UK-born, and approximately 357,000 (53%) were non-UK-born. The non-UK-born emigrants included both non-British citizens and British citizens who were born outside the UK.
The 2019 breakdown was 397k emigrants of which 131k where British, 151k EU, and 115k non-EU.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
It’s going to be interesting to see how things settle down in a post Brexit and COVID UK.
Granted, yes, we had little control over migration from the EU from 2004 to 2016. But very few of London's working poor are of Eastern European heritage - anyone from there who finds it too difficult here tends to head back.
Asylum seekers / "small boats" migrant numbers are absolutely tiny relative to the London population.
London does have a high % of first-generation immigrants - but most of them are now-elderly Caribbeans, South Asians, Mediterraneans, West Africans who came over in the 60s and 70s. Outside of a few areas, non-Anglo-looking people in their 30s and under were overwhelmingly born here.
It's clearly not controlled enough. That's a city approximately the size of Leicester every year. Nobody voted for this.
[1] https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo....
Can you please define how an objective simple piece of data is somehow biased?
Demonstrably untrue. 1 in 5 people are foreign born. Over six million people received indefinite leave to remain specifically through the brexit process. "Small boat landings" brought a city the size of Canterbury to the UK last year alone fleeing France. Over one million visas were issued last year.
Can you explain what's controlled about small boat landings?
Search "10 poorest towns in England". There will be no immigrants anywhere. Search "most deprived areas in Europe" and half of them are in Britain. [2] May I remind you that EU also contains Romania and Poland?
Have you looked at GDP per capita of cities? Once you remove London/Oxford/Cambridge, the country is so poor.
Second biggest city in UK is Birmingham, has GDP per capita $30,000. Second biggest city in Germany is Hamburg, has GDP per capita $85,000
You have to compare most of Britain to corrupt, post soviet countries to find comparable standard of living:
Take Prague, Czech republic, GDP PP is $57,000, Double of Birmingham.
So you go to Warsaw, Poland, it was completely destroyed in the war, is really corrupt, still has higher GDP than Birmingham, $32,000.
North & East Ayrshire has GDP €16,200. You might as well live in Siberia! Yakutia has GDP of $18,000 [5]
> The poverty you describe is... sustained and generated by policies designed to ease poverty.
Yes, I guess you could pursue the plan of starving poor to death, do a rerun of Ireland 1850's
London is fucked because housing. Housing in London is fucked because most of UK provides living standards of Poland.
References: 1- https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/eastofengland/essex/E340... 2 - https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/cornwall-sec...
5 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_subjects_of_Ru...
What I see though are governments which oppress their people to the point of illness, the way abused animals stop procreating — and then rather than confront that behavior in themselves, buy replacements they subsequently abuse the same way.
But ignoring that, the end result is the same whether people can't or won't figure out how to do it: immigration is an increasing necessity, and as more and more countries tip below replacement it will lead to increasingly desperate measures to compete for it.
With respect to oppression, the two most consistent factors correlating with falling birth rates is higher education and increased wealth.
A manual laborer start to get productive at 16, and stop after 50, depending on his form.
So basically, you avoid paying for his education, he is productive right away, and with some luck, he will retire in his country (or the state may deport him) and die there.
Not saying it's good, but that's the way the world work right now.
Demographics of our country guarantee a demographic collapse. Not as bad as say Japan or Germany, but enough of an impact to maintain wage inflation. The level of immigration that would be required to reverse that is currently not acceptable to our electorate (in the main). Which is unfortunate.
At the same time a job at Pret pays £20k / year and you can’t really find a room in London for less than £700 / month.
Now about being poor. It took me 13 years, 4 of which working in Saudi Arabia, and a career change into software engineering, to make enough money to pay off my debts from school and start earning enough to live on without worrying about the next bill and looking after my wife and kids. Most immigrants I know do work hard. There is also a large swathe of people (immigrants and natives) who for variety of reasons rely on the welfare state. I do agree that welfare state should be downsized significantly. The reality, perhaps surprisingly, is that such a downsizing will hit the natives the most.
Did you pay resident fees or foreign student fees? If you paid resident fees the cost of your education, would have been heavily subsidised by the British tax payer [1] . Given you spent so long in education that will have been a considerable burden. Probably as much as half.
Most people earning less than £40k are a net drain on the Exchequer. An increasingly small percentage of people are propping up the country
[1] https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2020/01/29/how-much-should-taxpayers-...
If you were a legal resident of the UK you would not have been liable for international fees.