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Sunderland, UK, is on fire.
It appears a tipping point has been reached; protests are seemingly erupting all over the UK right now in response to the stabbing of three young children. Ordinarily a sadly unremarkable happening, this incident was exacerbated by the authorities refusing to release any details about the attacker other than being "from Cardiff", which did not placate the mob, as media sources routinely use this kind of languages to elide criminals' real origins (saying things like "Mahmood Suleiman of Bristol", later turns out that he's a boat migrant from Albania currently being housed in Bristol), leading certain corners to pattern-match to previous instances of such attacks and conclude the killer was a boat migrant and the media and authorities were covering it up.
This narrative spread quickly in the wake of no other information being released, for which the excuse was that the killer was under-age and so no detail could be released. Internet detectives soon managed to piece together the identity regardless, that being Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, son of two Rwandan parents but nonetheless actually born in Cardiff.
Left-wing sides of the argument immediately went into crowing mode, seemingly elated that the killer was "British", to which the pithy right-wing response came that "a dog born in a stable is not a horse" and that this crime was still preventable if his parents had simply not been allowed to migrate.
Regardless, the protests were now in full swing. A vigil was held, and things got out of hand, with one man being arrested for bringing a knife and balaclava. The simmering tensions of the backdrop of mass migration seem to have come to a head, as a group gathered to damage an unrelated mosque and a police building. This is possibly a response to the boat migrant theory being spread like wildfire as the authorities refused to release any correct information, and possibly in part just a release valve for long-pent up tensions.
Government response was immediate condemnation of the protesters from all and sundry, pledges to set up specialised task forces to deal with "far right extremism" and deployment of riot police to quell the unrest. This only sparked further anger as people contrasted the response to the very recent Harehills riots in which a Roma community revolted over the removal of children from the house of negligent parents. Response on that occasion was the police in full retreat and the later total capitulation of the state in handing back the children in question. Others still remember now-PM Kier Starmer's response to the BLM riots of 2020, in which he knelt in supplication to the rioters and pledged fealty to their cause.
This has earned him the moniker of "Two-Tier Kier", with many calling out that a two tier justice system exists in the country; when minorities riot over facing justice, the state bends over backwards to appease them, but when native whites riot over the stabbing of children, the full force of the state comes out to crush them. As such, more protests have erupted across the country over this double standard, the most notable of which is Sunderland, where people attempted to torch a police station.
Further protests have been stated to be planned all week. PM Starmer has scrambled all police manpower available to suppress them, it seems, with the Home Office issuing a stern warning in the media that "we're watching you". The usual ancillary conversations about "Russian disinformation" being the cause are happening, and the Muslim Council of Great Britain has stated "law and order isn't enough to deal with Islamophobic hate" in response to the mosque attack.
I feel this all begs the question of the point of recent unskilled migrants. The majority of advanced Western economies are struggling to generate sufficient employment for their native population, unskilled labor is increasingly dead (and what remains is 'unskilled' service economy work which requires cultural awareness and language skills as opposed to the manufacturing of yesteryear) and thus all that seems to happen is a strange choice between either entrenched unemployment or pouring large amounts of resources into attempting to create economic productivity out of the unskilled.
The UK, like the US, has essentially full employment, in that everyone who wants a job can get one. There is still huge amounts of unskilled labour to be done due to a few things:
A huge number of people who could work, don't. This goes beyond the normal numbers of underclass people who are incapable or unable to hold down a job. The UK lags behind the rest of the developed world here. It seems to be a case of our easy to access welfare system coinciding with COVID idleness and people moving onto disability benefits due to 'mental health issues' (what proportion of these are malingerers are left as an question for the reader).
The previous Conservative government seemed to believe the dire warnings from business and threw open the borders to all comers to avoid labour shortages post-Brexit. It turned out that most of those being imported were inactive (either students or dependents) and lacked the high labour participation rate that previous EU immigrants showed. They later tightened up the rules a bit. So the labour market's needs weren't met by these immigrants.
Business wanting to keep down wages. This is most obvious in the care sector. The previous government explicitly allowed wages for work visas to be 20% lower than the standard in the UK, although they did abandon this after Labour flanked them on it.
Low productivity growth. UK business is addicted to cheap labour from abroad, obligingly provided by every government since Tony Blair. This means they don't invest in productivity enhancements, which means that the only way governments can generate more tax revenue and GDP growth is through yet more immigration.
Left-wing pro-immigration attitudes. In my view, these are best described as anti-anti-immigration attitudes. Left wingers don't make an explicit case for importing deliveroo drivers from Pakistan, but they (and their base) are strongly opposed to any restrictions on immigration, which smell of nativism to them.
The current government is saying that they expect immigration to reduce to 'reasonable numbers' (a net figure of 200,000 per year, still massive of course). It's unclear what Kier Starmer actually believes on immigration at the moment. His authoritarian streak has shown itself in his reaction to the recent anti-immigration riots, but whether he will follow this up with more immigration (to spite the nasty racists) or less immigration (to avoid future riots) is unclear.
They don't usually make a public case for doing it but they do defend it after it's done. Recall 'diversity is our greatest strength' and the other multiculturalism slogans. This stuff is taught in schools, it was taught to me in Australia. In the old days, everyone was white and British and that was bad. Now taxi drivers and lawyers can be Chinese or African or whatever and implicitly that's good. They didn't explicitly say bad and good but the meaning was impossible to miss.
In the UK specifically there was a letter about how the New Labour immigration program had one of its causes being to rub the Right's nose in diversity, that it was social policy as well as an economic operation: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249797/Labour-threw-open-doors-mass-migration-secret-plot-make-multicultural-UK.html
Neather was being a smug prick when he wanted to prove to the evil gammons of Norf FC that the UK would not be compromised by having poles and lithuanians come in to the UK. I believe Blair was however caught off guard when he thought France and Germany would also allow poles/lithuanians to go to their countries, when instead the UK was the one to get the brunt of eastern european migration.
The 'diversity is our strength' phrase really started taking off post-Obama, and was doubled down in the wake of the backlash towards mass MENA immigration. The problem of this message is that it automatically raises up literally everyone except the majority race, and the majority starts to notice. This can keep going so long as the pie is not rugged from under the majority, and the sheer volume of bad-faith MENA actors exploiting white british male achievements (as opposed to poles and lithuanians and indians and nigerians who didn't cause as much trouble) has come to a head. Perhaps the suspicion that Labour will do nothing to help the natives out, as opposed to the Tories who at least pretended to give a shit, has also lead to the back finally being broken.
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