to think we're all being manipulated

There are no countries where rape is hunkydory. It’s forbidden in Islam. A lot of the refugees are highly educated. The endless tropes around the idea of savage uneducated brown men coming here and raping our women are just plain racist.

Why ever not?

Before this set of immigrants it was black people and before that the Irish. There's always some immigrant community to blame for the woes of society.

They backed Tony Blair. The whole ‘it was the Sun what won it’ headline. They didn’t back Starmer though.

The Notting Hill Riots against immigrants were in the 1950s! Nothing new under the sun.

We are not at war. We are not being invaded. Modern British society is not ‘broken’

365,000 undocumented males arriving every year isn't an invasion? From countries where women have no rights, and rape is hunky dory?

You might want to take your horse blinkers off.

Well it's the politicians (and these days 'influencers') that start it all, the media just report what is being said. You get who you vote for! And the fact that any idiot can get a million followers by spouting unsubstantiated garbage doesn't help.

Remember when it was single mums who were the cause of everything wrong with society? Then "benefits scroungers"? Then ASBO teenagers?

Now with immigrants they've found something which has stuck.

Lately I'm not so sure. Every other newscast on BBC news over the past couple of weeks has been nothing but immigration and not in any positive way either.

Feeding directly to the DM demographic.

This comment is a fascinating combination of wishful thinking and crazy.

Even US commentators are reporting on the upcoming British civil war and people are falling for it!!

I've seen some of that - does make me wonder about my view of other countires as well though

I did see an Australian guy commenting about commnets on one of his videos- he'd done something about a proposed spare room tax - they also have housing crisis - and number of USA commenators calling Australin decocarcy dead or demanding an uprising. He was like well it's a shit idea and yes we have other issues as well but FFS given what's happening in your country WTF.

I know nobody British who does not have at least one immigrant in their ancestry, though in some cases it's a few generations back.

My own most recent were a great-grandmother from Flanders on one side and a grandfather from Germany, whose family took refuge here, on the other. I set this against another branch of the family mentioned in church records in Yorkshire from thirteen-something, and feel that (in the 1960s phrase) "we are all foreign students!"

If Farage got his way and everyone had to go back to where their family came from, I have no idea where I would go, but Farage has the same problem, being descended from Huguenot refugees on one side and Germans getting away from the Franco-Prussian war on another.

Yeah, I'm sure the 1000 men that arrive every day are all brain surgeons 🙄
Plus they can't work as they are not legal. So they take and take and take without ever giving back.

I used to live somewhere in England that had a huge foreign population. Let me tell you, they do not want to integrate with English "white trash", I have heard this MANY times.

Of course the narrative is being manipulated. We’ve been in a period of a lack of political consensus since the early 2000s. This has created a power vacuum where all parties are trying to grab the upper hand.
What’s the quickest way to achieve a consensus? A war. A common enemy.
What other benefits are there of being at war?
Government can push through laws that may not otherwise be supported, they can spend money in a way that wouldn’t usually be supported and can say and do things that people would only permit in a crisis.
So, let’s have a war.
But actual wars are very costly and support tends to dwindle once young men and women start coming home in body bags.
So what do you do instead? You have a phoney war. The culture wars. The ‘we’ve lost control of our borders’ type war. You use the language of war ‘Stop the Boats’ ‘raise the flags’ ‘be a patriot’, ‘reclaim our sovereignty’ rename your department of defence the department for war.
But …
We are not at war. We are not being invaded. Modern British society is not ‘broken’

I genuinely fear that the general public will vote in the self-interested little dictators who are telling them these things with straight faces and then once things start getting worse will continue to swallow the line that we are at war, so you have to keep giving up your rights and eroding those of others in order to keep us in the powerful position that they’ve come to enjoy.

To your OP. I mean yes, it's often a good idea to know which political leaning your source comes from as it were. Media 101.

Also splitting people into stupid and right, intelligent and left, leave = stupid, remain = intelligent, moral even, is really immature. I mean psychologically, it's very early - monsters under the bed anyone?

Huge gangs of foreign men hanging around. A few pointing at her children and whispering to each other. The last time she was in town she honestly thought one of them might grab one of her kids. Sounds crazy, I know. But she's not crazy, she's a very sensible middle aged woman.

Depends if they end up working for the NHS - plus if they are young and fit much less likely to use NHS while also paying tax to fund it.

They would be a burden when they get old if they stay - and start to need NHS services.

They'd likely have an adverse effect on other amenities like housing costs - as it's more people to house.

YANBU - What I find even more worrying is a consistent use of the term 'civil war' being echoed through particular platforms on social media. It's as though they are consistently sowing seeds of discord for a particular end.

Even US commentators are reporting on the upcoming British civil war and people are falling for it!!

It’s not happening rn for those in the EU. If it was all the first entry countries would have all arrivals.

I also live in the midlands. I don't feel safe in my local town but it's not because of immigrants. It's I suspect due to poverty and a general breakdown of society which I've argued in a pp is the wider issue here.

What specifically makes your sister feel unsafe? Do these asylum seekers hang around the streets threatening people? Is there any objective evidence that crime rates have increased? Again I'm genuinely curious. If crime rates are increasing and people are genuinely increasing then I agree that this is an issue. However if you think there's just too many brown people in your town then that's not a political problem it's a racism problem.

I'm curious as to where that paper has come from, and who wrote it.

The point about returning them to the first EU country is also interesting. Let Greece deal with it. Let someone else deal with it. I think we did the EU a favour by leaving. It's forced us to actually think about the issue for a start. We were the spoilt child of the EU - no we don't want to be part of the euro, no to Schengen. It was out of balance. Let's send them back to first country and not think about it. Don't you think that's wrong?

How about working to stop the wars that are making people come here. Because whatever you may believe, anyone who works with the people knows that it is extremely difficult not to mention costly. It has to be paid for. That's the reality. The money we are borrowing. It's extraordinary.

I don't know what the answer is. It's very complex.

Second generation immigrants, including those of Muslim extraction, tend to realign to the national average. The worrying about being "outbred" is unjustified. It's also a very old racist trope that has been targeted at all sorts of different groups over the last few centuries. None of whom have outbred us and seized control.

So you think adding millions to the population will help? Or not?

Op, I totally agree. It’s classic divide and conquer stuff being supported by American and Russian money. The dumb racists are falling for it and we are all going to be shafted as a result. It’s embarrassing.

I think there’s a huge amount of psy-ops on all the sites too. No doubt, after Brexit, the Russians are seeing how easy it is to manipulate a thick population. Then you’ve got the media licking their lips at all the wonderful click bait headlines that Farage and his ilk generate (second hand Trumpisms). “They’re eating our pets” and “They’re eating our swans.”

Oh and I see that Andrea Jenkyns is now (contrary to NHS advice) taking up the lead on the paracetamol causing autism nonsense. The Russians will never need to invade us when they can cheaply help us to destroy ourselves. Thank god my family have Irish passports ☹️

Why do you think the majority of the reaction is the emotive language used by the tabloids rather than the vast numbers of undocumented men that we seem unable to stop entering our country largely coming from counties where rape of women is not illegal (or so they claim when caught)?

Some of these men are actual known terrorists who then go into commit rape and other crimes while here (a terrorist from Egypt was recently convicted of raping a woman in Hyde Park - why are you so happy to accept her as collateral damage?). Why do you think that is not another problem we are facing alongside all the other problems?

Why are there so many threads insisting that all we have to worry about is government corruption, pressure on the NHS, many black holes in our public finances and growing crime and terrorist thread? Mass immigration is not going to improve any of those issues.

Why is uncontrolled immigration not also a valid issue for people to be concerned about? Many reports from people in communities that are seriously and directly impacted by numbers of foreign men behaving in unacceptable ways - why do you have so much empathy for unknown foreign men and none for British people tho are suffering?

I’m so bored of people trying to shut the conversation down - you can’t make it go away.