Keir Starmer Labour Leader
- Thread starter Damien
- Start date
That headline is disgusting. He was talking about taking too many in which means the quality of training in Britain isn’t up to standard. If it was you wouldn’t need to recruit so many from overseas.
BBC knew what they were doing with that headline.
If he’s talking medium-long term, training and the fact we should be bringing back the bursary and increasing pay to encourage people to go into a nursing/other NHS careers then I can see his point? I wouldn’t express it as too many foreigners are being employed in the NHS though like the BBC headline so wonderfully articulates…we aren’t incentivising it enough for people is the issue.
I mean, its true? Its also incredibly immoral. We're not taking swathes of doctors and nurses from Germany and Canada.
People are lying to themselves if they think he's only saying this stuff to get into power and then he'll push really progressive policies.
People might ask "Who are you talking about?" but there is a vocal minority of centrists who, when challenged about almost anything, resort to "Well we can't do anything from the sidelines".
People might ask "Who are you talking about?" but there is a vocal minority of centrists who, when challenged about almost anything, resort to "Well we can't do anything from the sidelines".
This is pretty racist.
My wife is a nurse, I don't know anyone in her profession who is asking for there to be less overseas nurses. Yes we need to drive up domestic recruitment but why focus on this anti-immigrant racist rhetoric?
As the daughter of a NHS doctor from a country which, under a points-based immigration system, probably wouldn’t have qualified - he can feck off.
There are over 10,000 doctor vacancies across the NHS and many consultant posts go unfilled, many because there are no applicants at all. There are over 45,000 nursing vacancies. 40,000 nurses left the NHS last year, many of them senior and well experienced.
He would have been fine under a points based immigration system. Many non-healthcare professionals would not.
that’s also an issue because I’m sure the non-healthcare professionals are the cleaners, cooks, maintenance teams etc. jobs which the average Brit wont be flocking too either, especially at the current salaries they’re paid.
Racist? I mean my wife is a nurse in Trafford, my sister is in law is a matron at Wythenshawe. It's pretty clear when talking to them that reliance of a health service on immigration is always going to cause challenges. Domestic recruitment is the only way the NHS is going to have the resources to deal with the long term demands.
The BBC's headline here doesn't really lend itself to the point he was trying to make, but certainly caught out a few folk on here to grab the pitchforks.
Aye I presume he means for us to be less reliant on overseas recruitment particularly as that in itself has become difficult to achieve without Freedom of Movement.
Absolutely, if we rely on immigration to resource the NHS then we've got a problem. The BBC are probably stoking this with the immigrant rhetoric of the Dover asylum fiasco this week
Re: this topic. The World Service did an excellent podcast on how foreign medical staff are recruited a few weeks ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0d80spp
It’s nice to see Labour voters finally coming to their senses. Soon enough they find the answer
The most hilarious thing about the Mumsnet interview is that all the members of Mumsnet, TERFs, and the rest thought Starmer came across as some kind of radical trans rights defender and hate him for it.
He has managed to upset everyone by saying as little of substance as possible.
NHS staffing levels are at a breaking point where it is totally unrealistic to expect that in the next decade we will become any less reliant on overseas nurses. Even if we did have a mass domestic recruitment drive under Starmer, all that would be doing is plugging holes in a system that is on the edge of collapse. So when he talks about requiring less overseas nurses, why should we give him any benefit of the doubt to interpret that as anything less than a dog whistle? Especially considering he's basically been a non-stop anti-immigration kick for the last week in the news cycle.
Because that's literally what workforce planning is about? Australia had a very similar problem in the past with huge medical and nursing vacancies. Over years, they've trained more and more medical students, more and more nursing students and (importantly) pay and treat them well and now their service runs incredibly well, with a high number of local graduates but also still immigration where its needed.
There is a difference between allowing recruitment of overseas workers in the healthcare system and active recruitment drives in one of the richest countries in the world from countries significantly poorer than it because they can't be bothered to train enough themselves/ retain them. One is fine, the other is actively immoral.
Healthcare workers are an incredibly valuable resource and cost countries a lot of money to train. It is incredibly immoral for the UK government to plunder Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, the Phillipines and recently Nepal and Myanmar too with active recruitment drives to bring thousands of those people over.
Nepal has 0.17 doctors/1000 people and 0.5 nurses. The UK has 3 and 7.8.
Firstly, I don't think the answer to filling low paid jobs should just be to bring in people who are just grateful for any job here and pay them a pittance too. The aim should be to increase the salaries of those jobs so that the people doing them can actually live a decent quality of life, whether they happen to be British or not.
But yeah regardless, was surprised to see the mention of a doctor coming up short at a points based immigration system. A middle class, highly educated, English speaking healthcare professional is never going to be disadvantaged by a points based system in an English speaking country. Doctors would literally be near the top of the list in terms of careers which are in demand and required.
I can't help some people are blinded by a mixture of the BBC headline and their own dislike of Starmer in their responses here.
There are very few healthcare systems where workforce planning seems to be based mostly around recruiting overseas workers, as the NHS increasingly seems to be. Causing mass drain from poor countries for professionals who are required for a semi-reasonable running of a country as an active policy seems incredibly immoral to me. I think in most instances, most would agree but seems to be weirdly accepted in the NHS.
That requires quite a bit of joined up thinking though. And the bit that’s responsible for recruiting from overseas isn’t so much responsible for driving up the levels of readily available U.K. staff. If you’ve got an operating theatre empty because you need scrub nurses, are you going to bring them from overseas and open in 3 months, or train an HCA (2/3 years?).
Yes in the sense that the health secretary isn't over personally in Nepal recruiting these people but also no in the sense that they create the environment which necessitates such an approach and also no in the sense that the health secretary actually has laid out very specific plans for the UK on a national scale to go on active recruitment drives from India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines (More plundering of LEDCs).
In the short term of course the NHS is in a genuinely dire state and the honest truth is that I'm genuinely scared about what this winter is going to be like as the hospitals are already at breaking point. In the long term, there needs to be infinitely better workforce planning and that means training more local nurses, training more local doctors and then actually providing decent salaries and quality of life so that people don't leave once they're burned out.
Australia has done this but the issue is that it requires boring long-term thinking and people aren't going to see the immediate impact. Are the electorate going to care if you say Im going to increase med school places by 10,000/year? Probably not because it will be 5 years minimum until those students are even qualified to start working as doctors and at least another 5 years after that to become a fully qualified GP or up to 10/11 years for some hospital specialties to become consultants (and that's without taking time out for research/parental leave/ burnout etc etc etc). The electorate have probably already forgotten that you exist by that point.
It needs to be done as simaltaneous workforce regimes.
Of course we don't want to think in this way either but making sure we're running our operating theatres here by nabbing Indian or Pakistani staff means there are theatres which aren't running in India and Pakistan anymore.
No, I don’t think such jobs should get paid a pittance either, and I’d gladly get behind a politician who runs on a platform of paying “low skilled” workers more, as well as paying doctors & nurses more to drive up domestic recruitment.
Keir hasn’t made any mention of that, and I didn’t just read the headline. I won’t hold my breath on him committing to it.
He wants to appeal to a select group in this country, and so far his only commitment to immigration has been to admit that his Labour government “wouldn’t be much different” to the Tories, and it’s not lost on me how he equates “open borders” when referring to immigration - its a dog whistle. Anybody who's been through the immigration process in this country knows just how difficult it is, even for someone with a job that is high up on the ladder because of some made up points.
The very idea of a points-based immigration system is steeped in eugenics, so while my dad may have deemed "acceptable" to come into this country under such system - my mum very much would not, and I struggle to see how I'm supposed to support a left-leaning party with such ideologies.
I don't dislike Starmer more or less than 99% of politicians, in fact most of my disdain for him has come as a result of him opening up his mouth and letting me know exactly where he stands on issues that I care about. You can pin blame on the BBC for sensationalising, but the actual article & video of what he said isn't much different.
No wonder the Tories keep winning 
I mean by far the vast majority of countries have these with no issues
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_identity_card_policies_by_country
The conservatives were against it and Blair of course was in favour ... gut feel that means your against it as Blair is clearly the true evil you need to fight against?
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The question could have been answered a lot better, but it’s a bit of a leap to say “supports austerity/tram lines for 5 years “. Saw that one earlier with Raynor where interviewers are just chasing someone to say yes to 10%
Remember when Cameron and Osborne promised to match Labour's spending in 2007, and then used the excuse of the financial crisis to do what they really wanted, which was massive austerity and shrinking the state?
It would be nice to think the same could happen in reverse. Never mind.
Starmer is seems is only into lying about backing left wing policy.
There is a certain type of labour person who really does think the party current stances are all deliberate lies in order to win over right wingers and then it completely change course when in government.
Feel a bit sorry for them tbh.
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It gets worse.
Might be the only time I’ve had sympathy for a Tory. Poor gal.
Also I didn’t know the UK forced its citizens to have children and own multiple pets. Growing up in a 3 bedroom house in Surrey is the most modest up bringing anyone can have.
Can't stand him. Tory cnut.
"A broad church"
The only choice between the two parties is whether you like the colour red or blue.
For what it’s worth, I imagine this is nothing more than a method of damaging his reputation amongst the left. He’s gone along with it because he’s more interested in appealing to the right - because that’s how you get elected.
He really offers no alternative to the Tory regime. He's likely even more authoritarian domestically.