To think the anti-immigrations have BEEN "heard"?

[dropoutin]

I posted something like this on one of the riot threads but it ws locked soon after.

Is anyone else getting really bored of people justifying racism, terror, violence and destruction by insisting how important it is that those who imagine asylum seekers are responsible for the country's problem are "heard".

Little reminder: It's exactly that particular obsession that led to the Brexit referendum in 2016, and the most radical - and destructive - political change of recent times.

There were several years in which the country barely discussed anything else. Farage and Johnson got to tell you in great detail how the reason you're poor is because of the black family down the road. And you got the choice of believing them, or not. You even got to make Johnson PM so he could "get Brexit done" and "level up" your community.

You've been taken for a ride. Asylum seekers rriving irregularly (via small boats etc) make up less than 5% of total immigration, which is coming down after peaking in 2022 (partly due to the Ukraine war, and other factors). Neither Tories nor Labour are going to radically reduce immigration because anyone having to ACTUALLY run the country can see that doing so will exacerbate the demographic time-bomb, reduce economic activity and decimate the NHS. You're poor because of 14 years of Conservative economic policy, not because of anyone's skin colour or passport.

Meanwhile: How many of us get to have a national referendum tailored around our favourite policy hobbyhorse? When is my referendum on industrial relations? On housing and land ownership? On the House of Lords? When do I get to be "heard"? Being heard doesn't mean everyone has to agree with you, or that you get to go out and beat up brown people because things aren't working out the way you imagined they would.

It's not that you haven't been heard. It's just that you were wrong.

For me- and I'm not involved in rioting or condone it. The numbers may be small, but over £6 million a day is spent on housing approximately 45,000 people......with everything economically going on, with everything the government says it needs to cut back on, hearing those figures makes things difficult for me if I'm honest. They could be seen as a trigger point, but I beleive the ire is being directed the wrong way. This is from the government report, showing the amounts spent on UK citizens is significantly less per head.

The Government’s impact assessment of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 estimated that the total cost of providing public services to a UK national is around £12,000 per person. Even the most basic calculations put the economic burden on the British taxpayer of an illegal migration population of 1.2 million at £14.4 billion. That is just shy of 10% of NHS England’s budget for this year.

Well said OP.

Another way of looking at it, is that the govt (of both parties) proceeded with European integration between 1975 and 2010 while ignoring the concerns of the electorate. We live in a democracy, people were entitled to their say, and the mess that is Brexit is the result.

On immigration, people have been expressing their perfectly valid concerns and being belittled, insulted, called racist or ignored since Gordon Brown and his famous 'bigoted woman' remark.

Rioting is criminal, completely unacceptable and those involved must be prosecuted, but there is understanding & some support from a wider section of the public because people are worried about a soaring population, about their inability to access services and housing. About communities being undermined and about their children's futures.

Politicians need to address those concerns head-on, and stop pretending that there are no problems.

OP, telling people they are 'wrong' is you acting like Gordon Brown. If we are to resolve this we need to address people's concerns.

The major irony is they tend to vote Tory, who are the party who decided to pay out millions to house asylum seekers rather than actually process them as Labour are now beginning to do. The mess we are in is a direct result of voting for a hard-line party who were better at stirring up the hatred than dealing with the issue in any effective way.

Asylum seekers are not illegal and if they are processed and granted asylum they can also become a British taxpayer, relieving the burden for all. Or deported, removing the burden.

Your estimated 1.2 million (estimates are between 417k and 1.2 mil) illegal immigrants are costing the British taxpayer WAY less than 12k per head though as they have no recourse to public funds, housing, healthcare... They are not the people who are being housed in immigration centres and defunct hotels, they're the people who are being trafficked, kept as slaves, living and working in terrible conditions with no legal rights. That's why we can only estimate how many there are. We know how many asylum seekers there are though. In 2023, 67,337 applications for asylum were made in the UK.

The people dragging innocent members of the public from cars, and harassing people based on the colour of their skin, have been heard. There's no clearer way to say "I am scum".

there can never be an excuse for dragging people from cars or setting fire to buildings housing people.

I dont think the right people have been heard. There are millions of us concerned about unfettered immigration and the worsening quality of life in the Uk and a myriad of other issues not least the impact on women but we aren’t doing the above which is never excusable.

They have been heard but they see little being done. It’s unfair to lump the reasonable concerned people in with the revolting rioters.

Despite concerns about mass immigration being a key voting subject there is little any destination country can do about it so this will never go away as an inflammatory issue.

Labour’s only solution so far appears to be some words which amount to wishful thinking and a slight reshuffle of Border Force.

I don't think the anti immigrants have been heard enough saying what they really mean: they should just own it and say "yeah we just don't like brown people and have been looking for an excuse for a good ruck" and stop pretending it's anything else, rather than give dumb sounding interviews rambling on about made up British values that don't make any sense.

If they came out with basic admission of being racist and feeling aggrieved at least we'd all know where we were 🙄

I disagree.

I think for too long genuine and legitimate concerns about immigration have been ignored and viewed as racist. The issue is a actually incredibly complex from an economic, ethical and cultural perspective and one that all developed countries are having to tackle. Put simply though, there are far far too many people who would like to come to countries like the UK and we don't have the ability to absorb that many people without huge (and often unwelcome) changes being felt by the existing population.

You also have to be honest about the fact that there are different types of immigrant. A highly educated, super skilled immigrant that speaks English already and is from a similar country is going to find it a lot easier to integrate and contribute than an uneducated, unskilled individual who doesn't want to learn English and has strong religious views that conflict with the liberal values the UK favours. Put stalky, some immigrants are likely to remain economic burdens for a long time and have no intention of integrating and enriching the country they end up in. Your demographic argument doesn't really stack up in this context unless you start sifting immigrants for what they can offer a country which has all sorts of ethical issues when it comes to asylum seekers.

I don't think the anti immigrants have been heard enough saying what they really mean: they should just own it and say "yeah we just don't like brown people and have been looking for an excuse for a good ruck"

I think we have too many immigrants of any colour.
Decades of hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

YANBU. I'm sick to death of 'hearing' them. What they want is to force people to do what they say, but I personally think the country would be much better off keeping the immigrants and getting rid of the degenerate scumbags who are rioting.

I am an immigrant. My parents came here from the Middle East when I was a child. We are all fully integrated. I have concerns about current immigration and behaviour of immigrant communities. I see radical Islam, the same poison my family came here to escape, becoming more and more powerful across Europe. I see people chanting “from the river to the sea” on the streets of our cities every week. I see blasphemy laws being introduced by stealth as that poor teacher from Batley is still in hiding in fear for his life.

I am not out rioting. I am lucky that I am pale skinned enough that I don’t get abuse on the streets and I am not a hijabi so don’t stand out in that way. I am worried sick for my many obviously foreign friends and their families.

But I don’t feel my concerns about immigration and integration have been heard, no.

Excellent post. I completely agree with all you say and they have been heard; we hear very little else! But the solution they were offered (Brexit) hasn’t improved their situation.

The trouble is that it’s not really about immigration. It’s about poverty, lack of opportunity, terrible public services. It’s about racism too, of course, and there will always be racists. But if people had better lives I’m sure we would hear a lot less about immigration. Minorities are just a scapegoat.

The riots are disgusting and there's no way to condone them. Half of them don't even know why they're angry.

However the reality is that in towns and cities like Rotherham and Hull, grooming gangs still operate in plain sight of the police force. Abusing and raping young girls. This is well documented and fully explained in the J report which was written over ten years ago. How the police turned a blind eye out of fear of being accused of racism.

Unfortunately vile scum bags can't differentiate between the type of immigrant who are have vastly different values than our culture and operate criminal gangs, and anyone with a slightly dark complexion. So here we are.

Our country was built by immigrants and continues to thrive because of immigrants.There could probably be better ways of managing the immigration system or processing those seeking asylum and the government has a duty to listen to those sensible suggestions. But random “there’s too many foreigners” statements aren’t helpful because they don’t acknowledge that we desperately need a large number of foreigners. I think that’s the one thing I would change about Keir’s messaging is that he could remind the public of the ways your voice can be heard if you have a constructive suggestion (write to your MP for a start) - it would stop people from pretending there’s no way to be heard. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if half those people rioting didn’t even bother to vote, they have zero real interest in ‘being heard’.

They have been heard. What they want isn’t feasible or desirable in a civilised society I am afraid. If you want people to be forcibly returned to their ancestors’ country of origin because they don’t have the right skin colour, if you want to ban people from practicing their religion, if you want to stop treating vulnerable people with basic humanity then, no, no right thinking democratic country will do what you want.

And it’s never too many Australians, Canadians or Scandinavians is it? It’s always the people with a non-white skin colour or from ‘undesirable’ countries that are the problem. Some of them are telling people who are black whose families have lived here for literal generations that they are not “truly English/British”. It’s not legitimate concerns, it’s pure racism.
And do you think that if they deny asylum to a few more people that any savings will come your way? Will they fuck.

Well sorry to break it to you, this country needed those immigrants because in one way or another the people here didn't meet the needs of the country. No, it's not just about cheap labour

then, no, no right thinking democratic country will do what you want.

Well, many countries are democratically voting in very right wing leaders who might just not be as right thinking as you expect.

Grooming gangs come from all races unfortunately but for some reason people seem more offended by the ones where the perpetrator has Brown skin

And those leaders are not going to make things better for the average working class person. They tend to have incredibly conservative policies and will certainly not ensure eg that healthcare is accessible and free. So people are cutting off their noses to spite their faces, motivated by hate.
Luckily people are waking up a bit about the threat from the far right, eg in France, where the racists thought they were in there and then had their hopes dashed. And at least here we only have Nigel Fascist as an MP (of one of the most deprived constituencies in the UK which I bet he gives not one shiny shit about improving).

The thing is that the vast majority disagree with the racist sentiments of the rioters. Even if they convince themselves otherwise.

Absolutely this.

We are paying to house asylum seekers because the last Tory government chose to do this.

They chose to so this so they could then tell everyone how much they were paying to do this.

They chose to stoke up this hatred.

The rioters are responsible for their actions in reaction to it.

True. And girls from deprived backgrounds have been sexually abused and exploited since forever but people only sit up and take notice when it’s Asian men doing it. When I was at school, several girls of 13-14 would have 24 year old “boyfriends” who would pick them up in cars. Looking back, the girls were very vulnerable and it was so wrong but nobody did anything.

It’s not ‘unfettered’ though. Most is legal. Worsening quality of life - well, that’s not really caused by immigration is it ? I can think of actual economic policies that prevented my local council from providing decent services and the NHS for example functioning properly.