to think we're all being manipulated

[newbluesofa]

I'm going to get flamed by reform voters here, and I think it'll come off as thinking I'm smarter than everyone but I genuinely don't, which is why I'm so confused by this.

To me, it is incredibly obvious that we are being completely manipulated by politicians and the media. They want us to blame immigrants and people who claim benefits for their failing to run the country properly. And it's worked.

I don't think we should have unregulated immigration, there are issues that need to be addressed. But there's a difference between sensibly discussing immigration from an economic point, and the nasty hate and vitriol that's everywhere now. It is what they WANT. As long as we're fighting amongst ourselves, no one is looking up at the people with the real power and money.

One example, newspapers describing immigrants as 'fighting age men'. 'Fighting' is not an age. Young men could also be fit, healthy, and able to work and contribute. They say 'fighting age' to scaremonger and promote anti immigrant rhetoric, and it works as people parrot the line.

It's always been the way that the ruling class look for ways to keep the masses infighting. Honestly I lose respect at anyone that falls for it. I don't get how it isn't so obvious to others, how can you not see you're being played?

Is your housekeeping lady an immigrant @Nestingbirds ?

Obviously we should be addressing the societal root causes but your earlier post implied that we should be most focused on the 85% of rapists that are known to the victim as if that’s an important distinction separate from the issue of allowing mass immigration from countries where they think rape is legal (a common defence used in court).

All of the men in the majority Pakistani grooming gangs were not only known to the victims but are also recent or first generation immigrants and their race and religion allegedly protected them from prosecution and led to councillors and police actively enabling them.

Thousands of rapes, torture and even some murders have taken place (and are allegedly still taking place) because these men follow a religion that says it’s ok to rape white girls.

Your presentation of those stats on rape is the misdirection. We await with interest the publication of crime stats by country of origin of the perpetrator from the government. Where this has been provided in other European countries (and in other threads in here), it’s clear that men from countries where women have few human rights are high up the list.

@BundleBoogie hey, I didn’t gather the stats and publish them. If you have an issue with those stats, take it up with the Office of National Statistics.
And I think your statement on Islam is terrible. What religion permits assault? None. I wonder where have you got those ideas from?

No, she was born here, what’s that got to do with the CONTENT of what I am saying exactly?

I just wondered because you said her mother is Polish and lives in Poland.
If your housekeeping lady is British then she is entitled to child benefit isn't she?

but you used the stats to try and minimise rape by men u known to the victim like that was less of an issue because the numbers are smaller.

I have been following an ex Muslim campaigner, Raja Miah, on the Rotherham rapes - that was not MY statement on Islam, it is the view of some followers and apparently a factor for the grooming gangs. Were you aware that they only raped white girls?

Obvious not all Muslims use their beliefs to justify rape but some of the more extreme elements, some of whom who reside in this country use the argument that non believers are not fully human.

www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122595/new-york-times-islamic-state-uses-quran-to-justify-rape-of-yazidi-women

Quite.

It was only this year that Iraq lowered the age for girls to marry to 9.

Now, I’m not saying that every Iraqi man will find that acceptable but some clearly do. Some of those men will be here.

https://www.walkfree.org/news/2025/iraqs-new-law-allowing-children-as-young-as-9-to-marry-undermines-women-and-girls-rights/

We have to go to huge lengths in the UK to prevent people forcing marriages on children, murdering their children in ‘honour’ killings and performing FGM in the name of their beliefs.

Why do you think that is happening and under which belief system?

There are many aspects if Islam practised by people here that are not compatible with British values. The growing practice of slaughter of animals by slitting their throats while conscious for example. Not all supermarkets that sell Halal meat label it clearly so it can be avoided - Tescos labelling is conveniently obfuscating last time I looked.

@Nestingbirds - that was a general ‘you’ btw.

Why do you think that is happening and under which belief system?

I think it would be of benefit to look a bit more closely at Islam and how it is used by some to so awful things both here and abroad.

To be crystal clear, I am not accusing all Muslims of anything. I know that the vast majority are law abiding human beings like the rest of us.

My point is that as we speak right now, there are some very bad people doing very bad things in the name of Islam in the UK.

Known terrorists are entering the UK on small boats. We don’t know how many but one from Egypt was recently convicted of raping a women in Hyde Park. Many of the men on small boats are from Muslim countries. In these countries women have limited to none human rights. It would not be a surprise that some of these men bring the values they have learned in their home country with them.

This needs to be more widely known. To understand the consequences of the situation being cleaved through by so many is not being ‘manipulated’.

As pp says this feels like more then gross incompetence on the part of the government- they have little will to sort it. But why?

Oh dear, I have been rumbled.

There clearly is a problem with mass immigration. This does not change the fact that Fararge and Trump are self serving opportunists who are mobilising racism for personal gain.

I’ve already explained carefully upthread that the problems with the NHS are to do with political decisions to give taxpayer money to private companies . Have a detailed look at exactly where those billions are going .
The NHS is not failing because of immigration.

As someone who gave 26 years to the NHS, and being married to a hospital Consultant I totally agree with this 👆

Nestingbirds
I am certainly not going to argue with people that have to look up on the bloody internet what life was like in the 1970s! It was my lived experience - end of.

Running a household, were you? Struggling to cope with galloping inflation on an income that was not rising in line with it? Memory tells me that was what I experienced in the seventies, but perhaps on your pink cloud you missed that bit. Did you live in a small village, or something? Because your lived experience of the seventies sounds a lot more like the late fifties to me. (As for being friends with all your neighbours, phooey. I simply do not believe you. I too had neighbours, after all, and one of them was a sex-pest and another was a drunk who hung about in the street and spewed on people's doorsteps. Those were definitely not my friends; the Jamaican family across the road were, though. As were a couple of Ugandan Asians, genuine refugees from the horrendous regime of Idi Amin.)

Your "lived experience" is probably accurate for you, though you need to remember that nostalgia wears pink-tinted glasses; it was by no means that of everyone. Do you for instance remember (as I do, vividly) the three-day week and the power-cuts? Those happened in the seventies.

The seventies are clearly an example of a Golden Age that never was. The main thing to be said for them was a general feeling that things were probably going to get better, because they were unlikely to get worse. And what did we get? Thatcher. And the renewed fear of nuclear war.

As a general comment: your furious denunciations of this and that might be more convincing if they did not contain obvious, provable inaccuracies. For instance your claim about "tens of millions of immigrants in the past two decades" can be shown to be simply wrong (as I did); I notice you haven't acknowledged that you were incorrect about that. What's your agenda? To prove the OP correct about it being impossible to have a reasoned debate with people who are working from fudged data?

I am really sorry you lived in such a shit place and had an awful time in the 70s. It will look like a teddy bears picnic compared to what’s coming however..

Bristol, just on the Clifton side of Whiteladies Road if you happen to know the area,was a fairly good place to live in the seventies, in fact, compared with many other cities in the UK and even other areas of Bristol. It just didn't have the immunity from inflation and strikes that you seem to have enjoyed in Longpuddle, Wessex, and (surprise!) not everyone living there was utterly charming and desirable to have as a friend. That isn't really to be expected in a population of over half a million people.

Do you actually know what the teddy bears' picnic says in the last verse?

@Nestingbirds what is coming?

The Rapture, probably. Nothing ordinary, anyway, nor anything that requires any factual basis.

The NHS is pretty much only surviving because of immigration.
1 in 5 NHS staff are foreign nationals.

Couldn't agree more op

Is it really only one in five? Almost everyone I see when I go to anything NHS at the moment seems to be a foreign national, though that does have to include one Irishman. One of the GPs at the practice I go to is a Scot, so is straightforward British.

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime Waving to you from my 1970s flat in Whatley Road. It was a fun place to live at the time but even with my rose tinted glasses on I knew nowhere was the idyll @Nestingbirds describes. She's confused the 1970s for The Darling Buds of May - and forgotten that even the Larkins witnessed poverty, loneliness, crime and discrimination.

Figures from 2023 so perhaps out of date - couldn't find anything more recent on a quick search
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7783/

I knew Whatley Road well! We started out in a flat over Mornington House Day Nursery until we could afford somewhere a bit bigger.