✌️majella #WalesPaysTaxToo #JoinAUnion

1/4 I came across this article by the titan of idiocy, @RobertJenrick, in the Telegraph, and it is bollocks: telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10… Jenrick says the average British worker renting outside London is "at least £2,000 worse off this year because of a decade of mass migration: £1,060 in lost pay and £940 in higher rent". He blames immigrants for low pay, for high rents, even for low investment and slow productivity ("Cheap labour has displaced capital and investment"), and, as expected, he says fuck all about businesses that sit on their profits instead of investing, or about how the lack of unionised workplaces takes bargaining power away from workers. Why? Because the real answers point at the people who make money, big money. The £1,060 comes from "Wages After the Wave", a paper written by @HM_Kucharski for @cambridgecircre, which Jenrick cites in the Telegraph. Let's have a look at why this paper is not worth the electricity used to type it, in its own words. Its £1,060 is for the typical British worker outside London only, set against a world where immigrant employment had "stayed at its 2015 level" (p. 40). For England as a whole the estimate is about £390 a year and "cannot be distinguished from zero" (p. 19). Kucharski himself told Invert that "if we were to have a hypothetical where there was zero migration since 2015, then the average wage in the UK would be £1,000 higher every single year", and also "there's actually no way of telling nationally whether or not migration has reduced wages or not". Watch it here: youtube.com/watch?v=VX0RVVtE… Nor can the paper tell you why your pay is where it is. It compares each area "with other authorities in the same region in the same year" (p. 18), so everything that hit a whole region, "a recession, pandemic, regional pay trends", is taken out by design, and with it the energy crisis, COVID and inflation. That is why the paper says: "This does not mean that pay fell" (p. 18). In October 2022 inflation reached 11.1%, the highest in the official series that began in 1997, and gas and electricity prices did most to push it up that month, and in April to June 2022 real regular pay fell by 3.0%, "a record fall" (ONS). You cannot tell people they are losing money to immigration and leave all of that out. Why leave London out? The paper says London's immigrants come more often from higher-income countries, but by its own count only "around one in four" National Insurance registrations in London came from those countries, and London took "about a third of registrations from everywhere else" (p. 24). So the paper leaves out of its headline a third of the arrivals from the very countries it blames, gets a positive estimate for London of about £720 a year (p. 24), and explains it away with a theory it calls "a hypothesis", after admitting that "the flow data do not show the outflow this account predicts" (p. 25). How does immigration cause the loss? The paper asks itself "What is Driving the Cost?" and answers in 4 words: "We do not know." (p. 34). Who gains? "Some of what natives lose in pay may be gained by employers and consumers through higher profits or improved consumer surplus", and the paper "does not say that migration has imposed a cost on the British economy as a whole" (p. 7).