Psychoactive Substances: Rolling UK Politics in The Neo-Con Era

very quick fag packet guess = around 15/16 million out of a population of 64 million

and only counting those eligible to vote

just wondering really if non-voters didn't know enough, didn't care enough, assumed status quo would continue quoing

think the electorate is about 38 mill

cheers drive

no I'm quite a bit off:

The total number of UK parliamentary electors in 2015 was 44,722,000, a fall of 1.3% from 2014.

that's only people registered to vote, not all eligible people

I suspect 20-odd years of having 3 main parties with similar economic policies might've put a few people off bothering

im prob feeling very cynical right now (or ok, the last month), but immigration is never going to be off the agenda. its so routinely used to exploit the electorate, cos its such an emotional subject that cuts right through peoples intellects and deep into their guts, that either you talk about it, or you get the current shitswill that made people (partially at least) vote brexit.

id actually like to see a more general poll on how british people feel about immigration/migrants/kids of migrants (then again, perhaps not).

its so embedded in our culture, in the very grain of britishness, to hate/sneer down/mock anyone 'other'. even i sometimes wonder if its a mistake to let migrants in, for all the trouble it brings, and im the son of two of them! even nice middle class people i often think only really like migrants so they can feel good about how open minded they are and 'try something different.. oooh look how open minded i am! can you see how tolerant i am! arent i liberal?!' (then again id still prefer that sort of self-deceit to ukip supporters).

off topic entirely, but i remember signing up to the guardian dating site once and being surprised at how nearly all the women i met didnt seem any more politically progressive or open minded than your average mail reader (slight exaggeration but prob not much).

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/05/brexit-has-its-roots-british-empire-so-how-do-we-explain-it-young

it needs to be discussed. when you choose not to talk about it, for fear of rhetorical ugliness, it just makes that elephant in the room that much larger.

Immigration can never be discussed enough for many of the people who voted Leave - in much the same way that there will be always be too many Muslims and Polski skleps for those same people (regardless of the actual figure).

that either you talk about it, or you get the current shitswill that made people (partially at least) vote brexit.

not an either/or though is it? It's been talked about constantly, and we have the current shitswill.

is shitswill the right word here?

London voted 60% in favour of remaining in the EU, although within this there were significant splits between boroughs, with inner London notably more pro-EU than the outer suburbs. For example, Lambeth recorded a 78.6% vote in favour or remain, while in Barking and Dagenham this was just 37.6%

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/24/voting-details-show-immigration-fears-were-paradoxical-but-decisive?CMP=share_btn_tw

Yet the details of the referendum demonstrate a paradox – that those who have experienced the highest levels of migration are the least anxious about it. The highest levels of remain voters were actually in areas of highest net migration while some of the strongest leave areas have had the fewest recent new migrants.

Looking forward to London becoming a West Berlin-esque Scottish exclave

Yup

they should just split the tories and labour

make four new parties

Yup. Need PR first, though.

xps
It's the catch 22 you get when people are conned into believing that everything wrong with their lives boils down to one abstract thing. If the answers you give them don't address all their anxieties then nothing you have to say about the issue will ever be enough and of course no answer on immigration that isn't an outright lie can achieve that.

the explanations for anti-immigration sentiment seem weak to me; normally explained as people disaffected after suffering from global capitalism (which is obviously vague to the point of meaninglessness), or concerns that rising population puts pressure on services

but neither of these things are unique to the UK. the population growth rate in the UK is not that high. the only thing I can think of which is unique to the UK is the media

Wtf did you guys do?

It's not really a paradox. Immigrants go where the jobs are, 'native British people' are less resentful where the jobs are.

I was in Doncaster, which went 70% leave yesterday, and barely saw anyone who wasn't white and didn't speak to a single Eastern European other than the bemused Serb i was showing around. There are just no jobs there. It's easier for politicians and the media to encourage a discussion of immigration than it is to admit that Doncaster is functionally useless viewed from London.

agree it's difficult to see any historical precedent for poverty and political disengagement leading to right wing racism

corbyn has to be playing the long game here (because as this proves labour had no other to play). let it all fall and rebuild the base. right...?

but neither of these things are unique to the UK.

It's all over though. Trump, Le Pen, Wilders, Pegida, to some extend the Five Star Movement and the new populist party that took Rome recently, etc, etc.

"It's not really a paradox. Immigrants go where the jobs are, 'native British people' are less resentful where the jobs are."

also, immigrants/children of migrants will not likely vote brexit, duh (well some will, but stupid, illogical people come in all stripes).

xxp

possible up to a point. the most pressing problem he has that he's got any hope of addressing is getting rid of about 200 useless MPs

Hard to imagine Corbyn is capable of any type of long term machiavellian shit.

Indeed

i actually love corbyn. but am wondering if the only thing that will make any of the major parties sit up and take notice - re: that idea of destroy and rebuild - is a left wing version of UKIP. nothing is THAT bad right now where anything is genuinely getting destroyed. not yet anyway.

*left wing equivalent

I know of quite a lot of immigrants that have voted Leave. families of colleagues etc

It's the catch 22 you get when people are conned into believing that everything wrong with their lives boils down to one abstract thing. If the answers you give them don't address all their anxieties then nothing you have to say about the issue will ever be enough and of course no answer on immigration that isn't an outright lie can achieve that.

― tsrobodo, Friday, June 24, 2016 12:12 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's otm. Also if you feel you're not being heard, you just repeat the same idiotic point louder and louder rather than have someone take it on board and try to move the conversation further

nothing is THAT bad right now where anything is genuinely getting destroyed

you should check out further education, the NHS, services for disabled people etc etc etc some time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jicnBlcAJ4

A watched pot never rusts.

Left wing UKIP - ie very populist, very 'honest' (simple) in communication, willing to use base attacks against opposition - if nothing else, then expressed as a fraction of Labour - has been an obvious necessity for a while. Corbyn went some of the way, he gained like Sanders because went more left-leaning and stood out, but he's too lifeless as a personality to sell it. You don't need to sink to low depths, but it baffles me how poor politicians who aren't right wing populists are at communicating their ideology through simple language, and how poor they are at dismantling shitty arguments by other politicians. Get some new PR people in there.

agree it's difficult to see any historical precedent for poverty and political disengagement leading to right wing racism

probably necessary but not sufficient causes... maybe the UK isn't especially awash with anti-immigrant sentiment, it's clearly hard to say what the masses think, but we're the only country to have had a referendum and immigration had dominated the agenda to an extent that seems unusual to me

i'm not sure it's easy to say that everyone who voted leave is a right wing racist. i mean fuck them, but i don't believe there are as many right wing racists in britain as there were leave voters. i mean, it's not as if the remain campaign did a good job of telling people what the eu actually does for them.

"you should check out further education, the NHS, services for disabled people etc etc etc some time"

i didnt mean those institutions arent being destroyed.

but i meant for the current political status quo to get destroyed, you need a firm tipping point.

im not sure what that will be.

ITV reporter in Sunderland just nailed it. An awful lot of people felt it can't get any worse for them, so they rolled the dice

this is exculpatory bullshit imo. there might have been a small anti-establishment "give anyone in power a kick" vote, but this referendum was explicitly xenophobic, anti-immigrant and pretty fucking racist. to say that wasn't relevant to how people voted is delusional.

reminds me of the dave eggers piece about trump in the guardian, in which he claimed trump's followers don't care what he thinks, and he could say he wanted to build a wall on the canadian border instead of mexico and it would make no difference because the only thing they want is stuff the establishment doesn't. which, you know, is bollocks.

. You don't need to sink to low depths, but it baffles me how poor politicians who aren't right wing populists are at communicating their ideology through simple language, and how poor they are at dismantling shitty arguments by other politicians. Get some new PR people in there

The UK has had a long list of leftist showmen - Livingstone, Galloway, Sheridan, Hatton, etc, and i think part of Corbyn's appeal is that he isn't drawn from that well. He's thoughtful, considered and policy-led rather than a flashy egotist.

He does need some better PR people but idk how much that would help in the current press climate.

the language of the right is more naturally alluring to people than the nuanced language of political realism.

It appeals to real people. Decent people.

I made a brief fb post about the brexit this morning and one of my British friends gave the following reply:

I voted leave for many reasons. One main one is that there are loads of useless homegrown losers than take advantage of our benefit system, because they know EU migrants will come here and do the jobs they should be doing. Meanwhile the good, talented people go over to Europe. I am not against asylum seekers - God help anyone that has to flee hell and leave everything behind. I am not against immigration - I am an immigrant!

The POTUS came here and told us to stay because our negotiating our leave with the EU would be inconvenient for the US and all their *projects* - they need us undistracted to be on call to help at any time. How thoughtful of him.

There are so many laws and regulations that the EU has put upon us. Human Rights will always be there and that will not be taken away.

Imagine Congress having 5 elected US officials and the rest are from other places that you have no say in their being elected. You don't know what their agenda is. You have to trust that they are out for the good of all. But they aren't because the EU is made up of COUNTRIES not STATES. And that is the problem with being in the EU.

Help me parse this out. Are these common positions among Leave voters?

xp tbc I think anti-immigration feeling is far too widespread to be understoood as classic niche right wing racism. affluent suburbanites overwhelmingly voted leave, they're not disaffected victims of global capitalism and many of them aren't particularly concerned about public services, but they're still full of immigration rhetoric

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/24/brexit-won-vote-remain-eu-article-50-lisbon-treaty-referendum-david-cameron

thought this piece was interesting. sounds like the perhaps this isn't over yet, or that we could be mired in red tape and in-fighting for a long time.

Despairing American here, with questions.

Question one: is there any real material upside to this?

Question two: are there any predictions of the % of UK's immigrant workforce that is likely to gtfo asap and the negative economic impact that's likely to have on top of the already unavoidable negative impact of leaving?

nothing is happening asap and effectively the country is on political holiday for 3 months

probably necessary but not sufficient causes... maybe the UK isn't especially awash with anti-immigrant sentiment, it's clearly hard to say what the masses think, but we're the only country to have had a referendum and immigration had dominated the agenda to an extent that seems unusual to me

― ogmor, Friday, 24 June 2016 13:30 (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is exculpatory bullshit imo. there might have been a small anti-establishment "give anyone in power a kick" vote, but this referendum was explicitly xenophobic, anti-immigrant and pretty fucking racist. to say that wasn't relevant to how people voted is delusional.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, 24 June 2016 13:39 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there was a conservative concilliatory option to talk about very real concerns, or else there could have been an attempt to split the very real concerns about immigration demographic into pragamatists and racists; whether that might have worked is unknowable but it would have been less cowardly. corbyn doing a little of it but only in his shambling fakir/ low church preacher way and probably a decade after it might have made a difference. ogmor obviously correct to see uk newspaper market as distinctive in a european contest.

the counterfactual something like.....if brown had told that bigoted woman that you are entirely allowed to talk about immigration and no that doesn't make you a racist, but you do appear to be a racist. sweden took the high road and has a doctrinaire antiracist public culture but it doesn't seem to have worked there judging by the new hitlerite party with a significant vote share.

Question two: are there any predictions of the % of UK's immigrant workforce that is likely to gtfo asap

I hope not because that will leave me having to do the work of two people in my workplace.

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/s480x480/13528839_10154282301265477_7774603859419193776_n.jpg?oh=1623f68ba3c4fd144ac7d8dd34e1f699&oe=57FBDF3E

I've been to try an console myself by going back and reading some left-wing cases for brexit that ppl were making during the campaign, but they still seem horribly unconvincing, some brave souls on twitter trying to argue that this is a posthumous victory for Bennism rather than a posthumous victory for Powellism

Well at least we can agree on the internet! Yay! (xp)

... oops, I mean capitalism. Yay again!