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Comment by blibble | Hacker News Reader

> I think the situation in the UK is very similar - nationalism and patriotism are being exploited to sell people a false story of immigrants taking their jobs, lowering wages and causing crime.

I haven't seen any evidence of this, outside of the tabloids (which would be business as usual)

> As to Trump being a clean sweep, there's nothing clean about his cabinet or advisors - he has one of the most traditional, male, rich, white cabinets in recent history and even includes family in his inner circle and in meetings.

clean sweep as in the old guard and their policies are gone (not the case in the UK)

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I haven't seen any evidence of this, outside of the tabloids

Recent examples from the conservative conference:

Exhibit 1: Amber Rudd vows to stop migrants 'taking jobs British people could do' and force companies to reveal number of foreigners they employ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/04/jeremy-hunt-nhs-d...

Exhibit 2: On immigration and jobs, Theresa May employs the post-truth politics of Donald Trump http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/05/on-immigration-an...

Exhibit 3: Official policy is to cut migration to tens of thousands (that order of magnitude cut would leave many industries short of staff with an ageing population)

yep, I knew the Amber Rudd speech would be in your reply to my comment.

1) has been thoroughly debunked: she never said what the press accused her of saying. try and find the speech where she's talking about employers making lists of foreigners... you won't be able to because it doesn't exist.

I looked quite extensively at the time for it, as I was horrified by what press were reporting her as saying... shame it's fake news.

(in actual fact it was one of many potential ideas in a briefing note before the speech)

2) is an opinion piece, not evidence

It's not fake news in the sense that the proposal was never made. She just didn't make it in her speech. So it was more a case of sloppy reporting by some newspapers. Here's what the Guardian says about it:

"The speech was followed by a background briefing by an aide who suggested firms could be required to publish lists of foreign workers. Rudd herself confirmed the next day that such lists were an option, but the idea was quickly dropped." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/12/amber-rudd-...

And I should add that the idea was dropped only after an outcry by businesses.

1) She proposed the idea, on briefing notes or in the speech, it doesn't really matter.

2) You missed the direct quote from May in the article? Her opinions are very clear on this and neatly mirror Trump's populist nationalism. To quote directly, she claims that British people are:

out of work or on lower wages because of low-skilled immigration

Given that employment is close to an all time low and most products bought are imported and thus nothing to do with low skilled immigrants this is clearly untrue. They may be out of work or on low wages due to globalisation, robotics, austerity, the markets, the dominance of china, the decline of British industry etc, but tying this to immigration is mendacious, dangerous, and entirely without basis in fact.

As robotics continues to take over, and most manual jobs disappear in the coming decades, this explanation of foreigners taking our jobs will become more and more appealing and more and more dangerous.

it does matter if it's an idea under consideration or a plan in action.

their job is to consider options, and they binned this one (thankfully).

normally this sort of transparency would be seen as a good thing, unfortunately with the vehement overreaction of the press to an immature proposal as if it was policy, I suspect in future we won't find out until the ideas are beyond the proposal stage.

if you take a single quote, and ignore everything else they've been saying and doing for the past 6 months, you could indeed say that the UK Government is similar to Trump's administration, but it's simply not an objective assessment.

The fact that the proposal was made in written rather than spoken form is supposed to matter, how? She certainly did make the proposal, and defended it afterwards. Not "fake news" by any stretch of the imagination.

misreporting "we could do this" as "we promise we will do this" counts as fake news in my book

headline: "Amber Rudd vows to ... force companies to reveal number of foreigners they employ"

simply not true, so it's fake news

Theresa May wants to close the UK off to foreigners. It's just her, but as a popular PM she has a lot of domestic power -- more than Trump. She can make laws.

You're right that the old power structures are still intact and if they decide to assert themselves over the Conservative party then Theresa May could be removed (it's not like she was elected into the position to start with).

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