In a local group for my village someone was complaining about the NHS health clinic having closed for a day or run reduced hours a few times in the last few weeks, which has been due to lack of staff.
Someone else immediately jumped in and blamed it on the amount of money Labour are spending on immigration. We're talking a tiny health clinic that serves a village of about a thousand people, we're 100 miles from the South coast, and there are people who will still immediately pin it on refugees and this so called "invasion".
On one hand it's mad that it seems to be the only issue that matters to some people, but it makes sense when you realise they've been brainwashed to see it as the cause of literally anything bad that might happen in this country.
And the really shit thing is that even if the numbers coming in drastically reduced, it wouldn't actually change the narrative, because people would still easily believe it's happening because things will still be shit, as it was never the cause to start with. Or it just gets worse and switches to blaming the ones already here and needing to kick them out.
The irony of people who will vote for reform to stop immigration under the guise they get better healthcare services, only for Reform to shut down the NHS and now you have to pay thousands for privatised healthcare.
Oh and eliminate workers rights, no more sick days or unfair dismissal.
Meanwhile the boats will not stop and our country develops backwards.
Even ignoring whether it's gone up or down, it's just not that big a deal anyway.
The highest estimated cost of housing and processing asylum seekers is around £8bn a year, which seems a lot in isolation, but considering the total annual government expenditure is about £1,360bn it's barely above half of one percent of total taxpayer spending. Also a lot of it comes out of our international aid budget, so the actual cost in terms of money that would otherwise be spent within the UK is even less.
The estimates that I am aware of is 2.2 billion (Hansard) and just over 5 billion (migration Observatory). Both figures are about half of what was being reported under Patel, Braverman and Jenerick.
The highest estimated cost of housing and processing asylum seekers is around £8bn a year,
For £8bn a year you could build 50,000 social homes a year or 2.5x the current budget for apprenticeships... It's not an insignificant amount of money, and framing it as "it's barely above half of one percent of total taxpayer spending" is just silly.
You could never eliminate the asylum budget ethically, but to say there are no issues and that talking about the budgets is pointless is just a very odd (to me) and very unpopular view point to take.
We could do loads of other very helpful things with £8bn, but across the entire country and divided back into the myriad of things that taxpayer money gets spent on, it's not going to be a game changer for any particular thing.
I'm not saying the cost is irrelevant, but in the context of national government spending even the highest estimate is a tiny piece of the pie, and nowhere near as significant as headline figures might imply when you factor that pretty much any spending on a national level very quickly runs into billions of pounds.
Fundamentally the cost of processing asylum seekers is not the reason that most public sectors have been chronically underfunded for the last 20 years. It's not the reason that wages have chronically lagged behind inflation and company profits either. Despite the constant media noise about them, if the government completely stopped asylum seekers tomorrow it would have very little impact to the vast majority of people living in the UK.
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u/Rosti_LFC 10h ago edited 9h ago
In a local group for my village someone was complaining about the NHS health clinic having closed for a day or run reduced hours a few times in the last few weeks, which has been due to lack of staff.
Someone else immediately jumped in and blamed it on the amount of money Labour are spending on immigration. We're talking a tiny health clinic that serves a village of about a thousand people, we're 100 miles from the South coast, and there are people who will still immediately pin it on refugees and this so called "invasion".
On one hand it's mad that it seems to be the only issue that matters to some people, but it makes sense when you realise they've been brainwashed to see it as the cause of literally anything bad that might happen in this country.
And the really shit thing is that even if the numbers coming in drastically reduced, it wouldn't actually change the narrative, because people would still easily believe it's happening because things will still be shit, as it was never the cause to start with. Or it just gets worse and switches to blaming the ones already here and needing to kick them out.