In the news today.

Eat or heat?

www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/07/13/fears-food-security-miliband-solar-farm/

The legacy of a British genius. (Probably unknown?)

www.jic.ac.uk/blog/the-a-e-watkins-landrace-collection-of-bread-wheat-who-was-ae-watkins/

The Trump effect?

[The FTSE 100 has fallen as traders ramped up bets on Donald Trump winning the US presidential race after the attempt on his life at the weekend. Britain's flagship stock index dropped as much as 0.7pc while the midcap FTSE 250 dropped 0.4pc as political uncertainty in the US sent jitters across global markets.24 mins ago]

We do have to be careful with these figures because almost all of them include students over 16, housewives who have never been economically active personally but are under 67, people who are unpaid carers and under 67 and many other people who have for instance taken early retirement, inherited enough to leave work before they are 67 etc.

Add to that the number of people with learning disabilities (a population that is growing with better medical intervention), chronically disabled (who are living longer with better medical intervention), people waiting for surgery or appointments and people who simply have enough money not to need to work. People who do unpaid work, like the spouses of farmers or business owners are also not easy to identify.

If you factored all of this in, there would be a much lower figure. However, it is hard for statisticians to find and identify these groups. They know how many students there are, but the other groups are much harder to pin down. Not of all of these groups are claiming any state benefit other than things like universal benefits like Child Benefit. If they could do this, even by attempting to estimate this, then the figure would be much lower.

Just saying a person in economically inactive is way to simplistic. All you are looking at there is an NI Number and active PAYE, or Unemployment Benefits and doing the maths, but those figures don't match the numbers we keep being quoted that's because doing the rest involves a lot of expensive research.

I would factor their figures down by about 30% and that's just a guess.

And it's not people having children because we are closing schools due to lack of numbers. It's mostly legal migration authorised by the Tories.

They have allowed people to bring in migrants to work in low end jobs undercutting normal t&Cs of the UK workforce.

I don't think we'd mind if they were doctors, dentists or engineers, but they're not these people are working in care, packing salad in factories, picking crops and çleaning. On top of that these visas allow them to apply for any job once they are here outwith the £35,000 a year a spouse would need to earn and they have been able to bring their families.

If you've allowed 120,000 care workers with spouses and children to come in you could have 300,000 easily.

Oh, and because they're low waged they can claim whatever benefits available except unemployment benefits- so child benefit, tax credits and housing benefit.

And Sunak stood there and said the other parties would open the doors. They've let in about 3/4 million people in the last 5 years.

You've spiced up your life Mel.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9e9g9xrkr9o