[flagged]
We're also not that bad in the race to the bottom on topics like surveillance and immigration...
not clear from the comment but the statement is that France is less a problem wrt to surveillance? Or some other place?
fresh from this year's 37C3: A year of surveillance in France: a short satirical tale by La Quadrature du Net https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-12309-a_year_of_surveillance_in_...
But as for the here and now (today), I find it hard to think of a EU country that went from so much to so little in such a short time, and 100% due to its own doing. Not even Italy I think.
I think if you narrow your scope to the Anglosphere and include Europe that could be true. However there's a lot of countries that are really bad and we must acknowledge their existence.
What is interesting in the UK is that it seems largely to be people voting against their own interests a lot of the time.
It's like the population is told that "bad people drink water, therefore we should poison the water" and they buy into it completely. The country (as mentioned before) is on the decline for sure, but the standards decline much faster than they should largely I think because people are protectionist in mentality.
It's the individualism that causes most problems; there's very little sense of collectivism in the UK. The belief is that everyone is sort of out to get you and that there is a finite number of resources we all compete for.
At least this is my experience having grown up in central England (but expatriated 8 years ago)
Without meaning this as a comment towards your post in particular, I've found that people who say "they're voting against their own interests" tend to project their own solidly middle-class interests (access to abundant, cheap labour, better deals on fees to go to university, etc - completely valid self-interests to have!) onto working-class people who may be unaffected or even harmed by those interests (competing with that same labour pool for work, being outbid for housing from the rest of the population, being unable to afford to have a child).
What this also misses is that people have self-interests besides straightforward economic metrics. Is it not a valid self interest for someone to want their home town to maintain a sense of local identity? For a community to not change beyond recognisability in a single lifetime? For a person to not feel like a foreigner in the only place they've ever been able to call home?
These concerns aren't as strongly felt by the more well-to-do people, since they have the means to live a more cosmopolitan, travelled lifestyle, and give their lives "higher" aspirations and meaning, like academia, or activism. But for poorer people, their home, and local identity and sense of community, is all they have. Like you said, there's little sense of collectivism in the UK, and is it any wonder why when whole communities have been either displaced by market forces, or replaced demographically, in less than a single generation?
I am so happy that it's me you're responding to.
My socio-economic status was "poor", "white-british" and from a very deprived area. My Mother continues in this social class though I (through accident of being interested in computers) have seemed to escape.
The reason I point out that "white-british" bit is because there's a lot of social programmes I was looked-over for simply because race was an important qualifier. As you might imagine that made me obscenely bitter about migration and non-native races; but that's something I haven gotten over as the years have gone by.
Cheap labour is not what I consider important at all, however if you vote for tax cuts because you think you'll be better off despite the tax cuts being mostly for the very wealthy: well that's less money for social services.
If you vote in favour of cutting benefits because you think that immigrants get too many benefits despite being on benefits yourself then that's directly against your own interest.
If you vote for a reduction in healthcare spending despite depending on it to live: you have voted against your own interest.
All of the above are some examples of what I mean, and I have tory-voting friends in these exact situations.
I'd imagine that most of poor and working class people "voting for" the policies you mentioned are victims of our terrible voting system, and doing so very begrudgingly because they believe that overall, that set of policies is the least-worst.
Out of genuine interest, when you say you say you have friends in these exact situations, do you actually have friends on benefits who are explicitly in favour of an across-the-board reduction in benefits in a way that would lower their own take-home? I'd be interested to know their reasoning for that. Or are they more in favour of a stricter set of requirements for immigrants to receive benefits?
Anyway, cheers to you for managing to get out of deprivation, definitely not easy.
It becomes about perspective at some point. The conservatives are seen as "tough on migration" but the mechanisms with which they are seen that way are actually "tough on lower classes". Thus when someone wants to vote against migration they wind up voting based on perspective.
It's also funny to consider the sorry state of the liberal democrats.
With the risk of your prior perspective of things being somewhat hardened; this is the reality of what happened:
* Lib Dems campaigned on a platform of an alternative voting mechanism and of freezing university caps.
* No clear majority in the GE
* Coalition government is floated, Conservative leader David Cameron says "join me and we will abide one of your major campaign pledges, you can pick which one".
* Lib dems join, pick alternative voting, as it has the best chance of doing the most good in the future.
* Conservatives employ the most underhanded tactics (using the same ad agency as Vote Leave fwiw) to undermine the referendum they hold. "This baby doesn't need an alternative voting system, they need a life support system" etc;
* Referendum fails
* Lib Dems come out as traitors for betraying their pledge to freeze university fees'.
* Nobody will seriously vote Lib Dem now because of this, instead preferring to vote for a party consistently embroiled in scandals after scandals.
Thus: we are perpetually stuck in a "lesser evil" voting system, and it's easy to completely decimate the other side by either eating a bacon sandwich wrong or making a choice that was intended to break this horrible situation.
Everyone loses, A/V is considered unpalatable due to the failed referendum.
Couldn’t respond to others in this comment chain for some reason but fwiw I think politics in my country (Germany) are equally insane at times if not more so…
in this case it seems we are in agreement because I absolutely limited my view to Britain & the continent (+ the US)
State use of propaganda has been perfected over the last century. The go-to emotion is fear. Next time you read the paper or watch it on TV, note how many stores are trying to instill fear.
Read some articles from 10 or 20 years ago and see how blown out of proportion the fear mongering actually was and realize you've been under a constant state of that for your entire news consuming life.
You mean like uncontrolled immigration and the highest tax burden for 70 years? That certainly does sound like a war on its own population.
no I don't. probably because I've been an immigrant my entire life. with the difference that I'm OKish off and people calling me an "expat" probably because I haven't been stepping off a boat chased by some s-hole country militia or Frontex.
what I referred to is the issue of how wealth is distributed, how the society isolates itself in a class-system, and people's mobility between these systems.
the fact that the poor are riled up against foreigners is a common pattern among the far-right world-wide and can also be seen as a failure by leftist politicians (who rather talk about pronouns than the struggling lower classes)
I agree that socio-economic mobility in the UK is bad and definitely needs to be improved. However, the lower classes are those most adversely affected by uncontrolled immigration due to the increased supply of labour and the downward pressure on salaries.
Could you elaborate? Things like the spouse visa requirements don't feel very permissive.
I note also that France is happy to let them cross the channel in rubber boats, with no effort to stop them.
The truth is that France did have less incentive to prevent crossings as there was no longer any financial aid for them doing so. To be clear: the UK would definitely not act differently in that situation; though it's reprehensible.
It's also true that France no longer has infrastructure to cope with it's own migration and tougher laws being introduced in French are pushing migrants to tackle the treacherous journey.
However since the deal has been reached France is doing as much as it can to prevent crossings -- that said, it betrays the real problem.
The number of "small boats" making crossings ("Small Boats" being a parroted line) was 29,090 for the year of 2023 (as of December). Which is a reduction from the year prior due to our agreement with France. But that's nothing compared to the net migration figures of 750,000 (largest on record and by a huge margin) and that also precludes the fact that of those migrants crossing on small boats may not be granted asylum (5,284 as of September '23 - 18%) were denied and sent away.
Not exactly an embarrassingly large number in the grand scheme of things, which makes it a bit of a boogeyman.
Numbers are down, but I'd be interested to see what that is attributed to, once weather effects etc are taken into account.
You also say 5,284 people were "denied and sent away". Were they actually physically deported from the UK?
And I agree, Net Migration is out of control and needs to come down severely.
Your first claim is that it was RNLI (which is a charity btw) taxiing migrants, which has some decent counterfactual evidence citing first-party sources: https://theferret.scot/claim-nigel-farage-about-rnli-taxi-se...
The second claim is that it's the french escorting people across the channel, there was only one incident that invoked this which was the french navy chasing a small boat into english waters under low visibility, the ire was caught because the french naval vessel requested that a British ferry make way for the naval vessel which cleared a path for the dinghy full of migrants. - as usual, a sprinkle of truth and Farage will parrot it on GB news and the murdoch media will fan the flames as much as possible.
Hate peddlers the lot of them, and all in an attempt to make you scared, scared and fearful so you vote on emotion and not on information. And it's working.
You can literally go to ship tracking websites and see the RNLI boats travel into the channel, and see photographic evidence (despite the efforts of channel ports to block this) of the people (the vast majority of whom are young men from safe countries) being unloaded and put on coaches to accommodation.
You can also see the French warships making no effort to stop the boats and making sure they safely leave French waters.
Please stop gaslighting.
The ferret doesn’t have to be reputable since it’s referencing first party data sources directly and linking to them, something The Evening Standard and The Sun fail to do often. And certainly something Farage has never done.
So, you could not possibly be more wrong when disregarding it.
Stop the gaslighting.
Even generous estimates put the number at 13,000 and we have laws and social systems to break this behaviour.
There's more victims of fraud in the UK, (21% of people have lost >£1,000 to fraud); which puts the number at 14,224,728 affected citizens.
Granted, human trafficking is a significantly worse problem, but it's not endemic.
e.g. there were 488k work visas and 632k study visas granted in 2022: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-...