The Issue I've Been Avoiding

I think one problem is that the rich are good at making themselves and their obscene wealth invisible, whereas immigrants are highly visible. How to make the rich visible?

I sit with my granddaughter who is 16. Her generation have been purposely absent from engaging with politics, economy and how wheels can turn ever so unfairly. We watch your vids together and we pause them as you raise each issue and we talk about it between us, learning and growing, and then push play again...rinse and repeat. You are education a whole new generation my friend. In my granddaughters eyes you bring real to reality. Bless you mate.

Labour and conservatives - two cheeks of the same backside!

Gary, respectfully, you still haven't done a video on immigration

I would say good start is to remind that immigration policies are mainly driven by the rich that want to increase pressure on labour market and drive wages down when system is becoming destabilized for working class they sell scapegoat with the same people they pulled in with policies they lobbied. Just explain the process. It is very common that immigration is connected to left policies but inherently these policies serve needs of the business class.

You haven't been failing Gary, the fact that you're behind a movement not only in the UK but in other comparable countries, your reach is more important than you think. It's a crucial time.

Immigration exacerbates inequality. Wages are driven down (supply of labour increases), and profits (from walth assets) grow as a result. You must know this already Gary. The fight against inequality needs to have an analytical approach to immigration. At the same time, a society without empathy, towards people who want to join it, is not a healthy one. You can say that a solution to the problem is hard to find but lets start by recognizing reality.

One of the biggest reasons the housing market is so competitive in Manchester for example is that there are loads of foreign investors (still living in China) and droves of legal foreign economic immigrants (such as wealthy individuals from Hong Kong) who are able to invest in or migrate to the UK, buy multiple houses for what they sold their flat/property portfolio for in Hong Kong without having any kind of economic challenge and paying the normal taxes a UK landlord would pay. A lot of other countries restrict the amount of foreign investment in their housing markets, or at least tax them more than they would a citizen, so the economy can still benefit more from this foreign investment....whcih could be driven back into building more affordable housing that only British citizens can purchase.

I’m not going to lie Gary. You’ve named this video “the issue Iv been avoiding” but not actually addressed the issue in the video, and continue to avoid it further. I love your videos because they use clear economic data. There wasn’t one piece of data in this video. This is one reason why the right are going to win on this topic. We on the left are too scared to give an honest opinion on immigration. And it causes us to avoid the unpleasant subject altogether. Just as your video has done.

We’ve had Thatcherism since 1979 which serves the interests of the (mainly overseas) wealthy. The problem with Thatcherism is that you eventually run out of assets to sell to overseas investors so that they can rip off British consumers. Reduce inequality by taxing the rich.

“Immigration isn’t a problem” “Can you explain why” “Trust me bro”

"I think the primary reason that life is getting hard is because of this growing inequality" That's like saying it's cold because the temperature is decreasing.

I'd like to see a breakdown of WHY you don't think immigration is the problem rather than just saying 'it's not the problem'. I don't believe immigration is the main problem but for those that do, I imagine they would require more than a 'trust me bro' to consider a change of stance.

I consider myself left wing but there must be a limit to sustainable immigration? It’s more than triple what it was under the previous labour government. Surely the increased demand for housing and jobs drives up rents and drives down wages due to supply not even close to being met, does this not increase inequality? Cheap labour for the rich and increased return on property. Honest questions as I haven’t made up my mind on this subject, I feel like you’ve kind of missed the point and just said it’s not the main problem as not to divide the working class but I was hoping for some economically backed insight.

It’s not just about living standards, it’s about the irreversible and dramatic changes to society on a cultural and values level. How can you not see that? We should definitely have less and managed immigration, not this insane amount that is only increasing year on year. People are fed up. It’s nothing bigger than that. British people are quite moderate in many ways, but failure to listen to large chunks of the population and then you’ll shock shock horror, have parties emerge that will listen to them.

Immigration is a symptom rather than a root-cause, but it’s one hell of a symptom. Nor is it incidental; it’s been cultivated over decades with the effect of avoiding or masking those root-causes.

Gary, you haven't been failing. You're letting impatience get the better of you. It's a slow slog you've set yourself on. 10 years ago, no one would have heard you. Now you have a small but growing audience listening to a bright, working class lad from Romford who isn't in the pocket of anyone. If you've got the energy, keep keeping on. You're in a unique position. You've seen the inside of capitalism at its most raw, and have a unique perspective. Please continue to use it but don't beat yourself up if it happens slowly.

In the 70s, the hard left was very much against European expansion because cheap slave labour would depress wages for workers. For the same reason, the right was enthusiastically pro immigration. Even the Gastarbeiter wave in Germany in the 60s was not politically powerful but mostly a result of United States and Turkey lobbying: "Theodor Blank, Secretary of State for Employment, opposed such agreements. He held the opinion that the cultural gap between Germany and Turkey would be too large and also held the opinion that Germany didn't need any more laborers because there were enough unemployed people living in the poorer regions of Germany who could fill these vacancies." To me it is obvious that immigration has effects on a society, good and bad (not only good and not only bad), and the bad effects are disproportionally distributed in poor areas.

"I really want to do this video justice because its such a big issue"... proceeds to ramble for 16 minutes without even making a single point beyond "I think the real issue is inequality".

Don't just look at immigration through an economic lens. Look at the speed of change in demographics, culture, crime etc. It's not just about money.