More Bank Holidays - Nice Idea but it highlights establishment ignorance

The Labour Party's proposal to throw in an extra 4 Bank Holidays is a nice idea but it really does highlight the disconnect between those in power and the ordinary people they want to vote for them.

Nowadays, for thousands, a Bank Holiday is just another day in the working week. This is especially true for people in low paid work such as social care, catering or retail. Where others may receive enhanced rates of pay for working the Bank Holiday there is no such benefit for the low paid who receive their minimum wage.

A second reason why this is proposal which is disconnected from the reality of ordinary people is the idea that these Bank Holidays should coincide with the national saints days.

With the exception of St. Andrews Day these all fall in an 8 week period, in this period there are also the two Easter Bank Holidays and, a week after St Georges Day we would have the May Day Bank Holiday! So, in 9 weeks or so, there would be 6 Bank Holidays.

Now, while this may be nice, for the many who have to work on Bank Holidays, there is the additional burden of having to find child care while teachers enjoy their extra days off!

Only the Easter Bank holidays could be guaranteed to actually fall in the school holidays every year and those who need to work, particularly those in low paid jobs face extra costs or loss of earnings.

Surely it would much better to simply promise an increase the the number of statutory holiday entitlement for all workers, so that the time off could be taken at a time convenient for individual workers. It would be a policy headline that would resonate more with those the Labour Party needs to win back and show a greater connection with the reality of the life of the lower paid in the UK nowadays. 

The Real Reason's We Need an October Election

We need a General Election in October, not because of the change in Prime Minister but because of the change in the UK.

In Britain we do not elect the Prime Minister, we elect individual Members of Parliament to represent us and the leader of the party with the most MPs simply becomes Prime Minister by default. There have been plenty of times when the Prime Minister has been in place without an electoral mandate, most recently Gordon Brown and before that John Major from 1990 until the election of 1992.

So, in normal times, a simple change of Prime Minister does not really warrant an election unless there is some constitutional change leading to the people of Britain actually directly electing the Prime Minister.

However these are not normal times.

The country is now split, not by left and right, but by in and out. This split crosses traditional party divides.

The manifestos, visions and ideals that were presented to the electorate in 2015 are now null and void. Now we face a future outside the European Union and this impacts on the lives of all of us.

The British people now need to be able to choose what that future should be. The political parties need to set out how they will negotiate the exit from the EU and what their vision of life outside the EU will be like.

The new Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition must go to the country and explain what they will do to secure the future of the UK, explain how life outside the UK impacts on education, health, social care, employment etc. and what they will do to secure the future of those most in need of help from society. These leaders must go to the people with their vision of a United Kingdom which thrives, their vision of how they will bring British society together.

They must also present their plans for ensuring that leaving the EU doesn’t mean leaving Europe. It is one thing leaving the bureaucracy of the EU system but Britain did not vote to leave wider European cooperation across defence, security, scientific research etc.

The British people must now be given the chance to choose which vision they believe is best for this new future.

On a secondary level we need a General Election so that the electorate can reaffirm or reject their current representative in Parliament. MPs are paid to represent the wishes of the people in their constituency, yet the referendum saw many instances of the MP’s views being completely at odds with the majority of their constituents.

It is only fair that those who wish to continue receiving public money to represent the people of their constituency should ask those people for their support in the post referendum world.

Those are the real reasons we need an October election and it is the duty of those who want to represent us to take their visions of this new Britain to the people and ask us to choose the path to that future. 

Immigration: Heads Buried in Westminster Sand

Cast your minds back to late April 2010, the day Gordon Brown’s microphone was left on following his encounter with Gillian Duffy and, after her reference to Eastern European immigrants, the word he used to describe her.

Fast forward back to today and we discover that nearly a third of people in Britain admit to being race prejudice (compulsory survey warning – the survey only sampled 2,000 people) and this is a significant rise since the all-time low in 2001.

Add to that the somewhat stunning success of UKIP in the recent elections, especially their ‘win’ in the European elections which, frankly, the Labour Party should have won hands down at this point in the electoral cycle and we can see that there is a large portion of the British people who are concerned about immigration in Britain.

An interesting, somewhat ironic, counterpoint to the survey news this morning were the images of immigrant camps and around 800 immigrants being cleared out in Calais, hardly images that will alter the views of those concerned with immigration.

Yet despite this obvious national concern with immigration the Westminster parties seem to treat those concerns somewhat contemptuously or, perhaps more accurately, simply failed to recognise the concerns of a sizable number of the electorate despite the endless warning signs of what is happening.

The Conservatives have been banging on about what they have achieved in terms of immigration yet are totally failing to convince many people of this. Obviously the images of the camps of people waiting to flood into Britain from just across the Channel do not exactly back up their narrative.

The Labour Party appear to have failed to learn the lesson from Gordon Brown’s experience and while they have been focusing on the cost of living issue they have failed to address the reason why many people feel there is a cost of living crisis, which is that to many immigrants have taken British jobs and are pushing down wages in the process. While not inherently true it is a popularly held belief and, as such, needs to be addressed by a party that wants the electorate to put them into Government next year.

Obviously the Liberal Democrats have suffered a killer blow because of this issue. Having been staunchly pro EU the implication is they are pro EU immigration and therefore quite happy with EU immigrants taking British jobs and, unless they take a stance that recognises the concerns of many of the electorate 2015 could be an even worse year for them.

Immigration is a potentially toxic issue which the politicians in Westminster would prefer to go rather than tackle it head on but by burying their heads in the sand they further increase the disillusion with politics in this country. They appear to seek power simply for powers sake rather than power to answer then concerns of the ordinary people who give them power in the first place.

The warning signs of increasing voter concern about immigration have been there since 2010 yet failure to truly address those concerns has resulted in the rise of UKIP which,  in turn, could give the three main parties in Westminster a real headache over the next 12 months.

Immigration and the Need for Sensible Debate

As we plunge headlong toward the European Parliament elections on May 22^nd there seems to be little doubt that IMMIGRATION will be the hot topic of debate throughout the campaign, largely spurred by the rise of UKIP of late.

UKIP has managed to control the immigration agenda with its message of EU immigration puts Britain’s out of work.

Yet this message is over-simplistic and the ‘mainstream’ parties have failed to address this, allowing UKIP to control the immigration discourse. Over the next couple of months we really and truly need to see much more measured and logical debate on the subject, particularly because it is more than one single issue which means there should, in reality, be more than one debate on the issue.

There are at least four separate issues within that all-encompassing word ‘immigration’.

There is the issue of asylum. The blanket attack on immigration does not allow for the consideration of those whose lives are at risk by staying in their own country, are we, as a modern society, prepared to sit back while men, women and children are murdered by regimes which hold no care for human life, only their own greedily acquired thirst for power? While we can take action to try to halt those regimes from operating, these things take time and, in the meantime, obviously we, as a society, need to ensure there is no blood on our hands by leaving those at risk to die.

Then there is the issue of immigration control from outside the EU. Successive Governments have taken action to curb this but there is still a need for qualified workers in the UK to fill the skills gaps that exist. This is less an immigration issue and more a national one. Why do these skills gaps exist and why do Governments not take greater action to ensure that we have, for example, the right number of Doctors trained to meet national needs. By focusing resources on the skills gaps and ensuring that Britain has the necessary skilled workers to meet demand then this form of immigration naturally reduces.

Thirdly, and we are coming to the contentious issues now, is the free movement of peoples through the European Union. The is serious concern among many people about the effect of workers coming in from Eastern Europe, not only in terms of ‘taking’ jobs from British workers but also about pushing down wages.

However, this is as much about the effects of recession as it is about immigration.

When times are good and jobs are plentiful we need those migrant workers to fill the roles us natives often shun! Even now many migrant workers are needed to fill roles in social care to enable providers to operate, if we were to leave the EU and put in place a blanket ban on immigration our already crumbling social care system would be put into more crisis and the lives of many put at risk. Naturally it would be better then to work within the EU, and ask, if Eastern European members are in a state of poverty that forces their nationals to seek work elsewhere what is the EU doing to ensure those nations benefit, economically from membership?

Finally there is the issue of illegal immigration. We have all seen those images of migrants waiting at Calais to climb under lorries or jump on trains and this, to my mind, is the most important area of tackling immigration. It is ILLEGAL, therefore a criminal activity. It also fosters greater illegality as people traffickers con many out of money, and their livelihoods, smuggling them into the UK.

In terms of the EU debate it is obviously better to work within the EU to prevent illegal immigration. Those waiting at Calais have already entered the EU at some point and it is that issue that needs to be tackled, where are they entering and why are they not being stopped. That can only be tackled through cooperative working within the EU.

Leaving the EU would actually make matters worse. Not only would Britain have no leverage over people coming into the EU illegally, there is also the likelihood that those who currently have free movement within the EU would seek to enter the UK illegally.

Over the next few weeks there will be a lot of nonsense spouted about Immigration. It is times for politicians and the media to ensure that the real issues and sensible debate about those issues is at the forefront.

Twitter: @TonyButcher