>"Mass immigration is your punishment for the British Empire" has a certain ideological appeal. But if you're a British person, you don't care about that. What matters is whether you'd rather live in London as it was in 2000 or London today. And I think the answer to that is obvious if your judgment isn't compromised. My parents went to visit London a year or two ago, and my mom was shocked by the decline in public order and standards, the ghettos, etc. This is a woman who lived in Bangladesh most of her life, and she came back telling me about the decline of London.

I walk around outside my home in the very heart of London: the street is full of Rolls Royces, pretty Russian and Ukrainian girls walk around carrying their Graff jewels and Kelly bags. Men still wear watches worth hundreds of thousands despite what the FT style section says.

What ghetto? Where is it? Everybody here is as rich as Croesus and very much a part of the same global jet set culture.

It's not a matter of ideology, or of punishment. It's simply the dynamics of the system playing out. It's alienating for people inside of it because they're experiencing the effects of historical forces which operate on a scale longer than human life.

OF course people would rather live in a period when things were simpler and easier, who wouldn't? The lie sold by the self-styled reformists (and doubled down upon by the emerging Restore Britain) is that all these unwanted outcomes were done to Britain by Other People instead of being the product of repeated bad decisions - Brexit being the most recent one. Someone else in the thread observed that about 27 immigrants are offered jobs for every native Briton entering the workforce. But this notion of prioritizing market forces at the expense of all other considerations is exactly the legacy of Thatcherite conservatism that has dominated Britain for nearly a half-century and of which the Brexit/Reform/Restor movements are the ost recent iterations.

As John Bagot Glubb pointed out ~50 years ago (and many others have pointed out before him), the root causes of decline are complacency, greed, and individualism (vs the notion of social duty). I put it to you that modern finance capitalism selects for these negative traits because they maximize short-term gain and because the accumulation of money allows the holders of it to be indifferent to the long-term structural problems. The primary reason I do not identify as a political conservative is that they sell tradition to the electorate but conserve wealth and power for themselves.

https://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

This comment is nonsense, and it is the usual propaganda based on an ideological bent. I'm sorry but I think you and your family have retained the class/caste based system of you original homeland and it is just manifesting in a weird way.

I am willing to bet your mother never encountered anything of the sort. Most of the old very rough areas in London are now gentrified (people complain about it). You can pretty much walk around anywhere in London, at night, without any issues. Phone snatching is the major problem, but general crime, violent crime, ghettoism, etc are all down since 2000.

I know this, because I am an immigrant from a 3rd world country, have lived in London for 25+ years. And the stats show it too.

Your post really makes me angry.