I’ve seen worse. I saw a guy try to cut another guy’s head off last week.
I work with lots of people living in Northern Ireland and that’s not their sentiment.
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The lead researcher of this report, Jan Van de Beek refuses to publish his modelling and his assumptions used to arrive at his conclusions. None of his work has been subject to peer review and all three of his reports have been produced solely by funding of acknowledged radical far right political parties (including Forum voor Democratie, Renaissance Instituut and Vlaams Belang).
He also has the knack of taking already completed reports by established and well accepted researchers and adding an addendum based on his privately developed and secret model of economics which, surprise, is rabidly anti migration. He then claims the authors of the original report as coauthors to his extreme conclusion, despite the original authors publicly contradicting the bastardized work.
One of these hijacked authors has claimed that Van de Beek’s report ‘Boundless Care State’ “seem[s] to be primarily intended to legitimize the xenophobic views of Thierry Baudet and his* own”. Independent fact checking indicates that a number of claims by Van de Beek in ‘Boundless Care State’ are unfibilable, because he did not have access to the correct CBS data.
Emeritus professor of public finance Harrie Verbon criticizes the report ‘Boundless Care State’ in the peer reviewed scientific journal ‘TPEDigitaal’ on the basis that the method used for the study is “based on assumptions that cannot be verified”. According to him, this method can lead “to an overestimation of the costs”. He also denounces the “not very transparent assumptions underpinning of the calculated high migration costs”.
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Interesting response. What is ‘unfibilable’ ? A Dutch word, maybe?
In response to that, I would say that of course research highlighting the costs and consequences of immigration is likely to be funded by people concerned about immigration. Who else would sponsor it? It is certainly unlikely to be governments, which would then face scrutiny over the negative fiscal impacts associated with immigration from certain regions. The important point, however, is that the report relies on the government’s own data.
I liked the Borderless Welfare State report because it takes that data and presents it in clear tables, charts and flow diagrams. It is also a much easier read than the original IZA report from which much of the analysis is derived. It was conducted by the University of Amsterdam’s (Amsterdam School of Economics). I wouldn’t exactly call Western universities a hotbed of right wing propoganda, if anything they typically have the reputation of being the exact opposite, perhaps it was why they were asked to do the report.
Reasons to take it seriously:
- It uses large-scale official administrative datasets rather than opinion polling.
- The methodology was not invented by the authors; generational accounting has been used by governments and economists for decades.
- The authors published a detailed technical appendix explaining their calculations, allowing scrutiny and replication.
If you wish to dismiss the data that’s forms the basis of the report extrapolated from Statistics Netherlands (CBS) by the University of Amsterdam economics departments, then you can instead look yourself at the official crime statistics published by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå), Statistics Norway (SSB), Statistics Denmark and the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA).
Those figures show extraordinarily high crime rates among immigrants from the Middle East and Africa compared with native populations, while immigrants from Western Europe and East Asian countries consistently record some of the lowest crime rates. Funnily enough, the high crime rates tend to overwhelmingly match up with the negative fiscal impacts data and vice versa.
Intelligent, articulate, reasoned argument? No personal attacks on other posters? What’s this? Who is this rascal? On Bomberblitz?
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typo - I meant unfalsifiable
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See Research
BBC News - Man arrested after boy injured in zoo crocodile enclosure
WTF is wrong with this country.
I despair ..
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“The man arrested and the boy are not believed to be known to each other” WTAF
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It’s not just that country it’s nearly the entire world.
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LOL at describing the Conservatives holding at 2% being “steady”.
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LOL, there must be an abysmal dearth of leadership among ~400 lower house Labour MP’s if the only alternative to Starmer has to be parachuted back in via a By Election.
Really, I would have thought that community leaders would constitute the vast majority of those nominating for a seat in Parliament. Clearly they keep their whips in their saddlebag, subjugating themselves in the name of party unity, or are so browbeaten by the party machine that they dare not speak for themselves.
To me, that is a problem with party politics.
Good luck Andy, it looks like you will win a poison chalice. Starmer is very very unpopular, surprisingly more unpopular than Corbyn at his worst.
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Governments of major western powers house a Demographic Planning unit usually within the Treasury department. Its a long term objective to ensure the ongoing financial viability of the government, which ever party is in power. It is this department that uses immigration as a tool to keep the population balanced for optimum financial stability, based on census data and projections of outlays.
As to the racial makeup of the migrant intake, it is much more of a political issue and it is a massive issue for Starmer, who like it or not finds himself in hotwater that has been a result of successive governments denying the need to listen to their constituents. It would be fair to say the Tories made a massive mess of illegal immigration. Its a mess Starmer has failed to clean up.
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WTAF!!
A 30-year-old man from Norfolk, arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a boy ended up in a zoo’s crocodile enclosure, has been released on bail after being declared not fit for interview.
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He’s probably been committed to a psychiatric ward.
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It says released on bail.
Should have been released into the crocodile enclosure.
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Australia must not be a major western power then as it does not have a demographic planning unit.
There is the intergenerational report (https://treasury.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-08/p2023-435150.pdf), but this is a tool that is supposed to feed into policy development and good planning.
Sadly there has been less “good forward planning” in the past few decades with the wholesale adoption of neo-liberal “let the market decide” planning and politics in the Howard era accompanied by pure pork barrelling (eg 4 lane freeway to Warrnambool but the Keilor-Melton Road is still the same single road country track it was 40 years ago despite it nearly being infilled by housing estates all the way along the road). This philosophy still permeates current politics (eg the debate on the outer train ring is incredibly short term-ism) .
No government really plans for more than 5-10 years in advance. They expose themselves to pushback, criticism and ridicule if they do.
I was involved in a brief lived 100 year forward planning initiative that started in the early stages of the Bracks era, but that lasted project shorter than the era of dominance of the 2000 Bombers. Short-termism sadly prevails.
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Nah, he might survive it easily. Look at the photo that went with the article: they’re not salties, they’re freshies.
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