@Bury Red post 21470676
Good to know about your background in civil engineering and your ambition to do well. Did you need to pay back the Uni at Grenoble for tuition fees?
On crime
Yes agree with UK criminals going to places like the Costas. My info though comes from policeman I know and local ones on FB and the livestock rustling from the BBC, I don’t know who Dacre is and don’t like Murdoch or the Mail. So is it perception or is it the figures are missing something? They always miss some things, like I have stopped assaults and muggings and frightened off someone breaking into my car neither were reported. I don’t think that is it, perhaps then localities of the crime are changing, I’m on the outer suburbs of London and there are stabbings, rapes, cats being killed and tortured and foreign types going around cars and checking the doors. I also think drug crime is becoming widespread and further lower police numbers mean fewer crimes identified and fewer criminals are being caught.
These London stats show a lot of crime is falling yet violent crime is on the increase:
http://www.ukcrimestats.com/Subdivisions/GLA/2247/
Unemployment
The chart you provide shows unemployment falling yet it does not show how many of those jobs created are low paid meaning people need to income support to survive.
Housing
I agree the housing shortage was not the fault of the EU yet allowing hundreds of thousands of EU workers to come here which would exacerbate the problem was incredibly short sighted and incidentally we then got a new term, hotbedding!
Brexit debates
I must have missed those as all I heard were about skilled migrants keeping the NHS going or others working in the caring industry. I saw a number of the TV debates and disliked the way Farage talked negatively about baristas.
I think we can fill those fruit picking jobs yet it will require some thought, perhaps solutions might include selected prisoners, students in exchange for debt free education, or revert to working visas for a short period each year. It might be a mix for it to work
.
Economy
Have we recovered? Our national debt went up massively and we are paying a massive amount annually in interest because of the crisis, this is why we have austerity so we don’t become like Greece. Our debt is less than GDP but it is about 90% of GDP so we have to keep interest rates low – penalises savers trying to get on the housing market – new demographic 11m renters! It also penalises pensioners on fixed incomes.
Here lots of small shops went under and though other shops have replaced them they are largely charity shops and poundland type shops and still have boarded up shops. Once again predatory banks were an issue, refusing to renew revolving loans to SMEs and then because the SMEs would go bust they then sold the SME assets and made a quick killing and capital gain. We also still have foodbanks which I had not seen before the Banking Crisis.
NHS pays a huge amount of interest under PFI, this goes to banks, IMO there should be charges brought against someone for this and these contracts re-negotiated. They also appear to have a lot of highly paid managers in the NHS >1400 earning > £100,000 and 10,000 earning > £77,000. Not saying some don’t deserve it (80 hour weeks?) yet suspect some non-medical mangers are earning too much for doing too little.