The Daily T: Davey - Starmer is echoing Enoch Powell on immigration
Keir Starmer has promised to take a tougher stance on immigration — but there are fears the government's new ban on the recruitment of foreign care workers could deepen Britain's care crisis, with providers warning it could lead to care home closures due to significant staffing issues.
Since 1997, there have been 25 official reviews into the UK's broken care system, yet little meaningful change. We're joined by someone who has brought the issue to the political forefront: Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey. His moving personal story of caring for his disabled son, John, struck a chord across party lines — and in his new book - Why I Care: And why care matters - he's calling for urgent reform.
He also explains why he disagrees with the Prime Minister's use of language announcing those immigration reforms, why he's confident that he can match Nigel Farage's appeal to former Tory voters, and why Donald Trump's position on the Ukraine-Russia conflict amounts to little more than appeasement of Vladimir Putin.
Plus, it's our first podcast birthday! Tune in for cake, highlights, and a few behind-the-scenes bloopers.
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Telegraph
31 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Diane Abbott is pushing the Left's biggest myth about immigration
The Labour Left were always bound to loathe Sir Keir Starmer's recent speech about the downsides of mass immigration. All the same, one of their objections to it strikes me as somewhat peculiar. At a rally on Saturday, the veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott thundered that Sir Keir's speech was 'nonsense' – because, as she stoutly reminded her audience, 'immigrants built this land'. Stirring stuff. I can see only one small problem. It's not strictly true, is it? Clearly Ms Abbott disagrees. Indeed, she proudly declared that her own parents 'helped to build this country'. As she herself acknowledged, though, they only arrived here from Jamaica in the 1950s. What precisely does Ms Abbott think Britain looked like, before her parents' ship pulled in? A barren, primitive, uncivilised wilderness, whose humble natives dwelt in bushes and subsisted on nettles and raw shrew? Did her parents look around, sigh, and then patiently set about erecting St Paul's Cathedral and Blenheim Palace? I'm not convinced that they did. In fact, I'm reasonably sure that most of this country was built a fair bit earlier, largely by people who were born in it. This is because, until quite recently, only a very small percentage of the population was born abroad. Between 1951 and 2001, the average annual net immigration figure was 7,800. In 2023, by contrast, it was 906,000. It doesn't take a mathematician of Ms Abbott's stature to recognise that this is quite a sharp increase. Still, I don't mean to pick on her. She's far from alone. In recent years, any number of Left-wing politicians and pundits have taken to pushing the line that 'immigrants built Britain'. On last week's edition of the BBC's Question Time, for example, the retired trade union leader Mark Serwotka informed viewers that Britain is only 'the great country it is because of centuries of immigration'. From the Left's point of view, I suppose I can see this tactic's advantages. Any time a voter dares suggest that net immigration of almost a million a year is a touch on the high side, and possibly not entirely sustainable in the longer term, shut them up by telling them that a) it's always been like this, and b) they should be grateful. The risk, though, is that some voters might feel a tiny bit insulted. Because the claim that 'immigrants built Britain' implies that the natives were so ignorant, lazy and useless, they achieved nothing until their superiors arrived from abroad to lift them out of savagery. Come to think of it, I'm reasonably sure that the Left used to have a word for that type of attitude. It was 'colonialism'. If you want a picture of the present... It was a bright cold day in June, and Winston Smith had just sat down at his desk in the Ministry of Truth. This morning he had an important job to do. A dangerous book urgently needed to be memory-holed. It was entitled Nineteen Eighty-Four. For decades, Nineteen Eighty-Four had been acclaimed as a landmark work of literature. Suddenly, however, it had been found to contain the most sickening thoughtcrime. The person who had made this shocking discovery was an American novelist named Dolen Perkins-Valdez. In a foreword she'd been commissioned to write for the book's latest edition, she declared that its main character exhibited attitudes towards women that were appallingly 'problematic'. Not only that, but the book didn't feature any characters who were black. 'A sliver of connection can be difficult for someone like me to find,' she wrote, 'in a novel that does not speak much to race and ethnicity.' Privately, Winston suspected that the reason the book did not speak much to race and ethnicity was that it had been written on a Scottish island by an Edwardian Englishman in the late 1940s. That was probably also the reason why none of its characters identified as genderqueer or pansexual, and why none of them had glued their buttocks to the M25 in support of puberty blockers for Palestine. But it was not Winston's place to make excuses for crimethink. In any case, he was used to such tasks. Not long ago he had been presented with the complete works of a children's author named Roald Dahl, and ordered to replace the entire text of each book with the endlessly repeated phrase 'BE KIND'. Had it been up to him, Winston would have been perfectly willing to rectify the text of Nineteen Eighty-Four, until all traces of crimethink had been eliminated. He could have ensured that it contained the correct number of characters who were 2SLGBTQIA+, neurodivergent or of Colour, and that they all expressed the officially mandated opinions about Islamophobia and net zero. The Ministry, however, had decided that there was no time. Better just to drop the offending object down the memory hole, and move swiftly on to his next task. This one was going to be tough. According to reports, there was a new TV adaptation of Harry Potter on the way, and the cast had completely failed to denounce JK Rowling. Winston had a lot of unpersoning to do.
BBC News
35 minutes ago
- BBC News
Earley MP Yuan Yang praises school's money-saving solar panels
A school will have more money to spend on education thanks to government-funded solar panels, an MP has government announced in March that it was investing £180m installing solar panels in schools and hospitals across the first 11 schools have now had them put in - including Whiteknights Primary School in Reading, which is expected to save around £4,500 a year as a result."Overall that means less money spent on energy and heating bills [and] more money to for the school to actually spend on students' education," said MP for Earley and Woodley Yuan Yang. The Labour MP visited the school on Monday, alongside climate minister Kerry McCarthy. She said she spoke to schoolchildren about climate change and how it should be tackled. "They wanted to talk about all sorts of things, from saving energy to transport," she said."It's often the children who asked the most incitive questions about climate change and the future."Climate minister Kerry McCarthy said the fact schools could save money on their bills was proof that the transition to green power could directly benefit communitiesGreat British Energy is a new publicly owned company set up by the Labour Yang said the solar panels, which would continue generating electricity throughout the weekends and school holidays to be sold back to the national grid, were "a really key investment"."All of this together is part of a diverse energy mix and the more different sources of renewable generation then the more robust - the more secure - an energy system is," she said. You can follow BBC Berkshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
BBC News
35 minutes ago
- BBC News
Thamesmead Waterfront: The London site with room for 15,000 homes
They are two vast sites on the banks of the Thames in east London and you probably haven't heard about the chances are you might are huge development areas called Thamesmead Waterfront and Beckton Riverside. Both are brownfield sites and are earmarked for huge housing developments of thousands of homes, shops and problem is these are among the few areas in London without a rail or Tube link and that is stalling the developers and the mayor want is a commitment from government to an extension of the Dockland Light Railway (DLR).Could that happen in the chancellor's Spending Review? Ed Mayes is the executive director for development at Lendlease, which will develop the Thamesmead site."Our priority for Thamesmead in particular is the DLR extension. We have already got commitment from the mayor and there is commitment from Tfl for the initial stage of funding," he told BBC London. "But what we really need is a government commitment that subject to that initial stage of work they are willing to help fund the actual delivery of the DLR."He says a transport link is crucial."It's been proven across London that transport infrastructure unlocks delivery of homes; that's happened with the Jubilee line and the Elizabeth line, it will continue to happen."This is an area of London that has amazing potential: there could be 15,000 homes at Thamesmead Waterfront, another 15,000 on the north of the river in Beckton - all unlocked by that extension."In addition, there's future potential if it was extended in the future. That will unlock homes, much-needed affordable homes for London, but also the jobs and enterprise that comes with that." It is perhaps no surprise that London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan is framing what transport infrastructure he wants in terms of course, creating housing through transport links is not a new idea in the capital. Just one example is the Metropolitan line creating the suburbs in the north west of London dubbed "Metroland".Today, the main projects on the City Hall wish list are the DLR extension to Beckton Riverside and Thamesmead Waterfront, the Bakerloo extension and the West London of them link areas where thousands of homes could be links do not come cheap though and are beyond the realms of Tfl's budget and so funding would have to come from government.A DLR link to Thamesmead would cost about £1.5bn and involve a tunnel under the Hall said in a statement: "The mayor wants to work in partnership with government to support the national growth agenda. With the right investment and devolution of powers, there is a huge opportunity to unlock growth; create new jobs; attract international investment; and ensure London contributes more to the national economy and the Exchequer's finances." Just down the road from Thamesmead is Abbey Wood. It got an Elizabeth line station three years ago. Once known as the cheapest postcode in London, the area is Lewis is executive director for sustainable places at Peabody, which developed the Southmere Lake site in Abbey Wood. "I think in any part of London that's changing, if there hasn't been an established market or people don't know the area, you need to give some confidence, you need a reason to come and visit," he said. "I think with the arrival of the Elizabeth line, people really understood that it was a new area opening up to a lot of Londoners so we saw people from east London coming here to visit for the first time and recognise all the open areas and green space."People started to recognise this was somewhere they wanted to view and ultimately move to."There have been objections to the Southmere Lake redevelopment, though, with opponents saying some of the homes demolished to make way for it should instead have been refurbished. As regards Thamesmead Waterfront, a project he is also involved in, Mr Lewis says transport infrastructure is critical."I think what's really exciting about the Waterfront is 100 hectares of land that's hardly been developed at all. In London terms that's unheard of."You have two kilometres of the waterfront of the Thames and we have got the capacity to get 15,000 homes built and a million square feet of other uses. "It would be a new neighbourhood for London, but the critical thing we need to make that happen is the arrival of excellent public transport - which is bringing the DLR over to Thamesmead." The government's target is to build 1.5 million new homes by if London can't deliver a large number of new homes, there is little chance the government will hit that number. To do that, it will mean transport infrastructure being funded to reach the undeveloped sites in Thamesmead and Beckton.
