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UK Politics: Deal, or No Deal. To May and Beyond.


A Horse Named Stranger

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The problem with the case for immigration is that it is being made on an economic level, and most leave voters are really reacting to other less financial factors. The more the argument is made on a GDP loss basis, the more it misses the point and is talking past those they were trying to address.

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1 hour ago, BigFatCoward said:

and then rubbing lemon juice all over the open sore.  

Somehow I am now hungry, after reading what was supposedly an old Scottish receipe for the English from the days when  Edward I ventured north. Although, somehow I doubt they had lemons in Scotland back then, so that might be just my imagination running wild.

7 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

The reason Corbyn doesn't pick a side is pretty straight-forward. If he picks a side, he loses - the only way to win is not to play.

Dafuq? If this looks like winning for Labour under Corbyn, they might as well disband. I mean seriously, there's a conservative party in more or less open civil war, that is taking shots at their own PM for fun, and still Labour is not leading them by a country mile in the polls. If Corbyn had taken on the impossible task of making May look like a semi-competent politician in comparission, then (and only then) he is doing a fantastic job as opposition leader.

Let's be real here for a moment. Corbyn is an opportunistic weasel, that is happy with playing politics on the issue, as long as the Tories goes up in flames, and if the country burns with it, he is also fine with that outcome. Just as long as he does not have to share any responsibility. And that is atm backfiring spectacularly. As May is calling out his non-existent position on anything, and him being so pathetic, that he can't even be arsed to sign a no confidence motion in the goverment. And worse, his inability to do jack shit has fully spread over to the entire Labour party.

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7 hours ago, mormont said:

So this morning we finally get to the meat of Brexit, the thing that Theresa May truly believes in, her one actual red line and target: immigration.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-46613900

The depressing thing is, she may not be wrong in believing that in the end, what Brexit voters really wanted was 'less foreigners'. They may or may not have cared about trade, the Irish border, Britain's place in the world: security, the economy or employment standards. But they probably did have a vague idea that there are too many foreigners and Something Should Be Done. And on that, the PM's history shows she clearly agrees. 

 

Wasn't there someone who declared that 'racism' had nothing whatsoever to do with BREXIT?

And yet, in the end, there the UK is again, with "tens of thousands of low-skilled workers" coming in every year, and "no cap" on skilled workers.

Once again proving that no matter which nation it is, this my country first, my country for me, populism, xenophobic, anti-globalist (i.e. anti-semitism), etc. is composed of idiots. They can't even do what they want effectively.  All they do is destroy and make things worse-worse-worse for everybody, including themselves, as they act as stooges for the oligarchs.

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6 minutes ago, Zorral said:

 

Wasn't there someone who declared that 'racism' had nothing whatsoever to do with BREXIT?

And yet, in the end, there the UK is again, with "tens of thousands of low-skilled workers" coming in every year, and "no cap" on skilled workers.

Once again proving that no matter which nation it is, this my country first, my country for me, populism, xenophobic, anti-globalist (i.e. anti-semitism), etc. is composed of idiots. They can't even do what they want effectively.  All they do is destroy and make things worse-worse-worse for everybody, including themselves, as they act as stooges for the oligarchs.

I was hoping we'd all learnt by now that countering peoples concerns about immigration and globalisation by calling them 'racist' is a bad tactic, and shows a real lack of understanding of the issues.

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42 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I was hoping we'd all learnt by now that countering peoples concerns about immigration and globalisation by calling them 'racist' is a bad tactic, and shows a real lack of understanding of the issues.

The issues are racism and xenophobia. It is never about the people of foreign descent they actually know, it is always about the scary others. It is of course made worse by other insecurities about present and future, but never directed at the actual sources of those insecurities.

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8 hours ago, mormont said:

So this morning we finally get to the meat of Brexit, the thing that Theresa May truly believes in, her one actual red line and target: immigration.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-46613900

The depressing thing is, she may not be wrong in believing that in the end, what Brexit voters really wanted was 'less foreigners'. They may or may not have cared about trade, the Irish border, Britain's place in the world: security, the economy or employment standards. But they probably did have a vague idea that there are too many foreigners and Something Should Be Done. And on that, the PM's history shows she clearly agrees. 

I said this months ago and people here were telling me I was wrong. It’s always been about immigration, be it for xenophobic or racist reasons or both. And it’s sweeping across the Western world. It’s no different in the UK than it is here state side. Older white people are terrified of the changing cultures and/or the browning of their countries. And I believe this will play a significant role in sweeping right wing populism, if it occurs.

7 hours ago, mormont said:

Absolutely. Most voters who name immigration as an issue just have a vague feeling about it, and don't understand the complexities: nobody's ever bothered to explain the benefits to them, all they hear is complaints. For some reason, the response to this among the major parties is not to make the case for immigration, but to accede to this woolly nonsense at any cost. And here we are: cutting off our own noses to spite our face. 

More specifically, and again like here in the U.S., the people who oppose immigration overwhelmingly live in rural areas and/or the suburbs with very few immigrants. People who live in urban areas tend to have little problems with immigration. Until you can fix this divide, immigration will continue to drive a lot of our collective politics.  

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1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

I was hoping we'd all learnt by now that countering peoples concerns about immigration and globalisation by calling them 'racist' is a bad tactic, and shows a real lack of understanding of the issues.

Are you saying that the people who told my wifeish "The country has spoken, you're not welcome here any more", or that "It's not people like you I want rid of, it's those fucking [Pakistani]"; who told me to "Fuck off out of our country now", or even those who've told me that "I asked for you specifically, as I didn't want to see no bloody French woman!" All at my place of work, 2 of them within the last couple of weeks; are nothing to do with racism / xenophobia?

 

Not all Leave voters are racists / xenophobes. All racists / xenophobes voted for Leave.

 

ETA, and FTR: I'm English born and bred, never lived overseas for more than a year; Ali is French and has spent more than half her life in England. Between us we started and run a small business from scratch, taking no jobs from anyone. We both have 2 degrees, we are both classed as "unskilled" by the government because of the amount we earn.

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3 hours ago, Zorral said:

Wasn't there someone who declared that 'racism' had nothing whatsoever to do with BREXIT?

There always is. In any country these days there are the people who will insist that nothing is racism, except anti-racism, which is definitely racism. And maybe Hitler.

 

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54 minutes ago, mormont said:

There always is. In any country these days there are the people who will insist that nothing is racism, except anti-racism, which is definitely racism. And maybe Hitler.

 

Also, claiming there is very little to no racism in their countries.  Nobody at all suffers from this because "I/Mr/Ms/Madam/Señor don't do it and I never see it happen anywhere. So there."

And no matter how much anecdotal and stat evidence one pulls up, it doesn't matter. The same bs gets repeated over and over by the same people whenever the subject is referred to.

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3 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

I said this months ago and people here were telling me I was wrong. It’s always been about immigration, be it for xenophobic or racist reasons or both. And it’s sweeping across the Western world. It’s no different in the UK than it is here state side. Older white people are terrified of the changing cultures and/or the browning of their countries. And I believe this will play a significant role in sweeping right wing populism, if it occurs.

More specifically, and again like here in the U.S., the people who oppose immigration overwhelmingly live in rural areas and/or the suburbs with very few immigrants. People who live in urban areas tend to have little problems with immigration. Until you can fix this divide, immigration will continue to drive a lot of our collective politics.  

How does Brexit address any immigration that would reduce the number of brown-skinned people entering the country, unless the Brexiteers regard the olive skinned members of the EU as also being amongst the brown-types that are not wanted?

Did EU rules require certain liberal immigration policies when it came to immigration from non-EU countries. Or was it more that EU countries with liberal immigration policies (are there any?) meant dark skinned people getting into Britain via the back door?

If pasty white french, German (indigenous Northern Europeans in general) are being told to "fuck-off, because we voted for Brexit", then it seems like it's an equal opportunity xenophobia driving Brexit. Skin-tone based racism is obviously a sub-set of that xenophobia, but it appears a much broader based disdain for anyone not British born and bred.

I don't think any economic or statistical arguments for immigration work on a general population. If a substantial amount of the population simply has an aversion to "otherness" there's no argument that can work.

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I would suggest that in most countries in the world if you introduced rapid large scale immigration, the native population would show concern over it. You’d probably magnify that problem if you also told those natives that not only could they literally do nothing about it,  but by simply complaining, they are racists. 

And even now the answer for some people is not to listen to a majority of the country’s concerns, or consider more managed immigration policies, it is instead to preach down to them, and to tell them everything is fine, they should stop complaining. 

We are now in a totally ridiculous state, Brexit really isn’t the answer to these people’s problem, i think we all know that, but if they had just been listened to even a little bit then maybe we wouldn’t have got the stupid over reaction of Brexit

 

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1 hour ago, The Anti-Targ said:

How does Brexit address any immigration that would reduce the number of brown-skinned people entering the country, unless the Brexiteers regard the olive skinned members of the EU as also being amongst the brown-types that are not wanted?

Did EU rules require certain liberal immigration policies when it came to immigration from non-EU countries. Or was it more that EU countries with liberal immigration policies (are there any?) meant dark skinned people getting into Britain via the back door?

Have you not been paying attention to the refugee crisis? I'm sure there are a fairly high number of Leave voters who were worried that over time those people would become citizens of EU countries and eventually immigrate or at least travel to the UK for work. I've said this before, but it's not uncommon to hear Europeans say, "(Insert city/country) doesn't look like (same city/country) anymore." It's pretty clear what that means. Now, is it factually correct that these fears will be realized? I don't know enough about Europe's immigration laws to say, but it doesn't matter because all you need is the fear of such an event to motivate people to want to crack down on immigration. 

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If pasty white french, German (indigenous Northern Europeans in general) are being told to "fuck-off, because we voted for Brexit", then it seems like it's an equal opportunity xenophobia driving Brexit. Skin-tone based racism is obviously a sub-set of that xenophobia, but it appears a much broader based disdain for anyone not British born and bred.

I agree, hence why I put xenophobia before racism in my comment you quoted, but that doesn't change the fact that there is a fear of diversity among some people in the West. And it's nothing new.

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I don't think any economic or statistical arguments for immigration work on a general population. If a substantial amount of the population simply has an aversion to "otherness" there's no argument that can work.

Probably. I think your best hope is to try and show people who are struggling with these feelings that people from different places and of different ethnic backgrounds are just that, people too. Humanizing people is probably the best way to strip away the fear of the other, hence why these divides often times fall along rural/urban divides.

I come from a state that has large urban hubs and vast rural areas, and it was incredibly common in college to meet people who said they had never met a person who was (insert ethic group). This often led to them having stereotypes about said group, and those stereotypes tended to strip away once they actual got to interact with them and realize they really are all that different at all. 

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1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

I would suggest that in most countries in the world if you introduced rapid large scale immigration, the native population would show concern over it. You’d probably magnify that problem if you also told those natives that not only could they literally do nothing about it,  but by simply complaining, they are racists. 

 

Iirc, historically countries start having successful anti immigration populism occur when immigration has resulted in an increase of the foreign born population to about 15% of the overall population. I saw an article or chart that showed that a few years ago, that anti immigration responses escalate and correlate to that level specifically amongst pretty much any country over the centuries.

 

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29 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

I saw an article or chart that showed that a few years ago, that anti immigration responses escalate and correlate to that level specifically amongst pretty much any country over the centuries.

I don't know about the 15% figure, but yes the notion anti-immigration sentiment is correlated with immigration population size is well-founded in the literature.

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How does that literature correlate the rapidly growing hate crimes committed against people who have families who have been in the country in question, whichever country that might be, even longer than the family of the person(s) committing the hate crimes, as here in the US against African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans (particularly in the Southwest, but here on the east coast with Puerto Ricans, etc. -- who are most certainly US citizens) and, ya, people of a Jewish background, practicing religious or not?

At this point we have terrorist tourism -- people coming to our city (even from other countries!) to commit violence against people of color, people distinguished as Muslim or Jewish, people distinguished as queer, transgender, etc.  For instance:

https://patch.com/new-york/chelsea-ny/tourists-suspected-racially-charged-chelsea-attack-report

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It's not like I don't have sympathy for the plight of the indigenous people's of Britain (Europe in general). I sometimes lose sight of the fact that Europe is the native land of the white folks. So if there's any place where there should be respect and efforts to preserve European culture (and British in particular) it is Europe / Britain. They have no other homeland. Thinking about my own country, if New Zealand had remained almost 100% Maori up until about WW2, and then the world started to take notice of New Zealand (would be officially named Aotearoa in this alternative history) as not a bad place to live, then I don't think we'd begrudge the Maori populace being very leary of letting the non-native population get too big.

Just because some of those countries have been guilty of going to other places and destroying, marginalising or oppressing native cultures, doesn't mean it's a fate that should be repeated there. Respecting and being open to diversity also means respecting and being open to the native people and culture. And in most cases should mean giving the native people and culture prime importance. If that approach had been taken in the lands that were colonised over the last few hundred years we'd have a very different, and probably more peaceful, world.

When it comes to the cultural preservation of the native people of Europe and Britain, is there something to be learned from the mistakes, and downright crimes against humanity, of our colonialist past that can help to avoid (or reverse) conflict and contention while at the same time allowing for the acceptance of refugees and well managed migration?

I also wonder, if one of the more racist concerns about open European borders is that refugees will go to continental Europe, eventually get citizenship and then flood into Britain. What is it that makes people believe that a disproportionate number of refugees actually want to eventually live in Britain, rather that live on the continent? Is it because Britain is the most multi-cultural country in Europe, so a lot of refugees have pretty well establish cultural communities in Britain, so therefore want to go be in a place that has that cultural support network already established?

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7 hours ago, lokisnow said:

Iirc, historically countries start having successful anti immigration populism occur when immigration has resulted in an increase of the foreign born population to about 15% of the overall population. I saw an article or chart that showed that a few years ago, that anti immigration responses escalate and correlate to that level specifically amongst pretty much any country over the centuries.

 

Hmm, yeah that sounds about right. I think Sweden now has a foreign born population of about 24%, (and a lot of that happened quite quickly as far as I know) and they are having a number of issues there, in a country you would expect extreme tolerance in. 

@The Anti-Targ yes I think that while we are all trying to be on a path towards a diverse society where colour and creed doesn't matter, we have to realise that we can't get there overnight. Europe has been, and is,  a white christian continent, and maybe in the future that won't be the case, but it seems a little unreasonable to expect that Europeans wouldn't be a little irritated that not only were the demographics of their nations changing rapidly, but more importantly there was nothing they could do about it. 

In all these countries I think its the apparent lack of control of immigration that is at the heart of the issue. Immigration is the most visual symptom of their lack of powerlessness in the face of big money interests and unaccountable politicians. We have to remember that Brexit came about at a time when there were islands in Greece containing thousands of refugees, that both Spain and Italy had enormous problems controlling their borders, where even Germany was having huge political problems that Merkel has yet to recover from after admitting millions of migrants. 
Brexit happened I think in a large part, not simply because there was a lot of immigration, but that there was seemingly no way to stop it. If the populace had been able to tell their ministers that immigration was an issue and they wanted it reduced, then there would be no Brexit. Instead David Cameron went to Europe to plead for a way to reduce immigration and the EU told him to bugger off. The optics of that were critical and only added to this sense of the EU as an unstoppable force that Britain will just have to lie down and let carry on.

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Just because some of those countries have been guilty of going to other places and destroying, marginalising or oppressing native cultures, doesn't mean it's a fate that should be repeated there. Respecting and being open to diversity also means respecting and being open to the native people and culture. And in most cases should mean giving the native people and culture prime importance. If that approach had been taken in the lands that were colonised over the last few hundred years we'd have a very different, and probably more peaceful, world.


All this is made worse when certain commentators attack any complaints by using variations of the same arguments such as: "Europe doesn't have a culture, you should embrace this new culture coming in", or " This is payback for colonialism so keep quiet". None of which is helpful, more like insulting. Christian culture obviously has great meaning to a lot of people still in Europe and it seems their main fears are of islamic immigration and a takeover by people who have different ways of life and cultures. From here in Britain I tend to find those fears completely overblown, but then I don't live in Sweden or Paris where they have enormous Islamic ghettos. Those areas show that their immigration policy clearly isn't working and more effort to integrate new and old populations together is needed or you will keep having that same level of social unrest we are seeing now.
 

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What is it that makes people believe that a disproportionate number of refugees actually want to eventually live in Britain, rather that live on the continent?

Its probably the idea of Britains generous welfare system. I think that is all a bit of a myth really and part of the general trend of paranoia about immigrants coming here and taking our benefits, when in fact most of them work longer and harder than the native populations. I do think that Britain has a particular pull for some people, maybe because English is so widely spoken everywhere, and maybe because it has so many connections abroad as you say, does make it easier for anyone arriving here. 
 

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9 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

How does Brexit address any immigration that would reduce the number of brown-skinned people entering the country, unless the Brexiteers regard the olive skinned members of the EU as also being amongst the brown-types that are not wanted?

Did EU rules require certain liberal immigration policies when it came to immigration from non-EU countries. Or was it more that EU countries with liberal immigration policies (are there any?) meant dark skinned people getting into Britain via the back door?

If pasty white french, German (indigenous Northern Europeans in general) are being told to "fuck-off, because we voted for Brexit", then it seems like it's an equal opportunity xenophobia driving Brexit. Skin-tone based racism is obviously a sub-set of that xenophobia, but it appears a much broader based disdain for anyone not British born and bred.

I don't think any economic or statistical arguments for immigration work on a general population. If a substantial amount of the population simply has an aversion to "otherness" there's no argument that can work.

This post reads like someone who did not follow the referendum closely, to be quite honest. If you had, you would have noted how much of the Leave campaign featured things like this:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farage-defends-ukip-breaking-point-poster-queue-of-migrants

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/brexit-facebook-ads-leave-campaign-nhs-immigration-boris-johnson-a8465516.html

Refugees 'flooding' into the EU from the Middle East and Africa. Turkey joining the EU. Scary Muslims. These were a huge part of the Leave campaign. And yes, so too was racism against East Europeans. Oh, sorry, is that technically just xenophobia? Excellent point! And when I say 'excellent', I mean 'why is nitpicking about specific types of disgraceful bigotry an issue for you?'

Anti-Irish bigotry was racism, and so is anti-East European. There is by definition no such thing as 'equal opportunity xenophobia'.

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