Putin has been facilitating migration into Europe to destabilise society

Adamante
To fe very clear though, it is not OUR fault. We, as an electorate have routinely voted against these policies and been ignored. It is our political class. I admit though it will be interesting to hear the cacophony of complaints from the middle classes who didn’t give a fig when it was only the grubby working classes who were struggling with impact of mass, uncontrolled immigration.

Did you see the thread recently on the shortage of jobs for newly qualified doctors because overseas applicants were being recruited instead? I made a similar point on that thread, the silence was deafening.

I concluded there are two types of "foreigners coming over here and stealing our jobs" conversations:

1. the white van man edition = always racist and/or xenophobic
2. the prosecco edition = nice middle class people discussing the scandal of their little darlings struggling to get graduate jobs.

The hypocrisy is staggering and nauseating.

It sounds like you haven’t read or researched much about what’s known about Russian interference in Brexit

You said upthread

“I don't understand the logic of "putins hand behind brexit"

This is what I’ve responded to.

I think you’ve veered off course

@Adamante in a way but the last GE was a vote for soft policies. We'll continue to see places such as those in the op exploit that.

Not sure people will get with addressing the issue via votes. We'll be comparatively the easiest if we don't change. Even more that we already are.

I agree with your points generally on many ignoring this or using accusations etc to avoid the reality.

Kung fu that's because what started out as a sensible trading partnership suddenly morphed into a social experiment and open borders and no one had a vote on that

Unless Tony Blair is working with putin because if he hadn't relaxed those eastern European traders rights we wouldn't probably have had brexit at all.
People lives were definitely impacted by sudden large numbers of people arriving.

What should have been a fairly dry referendum (because no one was really talking passionately about the EU in 2015 or 2014), was seized upon by nefarious opportunists with shady agendas and ultimately became enormously divisive

I’m sure we all know people who fell out with each other (friends, family, acquaintances) over Brexit. It seriously undermined and damaged social cohesion in the UK.

The answer to your questions are yes. No government in the past several decades has attempted to limit it in any meaningful way. Why not? There are multiple reasons for this, including political, ideological and good old fashioned back handlers into politician’s pockets in order to safeguard that steady supply of cheap labour. Only it’s not working any longer as many of those who come now are economic migrants who have absolutely no intention of working. I have said on another thread that it is the working class who are less able to organise and articulate the issues, who suffer the negative outcomes the most and have been for years only to be called bigots and racists for attempting to express their issues with it. Now the problem is so big that the middle classes are starting to feel the squeeze which was inevitable - hence we will now start seeing carefully curated articles blaming anyone but our politicians for this horrific mess we are in. Blair kicked it off, the insipid, ideologically captured Tory government of the last 14 years let it spiral out of control and now we have Starmer who is completely ideologically captured, preferring to do the bidding of the globalist organisations who are also lurking in the background, who will finish the job.

To fe very clear though, it is not OUR fault. We, as an electorate have routinely voted against these policies and been ignored. It is our political class. I admit though it will be interesting to hear the cacophony of complaints from the middle classes who didn’t give a fig when it was only the grubby working classes who were struggling with impact of mass, uncontrolled immigration.

lol are you being sarcastic?

But it hasn't worked has it? @kungfoofighting

The outcome of the vote was massively invested in and manipulated by shady outfits like Cambridge Analytica

Did you never read the investigative report by Carole Cadwallr?

Yes, these awful immigrants ruining our society. Men like Adil El Tayar, Alfa Sa'adu, Habib Zaidi and Amged el-Hawrani…

Actually those men were the first named doctors to die in the UK from Covid while trying to save patients lives.

I’ve reported this post as I think the racism crosses a line.

It wasn't all of our choice at all, the ones that didn't want any of this were called "racists"....

This is one of these areas where xenophobes have a huge amount to answer for.

Migration absolutely should be discussed, like every economic issue and every other part of local services planning, etc etc.

But all my life, it has been extremely hard to have any rational discussion of it because as soon as you start, xenophobes come out of the woodwork complaining about the "Them". "Their" food, or music, or "them" marrying "our" daughters... It's endless.

You then get a knee jerk of people trying to pre-empt the xenophobic attacks.

And it all goes round in a horrible dance.

The end result is we become unable to have any kind of constructive discussion, of the kind we might expect on, eg where to build a new hospital.

At least this is an acknowledgment that vast amounts of immigration does destabilise countries.

The other questions we should ask ourselves are: who are the forces within our own borders who are executing this destabilising strategy? Why are there influential westerners supporting this? Are there, effectively, enemies within who want destabilisation and know that immigration will achieve this?

This destabilisation strategy would not have worked without our consent. Yet we know that the vast majority of brits and other europeans don't want such high immigration levels. We see the negative effects of these policies every day on our streets and yet we are gaslit into thinking we can't cope without huge numbers of immigrants: supposedly us natives are too workshy, too inefficient, too small minded. Do the deep state forces actually know that diversity is not our strength, but want it anyway?

Or maybe it has and the numbers would be much higher. Most would be migrants just arrive on flights. Not much Libya, Turkey, Tunisia etc can do about that.

Paywalled

Doesn't surprise me at all, and now that he has the orange idiot under his control he will use the orange idiot to destabilize the USA

For years, right here on MN, anyone who has tried to discuss excessive migration and the negatives it poses to such a small land mass and infrastructure as the UK, has been labelled racist and/or some kind of “phobic”, told they were a “Gammon” and that constant and significant migration is a necessity as Britain has no culture of value and anyway brought it on themselves because of historical “colonisation”. I have watched these conversations with a mix of depression and fascination, i have sometimes engaged and been attacked and all the while I have wondered what would be the wake up call. Is this it? Are we actually saying that migration for all comers was absolutely fine and in no way a problem for the indigenous population and its limited resources, until we found out that Putin was behind it?

Utterly laughable, albeit extremely, hollow laughter.

To be fair to the security services, IIUC there are restrictions on them investigating UK members of Parliament, because of the obvious danger (history?) of them being used for party political purposes.

Dominic Grieve and Ed Lucas are among the people discussing the Russia report in this podcast by journalists Carole Cadwalladr, Peter Jukes and Sergei Christo, who have been working on this for a long time:

Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring: Follow the Money
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2G4egFcwSVgtqbLUeWVBe6

As Carole says, one of the motivating questions for their podcast was: why had the UK intelligence services NOT fully investigated whether Russia had tried to influence the Brexit referendum? Particularly given it had been shown Russia had tried to interfere in votes in other countries.

« In the 7 years between Minsk 2 and the Russian invasion did we increase our own weapons stockpile to better supply Ukraine? Did we increase military spending or increase recruitment? »
No, because as much as hindsight is telling us we were wrong, at the time, « we » were broke, and if the UK/EU had told its population they were substantially increasing military spending in case of an attack by Russia on Ukraine, no one would have believed it. No one believed it until it happened, not even Zelenskyy. But it was always Putin’s intention, he always said Ukraine belonged to Russia - there are people on MN even now who think he will stop at Ukraine even though he is on record as wanting Georgia, Transnistria, Kazakhstan etc. You can see on MN how difficult it is to convince people it’s a good idea to spend more on defense by pointing to what Putin says he’ll do.

Journalists are certainly trying to investigate the different influences on Brexit, and where it comes to Russia did a better job than Parliament and the security services.

Dominic Grieve MP has been outstanding on this – and livid.

9 July 2020
Long-delayed report into Russian influence on UK politics could soon be cleared for publication
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/russia-report-boris-johnson-election-interference-intelligence-security-a9610251.html
Boris Johnson has been widely accused of delaying the report’s publication ahead of last December’s election

21 July 2020
Intelligence and security committee publishes long-delayed findings on Russian influence over UK politics
What does the UK’s Russia report say? Key points explained
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/21/russia-report-reveals-uk-government-failed-to-address-kremlin-interference-scottish-referendum-brexit
“The report reveals that no one in government knew if Russia interfered in or sought to influence the referendum because they did not want to know,” said Stewart Hosie, a Scottish National party MP who sits on the cross-party committee.
“The UK Government have actively avoided looking for evidence that Russia interfered. We were told that they hadn’t seen any evidence, but that is meaningless if they hadn’t looked for it.”
The committee, which scrutinises the work of Britain’s spy agencies, said: “We have not been provided with any post-referendum assessment of Russian attempts at interference”. It contrasted the response with that of the US.

I believe European leaders need to take some responsibility too rather than drum up fear of the Russians

I find it interesting that European leaders are working so hard to generate anti Russian sentiment whilst apparently doing very little to prepare for the threat they claim Russia presents.

The Minsk 1&2 agreements were revealed as hollow promises by Angela Merkle. The discussions and agreements were apparently intended just to buy time for Ukraine to arm themselves. In the 7 years between Minsk 2 and the Russian invasion did we increase our own weapons stockpile to better supply Ukraine? Did we increase military spending or increase recruitment? Why did we sit on our hands waiting for what we thought was the inevitable and do nothing diplomatically to change the outcome?

Does anyone remember the outrage when, during his first term, Trump pointed out that quite a few European NATO members were not meeting NATO defence spending requirements of 2% of GDP?

If we were so convinced Russia was going to march across Europe claiming territory you'd have thought we'd have prioritised either diplomacy or preparedness. We did neither.

Tusk seems to be the only European leader who is behaving as if the Russian threat is actually real.

I very much doubt Farage had connections then but other more powerful political players I wouldn’t be surprised

I agree about Farage. If other politicians had connections then maybe Putin will expose them as further punishment.

David Cameron decided to call the referendum (that could have been stopped by MP’s) and it was Boris Johnson that won over the vote

Nigel Farage has always been anti EU but a failed to become an MP he made it a prominent politically debate but more people were supporting his stance about immigration rather than anti EU

I very much doubt Farage had connections then but other more powerful political players I wouldn’t be surprised

And also the corruption in those countries is rampant