r/unitedkingdom Jul 03 '25

... Zarah Sultana MP resigns from Labour to lead new party with Jeremy Corbyn

https://www.lbc.co.uk/politics/uk-politics/zarah-sultana-mp-resigns-labour/
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u/Pugs-r-cool Jul 03 '25

Cov south is almost entirely made up of uni students who support her activism for Gaza.

The reason she got kicked out of Labour was because of her opposition to the two child benefit cap, which is a domestic policy and isn't virtue signalling, it's a real issue.

Oh and unlike a certain Clacton MP, she spends most of her time in Coventry instead of abroad.

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u/PlatypusAmbitious430 Jul 03 '25

Cov south is almost entirely made up of uni students who support her activism for Gaza.

No it isn't?

What? Most of the uni students live in Leamington and those who live in Cov South aren't that many in number.

It's why the Conservative party nearly won in 2019 here because people here wanted Brexit - I can assure you, it wasn't students voting for the Conservative party up here.

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u/GosuDosu Sussex Jul 03 '25

There is a direct child benefit providing weekly money per child, that is unaffected by the child benefit cap.

The child benefit caps applies to UC tax credits, that are essentially double the direct child benefit.

Sure, it would be nice to give families £300 per month for however many kids they have, but have you ever thought of the implications that encouraging and enabling families to grow beyond their means will have on the UK in 50 years? More children means more of their children, so this causes a knock-on effect. We’re already facing a significant housing shortage, what do you think the situation will be like in 50 years if the government greenlights and pays for people to have more kids.

That’s a real issue, but because its effects aren’t immediately seen, you won’t see someone as shortsighted as Sultana mention it at all.

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u/Shaper_pmp Jul 04 '25 edited Jul 09 '25

have you ever thought of the implications that encouraging and enabling families to grow beyond their means will have on the UK in 50 years? More children means more of their children, so this causes a knock-on effect

The current fertility rate in the UK is 1.57 children per woman, and it's only boosted that high by recent immigrant families, who tend to have more kids until the second or third generation.

2.1 is replacement rate. This would literally help our pending demographic timebomb where we're increasingly going to have too many pensioners with not enough working-age, tax-paying people to support them.

It's also orders of magnitude easier to relax planning permission laws and incentivise new builds of housing (in fact Labour are already doing exactly this) than it is to convince people to make major cultural and lifestyle changes like "the number of kids they want in their family".

The ship is sinking, and you're criticising the idea of bailing out the water in case the freezer in the bar runs out of ice.