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Notes -
The actual story is slightly more complex than that. The dumb rules the Tories passed mean that the OBR has a lot of implicit power, and the treasury’s “projections” showed that immigration was necessary for GDP / tax revenue growth sufficient for planned borrowing not to freak out markets. That was coupled with the fact that 80%+ of Tory MPs, even on the socially conservative Rees Moggian wing of the party, didn’t care at all about immigration. That left Patel and Braverman relatively isolated. Boris himself didn’t care about immigration, and Sunak doesn’t really care about anything, but they alone aren’t responsible more than the party at large.
Yes I was considering talking about the OBR rules, with their explicit assumptions that all immigrants are going to be as productive as natives and the fact that they don't take long term tax and spending into account. All in all a profound failure of the political class, especially since the Boris-wave will all have been granted indefinite leave to remain before the end of the Starmer government. Permanently impoverishing the country for...nothing.
Indeed. But one can hardly be surprised with merely another decade of terrible decision making after almost 100 years of it, punctuated by only the occasional few years of sanity before it goes to shit again.
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