Save me from the madness!

Oh what a perfect storm that has been created!

I find the motivation for this measure of to help with the cost of living crisis interesting. I wonder how much realistically this money can help. It also begs the question why wasn't this done 5 years ago if it can be done?

Starting to go a bit exponential. These price rises will radically alter society I feel. They'll take more money away from mortgages then any interest rate rise will. Suddenly all those gas guzzling sports and 4x4 will really look unattractive. I think a recession is coming now.

The EU (mainly Greece) returns asylum seekers to Turkey to discourage dangerous crossings and that seems to have had an impact in reducing numbers. Turkey isn't in the EU. So it does seem possible to address and discourage people smuggling without all parties being in the EU where the will exists. Poland has a huge fence manned by its Army to stop asylum seekers from Belarus coming across its border. Hungary does something similar with its own. It seems that unpleasant actions can be done to stop the problem if you are in the EU, but if the UK tries there is international criticism and a lack of cooperation. Whilst asylum seekers crossing the Channel dangerously and illegally get to stay in the country for several years the problem will continue. Ultimately I'm not convinced it helps the asylum seeker either, they waste several of their most prime years waiting around.

I guess the risk is that this works in many areas of the country providing you can ride it out long enough. Sometimes life happens and people need to move before the next high tide and they can end up with quite a loss. There were lots of 'mortgage prisoners' in just this position. Having played the cautious game I wish I had taken on a bigger mortgage back in 2012, though this is an easy thing to beat myself up with in hindsight. In reality, marriage troubles, redundancy or critical illness could have made such a move a disaster for me, and at the time I didn't know I would be fortunate enough to not experience any to date.

Yeah, it's causing all sort of unintentional consequences and the pandemic ruined what would have been an obvious increase in the Higher Income Child Benefit Tax Charge as the higher rate of income tax was set to go over this level which would have made a linguistic nonsense of it all, but now it's frozen and we have rampant inflation more and more people will get hit. I realise at this salary level the general person will think, "What a lovely problem to have," but if you're a single income family it really isn't a lot to live off these days: I have an extended semi, in a nothing special northern town, one car family, foreign holiday once every 3 years on average (UK hols mainly), no expensive hobbies, no high fashion / tech addiction in the family, and all the money is gone each month these days.

I'm in a similar position to this. A promotion at work would mean an extra £10k, earlier on in my career such a big increase would have been an easy YES. Now, I have a wife who at home who is stressed out juggling child care responsibilities, the promotion would mean more time away from the family, more commuting costs, withdrawal of child benefit meaning I get to keep 31p in every £1 I earn between £50k and £60k, and a load of stress. When I did the sums, out of my potential amazing £10k per year extra promotion, I got to keep £65 a week out of which I had to pay my extra commuting costs from more time in the office. The negatives outweighed the positives by a massive amount. Granted a big chunk of this is to do with having kids, and a child less (or someone who's kids had grown up) would not see the withdrawal of child benefit attached to the job. I have some sympathy for my company, they are offering a decent extra amount, it is the government taxation and benefit system that then makes that extra amount turn into very little.

How many workers commuting budget has been spent on utilities and food price increases?

I don't think the elite care about the currency being trashed. Most of their wealth is in assets. Assets like London property, which with a high speed rail link becomes a slightly more valuable asset. Assets like businesses based in London that can now extend their talent pool reach out to Birmingham to grab staff on a cheaper wage and make them travel to London occasionally at no notice and avoiding hotel's etc. Assets like HS2 itself, a nice government backed money making machine. If some everyday people's savings in £'s get trashed well that's unfortunate.

The issue with the UK population density wise is that most of the population is in England. Scotland has a perfectly fine population density, Wales is getting higher, but England's is very high, and that even takes in Cumbria, Northumberland, North Yorkshire and Cornwall which are pretty light on numbers.

There is an issue with housing refugees despite the noble intention. The existing undocumented migrants have already overflowed into many hotel around the country. We have private citizens offering up spare rooms but lots of concern is being raised over this, who'd have thought the nation with the average smallest space homes in Western Europe would have issues finding non-single men to house predominantly female refugees from Ukraine? https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/04/1116162

Let's be fair, we spent something like 3 years in the shoe shop discussing the details of the order, with two family conferences to discuss and reconfirm the type of shoes (general elections) required, and the parents got together on countless occasions to discuss in fine detail (debates in Parliament).

Maybe immigrants are attracted to wealthy places? I'm not aware of greater immigration restrictions being in place in Carlisle then London, so it must be immigrants choosing London rather then Carlisle rejecting immigrants

This topic seems to be getting very personal, which is a shame. It's definitely a difficult topic with lots of complications and unintended consequences. How many people can we integrate, over what timescales? Do we have the housing (both short term and long term) and local infrastructure. What are the standards expected (tents as in Jordan, Lebanon etc, would that work in the UK given what we see at Glastonbury? How about political characteristics of acceptable host countries, how many countries in the globe meet that criteria?). How do we assess our 'fair share,' by percentage of existing population? By relative population density? Do we take recent immigration intake into account? Is it better for some countries that are over capacity to contribute financially instead so less well off countries with capacity but without means can take their share on then? I think it is right to debate the realities of how we're going to support and integrate migrants so we can achieve the best outcome for the money, space, quality of life expectations, and recognition that as we live in a fortunate country we should be doing something. The focus on which country houses the most though may be a fairly 2D view though.

Not really a fair assessment. On a sixpence the Gov changed direction and said previously agreed approaches to using Huawei kit were no longer acceptable. It takes a long time to negotiate a new supplier deal and do a nationwide rollout where every km or two new kit needs to be installed. Throw in a global semiconductor shortage and covid delays and we have something close to a perfect storm.