Jordanpolijo
Do you work for the BNP? I mean this quite seriously - you appear to be obsessed with immigration and seem to assume that "getting tough" with immigrants will solve the budgetary crisis.
Well, it won't. Even if we spent no money on social welfare - no pensions, no unemployment benefit, no child benefit, no disability living allowance, etc etc, we'd save £150bn p.a.; still leaving a gap of at least £25bn p.a.. And we're not going to let pensioners starve in the streets.
The Tories (optimistically and vaugely) talk of saving £10bn of the £150bn of social welfare spending: which means £1000 from each of 10 million people per annum. Not sure that that's going to happen - let along £150bn.
And honestly, the amount spent on asylum seekers - some of whom are fleeing persecution, some of whom are not - is a tiny proportion of this £150bn. So please stop banging on about it - it's not a solution.
You may have read the figures in the Defence Industry Council (DIC) report launched at the time of DSEI which called for stimulus spending on defence. If you've not, you can read it here:
Defence Matters Featured Article . The problem is that the DIC report is based on an Oxford Economics report (getdoc/937eb883-56a8-49cf-bc37-16bbca787e3d/Oxford-Economics-report.aspx) which actually shows that the margin benefit of public investment is in the pharmaceutical industry or the construction industry.
So please get your facts right, and spare me the anti-immigrant rants.
S41