It was a total cluster f*** of policies.
Not training more British doctors and nurses. Not encouraging women to have more children in the wake of two world wars and a rapid decline in the post war birth rate. Failing to plan for an aging population and forcing wide scale immigration on a population who never wanted it.

You haven't invalidated my point...The genesis of mass immigration was a Tory concept...and it's only because of that that the NHS has kept going as it has until now (now 26% of doctors,Stephen Nickell, who is on the board of the Office for Budget Responsibility, suggested 35% of "health professionals" came from outside the UK)...

The primary driver for widespread increased EU immigration in more recent years (which is what seems to exercise the minds of so many of those against immigration) was the expansion of the EU eastwards...who was one of the main proponents of that..oh yes,our old friend,Tory Maggie.

In your desire to do down "labour/the left" don't be blind to anything that makes your picture a little more complex and multi-party than the one you painted before...

If you are simply saying immigration has also at times gone up under a Labour government,I wouldn't disagree and nothing I posted is contrary to that...

If you don't understand the meaning (as opposed to agreeing or not agreeing) of "something that has greatly enriched our country",not sure I can help you further

As for your point about the NHS in the 1950's/60's:

"Staffing crises in British hospitals had been identified long before the establishment of the NHS in 1948 and concern over nurse shortages had been the subject of numerous government inquiries which blamed low recruitment on inadequate training, poor pay, and the marriage bar. .. staffing the new NHS was compromised by the national post-war labour shortage. The unprecedented increases in the medical and nursing workforce over the first decade of the NHS exacerbated the problem. Between 1949 and 1958 the medical workforce increased by 30 per cent in England and 50 per cent in Scotland; the nursing and midwifery workforce increased by 26 per cent across Britain. The most severe shortages were in unpopular areas of nursing such as hospitals for the chronically sick, mental hospitals and in geriatric nursing.

As early as 1949 the Ministries of Health and Labour, in conjunction with the Colonial Office, the General Nursing Council and the Royal College of Nursing launched campaigns to recruit hospital staff directly from the Caribbean. Recruitment was aimed at three main categories of worker: hospital auxiliary staff, nurses or trainee nurses, and domestic workers. Senior NHS staff from Britain travelled to the Caribbean to recruit, and vacancies were often published in local papers. In 1949, the Barbados Beacon advertised for nursing auxiliaries to work in hospitals across Britain; applicants were to be aged between 18 and 30, literate, and willing to commit to a three-year contract. By 1955 there were official nursing recruitment programmes across 16 British colonies and former colonies. Over the next two decades, the British colonies and former colonies provided a constant supply of cheap labour to meet staffing shortages in the NHS, and the number of women from the African Caribbean entering Britain to work in the NHS grew steadily until the early 1970s. By the end of 1965, there were 3,000-5,000 Jamaican nurses working in British hospitals, many of them concentrated in London and the Midlands. It has been estimated that by 1972, 10,566 students had been recruited from abroad, and that by 1977 overseas recruits represented 12 per cent of the student nurse and midwife population in Britain, of which 66 per cent came from the Caribbean".

Dear oh dear,indeed.

Edited by legaleagle (23 Feb 2017 11.58pm)

You are perhaps not the most unblinkered and open-minded poster to have put forward views on immigration here

I'm afraid we part at your initial contention that a 4,500% increase in immigration,in the context of 1950's UK,was not "mass immigration".Certainly bbc.co.uk refers to the immigration in the 50's as "mass immigration" as would many other people. The "nonsense" you refer to might be felt by some to be being spouted by a writer other than myself.

To take one of your other sweeping assertions,as an example:

If you look at reality rather than rhetoric,Maggie was indeed a big champion of the expansion eastwards of the EU (the key causual factor behind mass immigration from E Europe since 2004.. ...don't let blind prejudice and taking politicians' "soundbite" utterances cloud reality...

For example,in the view of Chatham House: ...

"Although the programme to push for the elimination in non-tariff barriers to trade within the European Community was not of Margaret Thatcher's own creation, she was an enthusiastic supporter of what came to be known as the Single Market Programme...

But perhaps Mrs Thatcher's most important legacy is on the 'other Europe': the Europe of transition in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989."

Or in the words of that well known liberal organ,The Telegraph,in 2004:

"The prophetic words of Margaret Thatcher's Bruges speech become reality today when the European Union expands to the former Soviet bloc and Britain celebrates a triumph in foreign policy".

Blair fcuked up allowing the Poles in to the UK when every other EU nation wasn't....

[Link]

This link gives an admission from one of his aides that they fcuked up massively.... expecting about 13,000 Poles, but over a Million arrived FFS.

Tony Blair simply failed to comprehend the significance of new EU rules which dramatically expanded the number of people who could settle in the UK, his ex-advisor claimed.

Sir Stephen Wall, the former-PM’s chief adviser on Europe, has spoken out, claiming the last administration followed poor advice.

With all due respect, whoever leads labour will get a lot of flack from the press. Blair curried favour with murdoch et al by getting rid of clause 4.

First, congratulations on ignoring Andrew Neather's comments quoted in my last post.
What figures are you using to calculate your 4,500% increase?
The fact remains that immigration 1953-1962 was a drop in the ocean compared to Blair's efforts. It was also targeted immigration to some extent, getting people with skills we wanted compared to what we have now. (By the way love the way you think the term 'mass-immigration' is correct just because the BBC says so!)
I don't really care whether Thatcher was pro-EU or anti-EU, I have no regard for Mrs.T. However, I would place a sizeable bet they she would have voted Leave in the referendum.

Edited by hedgehog50 (24 Feb 2017 12.54pm)

We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. [Orwell]