to think we're all being manipulated

Agree with your OP. But once upon a time I didn’t know either so I try to keep the frustration down.

You are absolutely correct that at this point the answer is for the wealth to be shared.
I also think it would be far preferable to not end up in this state as a society- and that would mean people being less ignorant to current affairs, the legal system and using their vote to avoid such equality.
I feel the deep inequality we have today is partly the fault of ‘normal’ people who have voted very stupidly in the past; having being manipulated by the media and not knowing enough about anything to make a good choice for themselves at the ballot box. Brexit voters, reform voters, people who have voted Tory yet who earn under 60k a year for example. Very stupid. I don’t know what they expected! It seems obvious to me that if you are in the little fish pond (as almost all of us are) but you vote with the big fish, you aren’t voting for your own interests at all. It’s pure manipulation!

Mail has been owned by the Rothmere family for nearly 100 years. In 1934 the owner Lord Rothmere ran the headline 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts'.
That tells you what you need to know about the Mail. no surprise they are in favour of Right wing politics

I couldn't agree with you more OP, and yet so many fall for it. They want the division, they want us fighting each other, divided and distracted, in survival mode and not looking at what they are actually doing at the top of the system.

I hope this era is the start of people waking up to these tactics and we see big changes in the distribution of power in the decades to come.

😂

Maybe my point wasn’t quite clear - I do think the number of people coming in is a problem and needs to be stopped but it’s for the politicians to sort and stop incentivising the people traffickers.

I don't and I am definitely NOT unusual. It's likely that despite the recent migration waves there are probably more ethnically British people alive than at any point in history. Our population was after all a lot smaller at the height of empire.
I do wonder why so many today try to deconstruct the British, and also British culture generally?

I love it! It's a good book to read as a teenager and then again as an adult. Different parts stand out and you notice more. I agree about the delicacy. I think maybe because he wrote so many short stories he became incredibly skilled at sketching detailed characters in a few lines. It reminds me of Iris Murdoch even though her style/themes are completely different. Tender is the night and Save me the Waltz (his wife's novel about the same subject as tender) are both really good as well but best read together IMO.

You end by saying that we need to be able to debate civilly with one another but start by saying that people (presumably those with different views from yours) are poorly educated.

If you want to debate civilly you have to start from the premise that the person you are talking to knows something that you do not and is worth listening to. You have to start by being willing to have your views changed or moderated. You can't do that if you have already decided they are 'poorly educated.'

There are two competing dialogues here and, as ever, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

We have the left who claim all immigration is good and it is the only solution to our demographic bubble and all cultures are equal and anything else is racism. And that immigration doesn’t depress wages or create inequality. They also believe that there is no value in the nation state.

And we have the right who believe that immigration is out of control, the recent immigrants are a cost and a threat to our society. They also believe that the nation state is all important.

The reality is that we need immigration and a certain amount of immigrants can be absorbed and assimilated into society each year. But that, above this number, it is creating problems and social divisions. It is also true that the democratic libertarian culture based on Judeo-Christian ideas (regardless of whether someone is religious) is what has allowed the West to do so well over centuries, and not all people share these values.

However, it is also true that due to free movement of labour has vastly increased inequality and made the rich super rich whilst depressed the pay of the poor. And it has been awfully hard to redistribute this wealth.

I don’t think that either side has the answers and merely thinking the other side is thick, bigoted or fallen for a lie is self serving and not constructive.

This is illogical because quite obviously "culture wars" do the opposite of create a concensus.

Thank you. This is tangiable stuff that we can have honest conversations about. I can see why you would find this distressing and even why it would make you angry. As somebody who has experienced this what do you think the answer is? Tell me honestly what do you think is the solution? Do you think that Farage has the right answers? I'm not asking to agree or disagree btw I'm just wondering

''People get the government they deserve'' - even in Africa and certainly in UK.

Absolutely, OP.

Right wing media and vested interests who want people to fight among themselves while the top 0.1% hoover up money while lowering the median standard of living.

We should focus on the Royals

And the billionaires

I re-read this over summer alongside Ds who did too and it really is stunningly well written. It has a delicacy that I don’t think I remembered or that has been successfully put into film.

I see it as an issue with people being so poorly educated that they can't differentiate between being told nonsense and sense. Everyone is supposed to have their own mind. If we don't, we're all lost. I personally see very clearly (I think!) when I'm being manipulated. I think it's happening everywhere on lots of levels, left, right, you name it. We all need to settle down, accept that views can be different to ours and be willing to debate in a civilised manner.

"“Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard? Well, it’s a fine book and everyone ought to read it … This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are.. and we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization — oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see"
Its the same arguments repackaged. Again and again and again

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

.

YABU.

This has been building for a long time, especially since the EU expanded and there was unexpectedly high migration from Eastern European countries.

High levels of immigration do disproportionately affect people in poorer or more marginalised communities. It did depress wages for self employed tradespeople, including building site labourers and more skilled tradespeople. had a quote for painting my house. The price from the Eastern European was one third of that of the white British people who gave me a quote. That was maybe 20 years ago and prices have remained that depressed. That is a huge loss of income for those self employed traders.

At the time, my lovely middle class recent immigrant Polish neighbour went to work as a teaching assistant in a deprived area of the city. She came back and told me in shocked tones how the class was full of polish kids who could not speak English and how the teachers could not teach the class because of this.

The 'migrant hotels' has meant that large numbers of unemployed young men become concentrated in one area. It is not a surprise that large numbers of unemployed young men causes problems in an area.

When communities are experiencing difficulties, and when they try to speak about this, they are just told that they are thick and racist, then tensions will start to rise.

I see this as a class issue. Poorer communities have been disproportionately affected. But the middle classes, who only seen benefits of immigration in terms of new delis and cheaper tradespeople, have not only ignored them, but actively derided them when they spoke about what they were experiencing.

Sure the cost of living crisis and the cost of housing, and problems in the NHS will have heightened things further, these are things that disproportionately affect those who are poorer, and people with fewer resources will be feel more protective of those resources, but there have been real and disproportionate negative impacts of immigration in some already pressurised communities.

This is not a tale of the elite manipulating people but of middle classes and politicians having a class based derision for poorer people and a deep set unwillingness to listen to what poorer people said, a lack of curiousity about their experiences and views, because they had already decided that poor white people, who do not dress like them or talk like them, are thick and racist and not worth listening to.

Exactly. It's not the immigrants. They just like to make us think if the immigrants go away, things are peachy.

People who voted for Brexit the forget how it works the other way too, and now they're standing in longer queues at airports, or their children won't be able to go abroad and work in the EU as easily etc. Guess what? Maybe you should have thought about this before you decided that Brexir easily solves things.

Define immigrants too... does it include people of the non-white origin whose ancestors or previous generations weren't born here, but their children are citizens... do they get turfed out too? If my birth father was from Hong Kong but I am a British born citizen, does that mean I'm not welcome here?

It has implications for everyone. It's scary times.

So sorry to read this, it’s so sad that this has been forced on us. However, according to the OP (based on a reply they made to my first comment), anyone not embracing these cultural changes must be xenophobic. It’s hard to deal with people who have this attitude.

" People can make up their own minds" except that's a bit more difficult when they only read newspapers with this rhetoric, watch similarly biased news channels and their social media feed reflects their preferences back at them. They're only seeing one side, a lot of which is misinformation.

Politicians on all sides are causing this break down of society. Its the left and the right and driven by people who make money from it.

I hate the way politicians look down at voters and the way we are treated by them. They all think they are elite and special but most of them are thieves, scammers and liars. how do they manage to do what they do? MONEY... bribes - oh its not called bribes now its called funding.

Politicians all over the world have manipulated themselves more power over the years and now they are greedy and want more.

Resources aren't that scarce. They're just being hoarded by the few.

Still waiting for the promised Brexit benefits such as :
Reduction in immigration
Money for the NHS ( £ 350 million a week )
We wouldn’t leave the single market
Turkey is about to join the EU and ‘ they’ll all come over here ‘
etc etc .
Still at least our rivers and seas are nice and clean now …
Brexit voters were told they were being scammed …