Thatcherism was a huge program of selling stuff off to ordinary people. Your reasoning makes no sense at all.

Freedom of movement:

• we get to move, go on holiday, and work in the EU with no visas/red-tape
• we get access to EU doctors who can live and work freely in the UK and don't need to worry about their families getting deported.
• our fruit doesn't go off in our fields (this is sarcasm, but mainly true)
• no EU country is predominantly black (which is what the racists were actually worried about)
• illegal immigration went up since Brexit. Ending it didn't help.

I screamed in the kitchen when I heard the Conservatives sell it as a benefit, smiling like crocodiles. If anything, it took our rights away.

Because normally the Tories sell it off to themselves or their mates. In this instance, they let council tenants benefit from their practice.

Doing so endears people to them and their behaviour of selling off assets. It thus makes it easier for them to get away with selling more state assets off to their mates.

People face loss of job security, and a highly diversified work force is less likely to unionize. Workers have everything to fear from foreign labour.

The solution of course is to give every migrant worker legal status so that they can't work less than minimum wage, but a) that will never fly here, and b) that only puts a cap on how low wages can go, without any path to raising them

It's so cool how we have 0 say in where our taxes go. I simply adore being legally compelled to break international law and fund genocide

Oh ffs

I don't know what point you're trying to make; that doesn't tell us anything more about why, except what we've already said.

Apart from Britain’s land borders with Ireland, Spain and Cyprus

Low wages aren’t illegal. Their point, which is valid whether you accept it or not, is that an increase in available labour drives down the cost of that labour. Why use a uk plasterer charging a premium when you have access to a hundred more who are happy to send a minimum wage back to their families in the eastern bloc?

Its a first step but it won't be fixed overnight as the houses have already been sold off.

Just another reason to say fuck Thatcher.

It's called the conservative promise.

They constantly trying to argue that Labour don't have a grip on the economy while simultaneously making everybody else poorer.

Apparently conservative votes are happy with Kemi's performance. I assume that is because they have low standards and don't have anyone better.

If you are being replaced by immigration workers who are prepared to accept low wages go report that to the relevant authorities because that's illegal.

It kind of sounds like you're trying to shill for the racists, who absolutely do not have any kind of point.

Hanging flags on lamps post does not make you a patriot, it just makes you an idiot.

They're reducing the power of the state by selling off its assets on the cheap.

Perfectly fitting with Burnham's mandate. Isn't democracy great?

Kind of amazed that this article didn't include the fact that Councils were restricted with their spending of the proceeds of Right to buy sales (of which they received 50%) to paying off their debt.

That's not the Good Friday Agreement. That's the Common Travel Area which has been in place long before the GFA and long before Schengen. The UK and Ireland both opted out because, at the time, they saw little benefit in joining.

The wording of the treaty makes Ireland's opt-out from eliminating border controls conditional on the Common Travel Area being maintained. An important reason for the Schengen Agreement was to make daily cross-border commuting by workers easier as a part of free movement for workers. The United Kingdom and Ireland have a short land border, which is only to part of the UK, making this reason less important to them.

The British government has always refused to lower its border controls as it believes that the island status of the CTA puts the UK in a better position to enforce immigration controls than mainland European countries with "extensive and permeable land borders". While not signing the Schengen Treaty, Ireland has always looked more favourably on joining but has not done so in order to maintain the CTA and its open border with Northern Ireland.

So Ireland could, if it wanted to, join Schengen. But had clearly deemed it of little benefit to them if they then need to police a border they have no intention of policing.

This sums up a lot of the hand-wringing a lot of British people who consider themselves to be politically enlightened.

"We can't possibly act rashly, we need to have 17 committees for consideration of a possible future decision."

Meanwhile, everything is on fire and the people in power (which they will criticise but never condemn) are fucking things up all over the place and leaving everyone else to have a town hall meeting for a potential committee to discuss what pieces should be put back together. Fucking infuriating.

I don't understand how that leads to your conclusion. If it's because of the Tory philosophy that the state is bad, surely the real aim would have been to reduce the power of the state?

The reason I'm asking is because I think people tend to be overly cynical and won't accept the possibility that people disagree with them honestly, finding it easier to believe that they disagree dishonestly. To me it seems perfectly plausible that Tories thought they could reduce the power of the state, do something good for ordinary people, and expand their voting base, without realising/believing that this approach would lead to many (but not most) of those assets essentially becoming investments.

but labor moving in does

Tory philosophy. The state = bad. The state supplying cheap housing is like fingers screeching down a blackboard to neo liberal fanatics.

Jobs moving abroad doesn't really have anything to do with immigration though.

What makes you say that's the real aim, rather than the stated aims?

I think the mandate came from the subsequent general elections in 2017 and 2019, where the Tories, a declared Brexit party won significant majorities. In fact, between the first one and the second one, they gained almost 50 seats in Parliament.

The people were lied to, but they believed the lies.

You might be forgetting the Good Friday Agreement. Ireland is restricted in what it can do on visa-free travel, because it has an open border in Northern Ireland with the UK. If the UK doesn't allow people from a specific country, then they can't come into Ireland visa-free either.