Keir Starmer must keep immigration numbers down AND green-light huge amounts of new infrastructure
Open borders
WHAT was built to handle the record-busting 610,000 surge in our population in one year due to immigration? Not a lot.
Where are all the new homes, schools, GPs’ surgeries, hospitals, roads, power plants or reservoirs needed after importing in 12 months enough people to fill a major city?
Er, they don’t exist.
Having boasted of taking back control of our borders in 2019, the Tories let immigration double.
Scandalously — like the Blair Government years ago — they just left us and our already crippled public services to soak it up.
Yet even now, after the biggest annual population rise since our soldiers returned from World War Two and triggered the baby boom, some on the Labour Left still want Keir Starmer to relax rules and usher even more migrants in.
These halfwits think borders are racist, you see.
This year’s total is likely to be half last year’s due to a crackdown belatedly instigated under Rishi Sunak.
But the new PM must not cave in to those siren voices in his party.
He must keep the numbers down AND green-light huge amounts of new infrastructure . . . simply to try to cope with all those already here.
Votes for kids
IF what we know about Labour’s first King’s Speech is borne out there will be plenty to applaud tomorrow.
A relentless focus on growth, particularly by turbo-charging house-building and modernising the planning system in favour of development, sounds good.
Some measures are more troubling.
Take votes for 16-year-olds, a Labour manifesto pledge which despite the party’s thumping election victory is wildly unpopular with the public, who recognise it for what it is.
A naked attempt to manipulate our democracy in Labour’s favour.
Labour know kids who have never paid a bill, had a full-time job and know little about how the world works lean left.
If the party thought they would vote Tory or Reform in significant numbers they would never consider it.
There is no defensible principle here.
Which is why a few in Labour are said to be equally uneasy about it.
Mr Starmer should bin it.
Don’t despair
TWO finals, a semi-final and a quarter-final in the last four major tournaments.
The Three Lions’ record under Gareth Southgate is far from shabby.
Plenty of nations would envy it. And it IS progress.
We should not forget that, even as we mourn again what might have been.
One day football WILL be coming home. We just know it.
Forget that for now, though. The Olympics starts in ten days.
Come on, Team GB!