Controlled immigration. Use the Australian points based system to attract those we want and reject those we don’t. It is a complete nonsense that we can’t employ engineers from China, India and Brazil yet we are forced to accept unregulated migration from Europe.
Abolish HS2whilst the project has merit the cost is simply too high. The same money spent on a number of other infrastructure projects would have a much bigger impact.
Introduce Grammar Schools. People want them. We need to have schools that the brightest children can aspire to. The damp blanket of fairness for all has blunted our desires and ambitions. Life is not fair and if the less able are to have a better life then the very best must be encouraged to succeed on the world stage.
Get fracking and set up a sovereign wealth fund with proceeds
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Abolish National Insurance. This has become just another tax. It’s is too complicated and costly to manage for businesses.
Simplify the tax system. People work best if they can keep what they earn. Managing a complex tax structure is inefficient and acts as a brake to growth. Often seen as a plaything for politicians tax creates unintended consequences and perverse behaviour.
Immigrants must have private health cover before entering UK. After being productive citizens for a period then they can revert to using the NHS for free.
Oh and leave the EU political integration experiment. No one has voted to be ruled by Europe, few people want to be ruled by Europe and the European structures, budgets and politics don’t work very well. Trade with Europe but return powers to our own government.
Nick, would you like to see immigration controls on British citizens who want to work in or retire to other EU countries? As you know, we’ve been free of these for 40 years, but if we wanted this in the UK, we would have to accept it for our own citizens, wouldn’t we?
Also, UK controls would put up business costs recruiting labour from abroad. What are your views?
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Thank you for your comments Simon.
The reality is that unchecked migration from Europe has placed a huge strain on our public services, which is unaffordable.
Many of the formulas used to work out if migrants are net contributors or not are flawed and don’t include many of the consequences.
I accept that most migrants are hardworking and well intentioned but the additional numbers of people being supported in the country is unsustainable. It’s not just about benefits but schools, hospitals and congestion on the roads to say nothing about community cohesion.
And yet their is a lot of frustration from universities, including Cambridge University, that it is very difficult to get permission for high flyers from non EU countries to remain here. This loss of top talent is a massive cost to our companies and possibly even worse means they go elsewhere in the world and end up as our competitors.
I think some migration is fantastic. I’m just arguing we need to be thinking about global talent, not just European, and that we need to remember we are a small island off the coast of Europe with finite space available. If that means we can’t buy holiday homes in Europe I guess that is the price we must pay for 40 years of unchecked population growth.
What we really don’t want is the political control and inefficiencies that the EU seems to demand. Each of the countries is at a different point in the economic cycle, often poles apart in political thinking and maturity and have very little in common. Why would one organisation work for everyone?
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Nick, Thank you for the response
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There is a lot to discuss here. Viewed globally and historically, we are close economically, politically and culturally to the rest of the EU. But I was really talking about the common market for labour. Don’t you think that taking British citizens out of that market would really harm us?
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I agree with all of your suggestions. Personally, I have no problem with European immigrants who come here to work hard and improve their standard of living. But so many, so fast, has created a social panic which affects the way people feel about their homes and their communities. It’s not all about economics – governments ignore social and cultural upheavals at their peril!
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