Yes though it's no all sunshine and roses:
Crisis said:
Recent data reveals that over 4,000 Ukrainian households have received homelessness support from their local authority last year since arriving in the UK.
That is of course appalling and desperately sad. But to my mind, it mostly reflects the problem that we simply don't have enough homes in the UK for everyone here. And if there aren't enough homes then it's inevitable that
someone is going to end up homeless: That is dictated by basic laws of mathematics. To be fair, the report you cite does suggest the Government could provide more financial support for refugees, but I'm not clear how that can solve the problem of there not being enough homes. The only thing I can think of in the short run is to do more to incentivise more people to take in lodgers. We urgently need to build more homes but that takes time. It's also hard not to avoid pointing out that if it hadn't been for Freedom of Movement in previous years, the problem would probably not be as bad as it currently is (although lack of Government action on housebuilding is also a huge issue).
I'm also not sure it's more than 200,000 haven't there only been 190,000 odd applications?
Possibly. It can be hard to interpret the statistics, but I was going by
https://www.gov.uk/government/stati...ember-2022/statistics-on-ukrainians-in-the-uk, which claims 238 562 visas granted to Ukrainians in 2022, of which 208 389 were from one of the special visa schemes.
My view is we should look to change our system to one not reliant on growth and focus more on sustainability. As well as the environmental needs for moving in such a direction, immigration demands would naturally drop off and controls on immigration would not be so necessary, this is the only way I can see how both those opposed to high immigration and those opposed to controls on it can be satisfied, but all parties have to accept you cannot grow an economy indefinitely first.
I broadly agree with you about the need to focus on sustainability, but why would that cause immigration demands to drop off? The only part of immigration that it might plausibly impact is companies seeking foreign workers because they can't find UK workers, but my understanding is, that accounts for only a fairly small proportion of immigration.
There will be a variety of long term health conditions responsible and not all will be linked to being unhealthy. For those that are caused by unhealthy lifestyles, when one considers how much of the economy is dependent on fast food/hospitality, and how driving is encouraged more than walking and cycling for relatively short journeys, then it's possible to see how being unhealthy is more prevalent than perhaps it should be. In turn this is another example of short term gain causing long term pain, i.e. in the short term build an economy on things that long term causes health problems that are a burden to the economy later on; there has been a similar example seen in those countries going to Russia and China for essential imports that has/is looking like more of a problem long term.
There seems to be an element of personal responsibility missing from that analysis
As far as I'm aware, no-one is
forced to buy fast food, nor on the whole are people
forced to drive half a mile instead of walking to pick up their fast food or a couple of things from the local shops. Those are choices that individuals make. And if more people chose, for example, to buy healthy food or to exercise more, then you'd very quickly see more businesses spring up to cater for that demand - because that is how the free market works!