Douglas Murray on intolerant politics

[BovaryX]

There is an interesting article by Douglas Murray in the DM about the authoritarian, identity politics which have alienated Labour voters and triggered a paradigm shift in the political landscape. It covers some of the themes which Lang GC Pencils and others have been discussing in light of election result.

It is a divide between people who have real-world concerns and those focused on niche and barely significant ones...How, you might ask, have we reached such a state? There is a clue in the Labour Party’s dysfunctional reaction to its catastrophic defeat on Thursday

Well my care needs are still at the low end, and fingers crossed I've struck lucky with my new area, so could be a lot worse.

As you can imagine, I'm very keenly aware of the issues of good will and unpaid labour of every kind – like Packing having to notify people when someone died. That just doesn't make it onto anyone's accounting sheet or most people's ideas of labour, but if Packing hadn't done it, who would? And as she describes, there's a constant flow of these not-really-a-job jobs.

SAHP, often women, are listed as "economically inactive" when in fact many are doing huge amounts of this community labour. It doesn't get measured – but the economy misses it when it's gone.

Stooshie8 I think a lot of what you say is correct, especially on integration.

you mention this about Scotland "One of N Sturgeons policies is to increase immigration to Scotland due to falls in population."

is anywhere really experiencing a fall in population? I think politicians scare monger about it because they want every piece of green land covered with hotels and leisure complexes.

Outer London is like an airport, yes.

is anywhere really experiencing a fall in population?

Hello? I may have mentioned living in the fastest depopulating council on the UK mainland a time or three.

Yes we are experiencing depopulation, have been for decades. My town has fallen from 22,500 in 1981 to around 15,000 today. My authority from around 120,000 to under 80,000. And it's still falling.

Scotland as a whole is around half as populous as it ought to be in comparison to neighbouring countries.

Yes it is a massive, massive problem with many knock on effects.

Arnold please can I move to where you are? (I won't ask where you are as I assume posters wish to be as private as possible).

I am happy to hear any information re population - hope Bovary is all right with it, just asking permission as she began this great thread.

Please do AutumnRose we need people, though I must warn you this is ex-industrial, socially deprived central belt not remote, romanticised Highland and Island territory. Can offer stunning views though.

Arnold what kinds of people do you need and why are people leaving please?

is this a case of being ignored by government for decades?

People leave for work. The reasons are complicated, in part the demise of old industry was just one of those things. In part it was a collective failure of management and unions to modernise. In part a failure of government to invest in any kind of sustainable replacement. Blame cannot be laid solely at the door of government.

I also think the Scottish psyche has something to do with it. People have been migrating away for centuries, and migrating internally so there is a level of expectation that it's just the way it is.

As for who we need. We need young people. It is the young that have left so we are top heavy with elderly people even by more general western world standards. We need people who have the capacity to set up businesses and provide employment. We need the fit, the able, the entrepreneurial.

This is a fascinating thread - thank you everyone.

I was thinking about the "somewheres" and "anywheres" point and wondered if it also had something to do with the Housing Act 1988 which introduced assured shorthold tenancies (the usual 6 month tenancies). This meant that huge swathes of what previously in many cases had been council housing was lived in for short periods by people who had no ties at all to the area and no interest in growing any. I suspect this has played a fair part in London and other major cities becoming "anywheres" and breaking a community.

Arnold I sense we may be neighbours!

Arnold "We need people who have the capacity to set up businesses and provide employment. We need the fit, the able, the entrepreneurial."

So you have high levels of unemployment?

Have you spent any time in outer London lately? I'd say there was a massive boom in people setting up businesses and it's part of what makes it an overcrowded hellhole instead of the quiet little suburb it used to be.

And instead you get the likes of me, moved there (well, somewhere v similar) because property is cheap.

My only conscience-saver here is that my income is from UK national funds (DWP), so I'm importing paid work into the area for cleaner, gardener, taxi-driver, trades, etc. And I don't take up much in the way of locally funded services, so I hope I'm not a net drain. (Plus in my head this is all temporary and one day I'll work again... Well I need a good fairy story to keep me going.)

But yeah, that's really not the sort of employment the area needs. And if Scotland becomes independent, that will be the end of my DWP funding.

We do have an ageing population (west coast scotland) but very recently we're seeing a steady increase of incoming people, especially English people. Cheap housing helps, I think.

Interestingly although our population is falling, we live in smaller and smaller households these days so the housing shortage still affects us.

Nrft-only about half way through but lots of good points here.
Absolutely agree with that people have been shouted down by the establishment (gov services, the media) for worrying about immigration and it hasn't helped.
I'm from immigrants (though very assimilated) and I got so sick of seeing on these boards the "immigrants do the jobs that British don't want to do." It's rubbish.
If I'm 23 and willing to go to another country, share a room, and work all hours to send money home that's a completely different prospect than needing to know my shift patterns because of childcare, or needing to pay rent on a house for my family.
Immigration is a good thing, free movement is a good thing, but you can't just open the gates and let a million people in without some repercussions, and it's the working class that lose out.
I'm a traditionalist in lots of ways-left wing, pro union pro social contract pro social mobility, proper jobs, all those things. I wanted to Remain mostly because I think we need to be part of a block and I don't want to be at the mercy of the US and China. However I have long been able to see both sides, as the people who have been shafted by globalisation ( free flowing money and labour) are the people I grew up around.
Basically Brexit and the Tory landslide are Blairs fault. His government stood for the cosmopolitan elite who cared more about getting a cheaper plumber than the effect the open door policy had on the general population.

First things first—this conversation has been amazing, enlightening, and a source of nourishment for my brain. Thank you to all who have contributed.

Second, what I've been wanting to say about a PP's comment that "lack of community" is caused by immigration, when I feel it's caused by transience of any kind, particularly in-country migration.

I wanted to add that the exception I’ve seen to this is growing up in 70s/80s as an (American) Air Force brat in the US. I don’t know if it’s still this way or if it was due to the time period (Vietnam War) but streets in the base were full of military men with foreign wives they’d met while stationed abroad (my mother being one).

This created instant multiculturalism yet simultaneous integration. The wives hadn’t emigrated with their own families—this is key—and while they were keen to rear their children with knowledge and values (and food and language!) from the wives’ home culture, they were even keener for their children to assimilate and become “proper” Americans.

My mother stopped speaking to me in her native language—in fact, my native language, as I had lived and been schooled in her home country until the age of five while my father was on active duty around the world—because I came home from school one day at around seven years old, after we were permanently residing in the US, and stated I didn’t want to speak it anymore because no one else did.

Back to transient communities, though—there was tremendous community on those bases. Partly due to military life, but also due to the knowledge that the next move was but a moment away so people got stuck in fast and firmly to make the most of the time they had. Being stationed somewhere was the only community opportunity people would have for decades, until retirement when possibly a return to “home” would occur.

When everyone is transient and knows it, these communities form and carry on. The faces change, but the community still exists.

IfNot "Basically Brexit and the Tory landslide are Blairs fault. His government stood for the cosmopolitan elite who cared more about getting a cheaper plumber than the effect the open door policy had on the general population."

this! I blame Tony Blair for pretty much everything

Other part of the housing crisis is older people living in massive home and young families living in very small family homes sometimes below the sq footage recommended 100 years ago.

In the past, families would have taken over the family home and parents moved to smaller household and this worked better than the modern version of downsizing because both families were in the same community.

Thus housing stock served the needs of the local population rather than housing being built according to what the out of community developers think they can make the most money from.

ShagMeRiggins, that's interesting because what you're describing is physical transience – the faces change – but within a ready-made, geographically dispersed community, viz the US military.

You were on a base; it's an even more ready-made community than arriving within an informal diaspora, and on top of that, loyalty to comrades is a key value of the military (even though social and career back-stabbing also happens). So everyone did, as packer eloquently put it, have "skin in the game",

The universities play a pivotal role in the anywhere/somewhere division. The traditional UK university experience where students leave home to reside at their university acts like a big conveyor belt taking young people out of their local communities and into a new community of the academically educated, where community identity is rooted in shared abilities and values rather than in shared place.

Just as the traditional boarding school was where young men were grounded in the values and ideals of the ruling class to which they belonged, the universities act to ground young people in the ideals and values of the 'anywhere' class.

The rise of the 'anywheres' as a powerful class within society is therefore closely linked to the shift from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy and the expansion of higher education that has come with it.

(I should add that I am not criticising the universities here, but just pointing out how the particular higher education system adopted in the UK leads to the kind of outcomes we are seeing now.)

Basically Brexit and the Tory landslide are Blairs fault. His government stood for the cosmopolitan elite who cared more about getting a cheaper plumber than the effect the open door policy had on the general population."
Agree. Blair could have put controls in place that the other EU countries have done. By not doing so, anyone from the new EU countries who wanted to move could only come here. For 7 years, we were the only place people could go. Successive governments could also have put in place employment restrictions that other countries have done. Instead, they didn't, which meant not only did they not have to bother spending money on further education in vocational skills for British born teenagers but they could blame the EU for the influx of semi skilled labour. I do wonder if the metropolitan elite would have been up in arms if they had put any restrictions in place. We saw during the election campaign the Left saying what a disgraceful country we were for not allowing all residents to vote even if they weren't citizens. Something that no other country allows AFAIK.

Universities and the military are interesting because they have always had a certain amount of transience. Academics tend to move around for a few years and often settle away from their hometown, even in a different country. And of course military people move all the time.

But both make a lot of effort to create a strong institutional culture to make up for that. When you move onto a military base there are all kinds of things set up already, schools, clubs, regimental associations, family centres etc, all meant to keep the social life going and to create a sense of belonging. They tend to be similar culturally from place to place and people are expected to be involved, it may even be part of their official job. Universities are similar, people are slotted into groups, there are all kinds of societies, that will carry on even with a change of members.

I do wonder if the metropolitan elite would have been up in arms if they had put any restrictions in place. We saw during the election campaign the Left saying what a disgraceful country we were for not allowing all residents to vote even if they weren't citizens.

Where does this attitude come from? It's common enough but it seems weird on the face of it.

Where does this attitude come from? It's common enough but it seems weird on the face of it.

Is it weird? Why is it logical that a British expat in Spain should have a vote, but a Spanish expat in Britain shouldn't?

As an unquestionable 'anywhere' that would be my instinctive response.

Is it weird? Why is it logical that a British expat in Spain should have a vote, but a Spanish expat in Britain shouldn't?
Because being British is the defining boundary here, the expat might want return to Britain if they wish.
It's the one thing that gives people hope, to return to their community.

So everyone did, as packer eloquently put it, have "skin in the game"

Absolutely.

Re the voting mentioned above, as a non-Brit but EU citizen (and American, i.e. dual citizenship), I am allowed to vote in local elections in the UK but not at the national level, so no vote allowed in the GE. This makes sense to me—as a resident in England local voting directly affects me but why should I, a foreigner, have a say what happens to Britain as a nation?

Also I do get to vote for President in the US but not at local level. Again, this makes sense. I don’t reside there so local issues don’t affect me, national issues still do (federal tax, for one).

Shag
The arrangement of local voting sounds perfectly reasonable.