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UK, are you OK?
Labour councillor calls for people to 'cut the throats' of 'Nazis and fascists'
Suspended Labour councillor arrested over video ‘urging people to cut throats’
Probably anyone reading this is familiar with the story so far: three gradeschool children in Southport were knifed to death, and ten others injured, on July 29th at a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club. The alleged perpetrator, Axel Rudakubana, is reportedly the son of Rwandan immigrants and was 17 years old at the time of the incident, but has apparently since passed his 18th birthday. The events, allegedly in part as the result of some false reporting concerning Axel's identity, led to a number of protests, which led to a number of counterprotests.
Why would you counterprotest a protest against the knifing of schoolgirls? Well, apparently the original protests were racist. It's pretty important to not be racist. Sufficiently important, I suppose, that people would rather talk about that, than about the dead schoolchildren who, but for recent immigration from Africa, would likely still be alive. Not that Axel is an immigrant, of course. He was born on the magic soil of the UK, so it's apparently racist to notice that his parents weren't. I saw one article suggesting he might be autistic? Good sources are hard to find.
That brings us to the current events! Labour councillor Ricky Jones apparently found some inspiration in Axel's extracurricular activities, as he is very clearly articulating additional knife violence as the proper response to people protesting the murder of little girls. I actually had a surprisingly difficult time finding the original video; most of the articles throwing around the word "alleged" did not judge me fit to judge for myself. I assume Ricky was born tone deaf because throat cutting seems like an especially poor choice of words given the circumstances--though I guess I don't know for certain that Axel managed any literal throat cutting in the process of (EDIT: ALLEGEDLY) butchering schoolchildren. The UK does not have any particularly meaningful or toothy Free Speech legislation, either, though in this particular case I can imagine Mr. Jones facing consequences even here in the United States. Remind me, is it still okay to call for the punching of U.S. Nazis? Was it ever? I seem to have lost track.
Axel's knifework is not being treated as a terrorist attack (yet?), but here's where things get weird.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT:
Taylor Swift shows in Vienna canceled over alleged planned terrorist attack
Suspects in foiled attack on Taylor Swift shows were inspired by Islamic State group, officials say
Will we hear more about Axel's motivations? I suppose Taylor Swift is just so famous that at this point any plot to kill large numbers of people would, statistically, run into Taylor Swift events eventually. But now I'm wondering if Axel was just, you know, reading the same weird terrorist handbook as the Austrian terrorists. They were even the same age--the two arrested in Vienna are 19 years old and 17 years old. If I had a nickel for every time a 17 year old boy tried to murder Swifties en masse, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice!
I'm sure much smarter and well-connected analysts out there are way ahead of me on this one. And probably it's nothing! And it wouldn't really matter if it was something, beyond maybe bankrupting a handful of Taylor Swift event ticket scalpers in the near future. But it's all very weird.
Especially the part where counterprotesters started literally calling for and cheering on more knifings.
The anti-immigration argument expressed in this post seems too strong. It seems to be along the lines of if there is any kind of downside from immigration then immigration is bad. But I don't think this is a realistic benchmark for any government policy. The positives have to be weighed against the negatives. Maybe certain classes of immigrants are net-negative and a better immigration policy would be able to discriminate against these people but I don't think the UK is at the point where all immigration is net-negative.
It isn't an economic issue. It is the UK no longer being British. It is the loss of a people, an identity, a culture och sovereignty. The UK belongs to the people who built it for the past thousand years and those who will inherit it for the next thousand. It isn't up to the current people to give it away to strangers.
It actually is. For better or for worse, having a democratic society means that the people get to make such decisions.
In any society, democratic or not, it is only the current people, by definition, who get to make such decisions. Not the dead or the unborn (whether the right sort of unborn or not).
The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.
If the English lower classes don't want mass immigration, they have to find a way to stop it. Voting for people who pretend to care about it clearly doesn't work. Protesting in the streets about it or on twitter clearly doesn't work. The judiciary is firmly against them so that won't work either. And they are all disarmed so terrorism is not a realistic proposition.
I don't really see any recourse there. Looks to me like these people are fucked.
Because they also want and vote for economic growth. And both parties internal projections show limiting immigration prevents economic growth and also that the economy is most people's driving issue.
It's a simple straight forward calculus. When we did (when I worked for the Tories) internal polls and asked people would they accept an overall lower standard of living in exchange for reduced immigration they said no. Overwhelmingly. Over and over and over again. Everywhere.
So the recourse is to start actually valuing lowering immigration over other factors. Just like the Tories flipped on lockdowns in record time they will do the same on immigration. They aren't attached to it for principled reasons. Simply practical.
That's a bit of a rigged poll, though. You let people project their worst fears into "lower standard of living", and the only thing economists can actually back is "GDP line not go uppy anymoar".
Well I am paraphrasing form a whole bunch of polls and focus groups and the like over near 20 years. It is true you could reduce how much people valued the economy over immigration by rewording the questions and because the Tory part has internal splits on immigration, we often had different polls with different skewed wordings. But on all of them even worded to try and side with immigration as much as possible, people always valued essentially "line go up" over reducing immigration.
Even in focus groups where you might run through various scenarios in detail, and in some cases where we trying to see under what circumstances people might give different answers, it was pretty much always "It's the economy, stupid".
Now part of that might be because the Conservatives are seen as the party of being good with the economy. Or were at least, so Labour might get a little more leeway with their supporters. But they also have a much smaller (though still existent!) anti-immigration faction, so they aren't even looking at the question as hard in the first place. And of course some of their supporters are very pro-immigration. So it will have to be the Conservative party if anyone I would suggest. Though some of their anti-immigration faction has boiled off into UKIP and then Reform nowadays, so the internal faction balances has likely shifted.
But essentially if Tory modelling indicated they would win more votes than they would lose from cracking down on immigration, then they are likely to flip. There are few pro-immigration idealogues within the party. Though the farming lobby comes close I suppose, for many of the same reasons as in the US. Low-paid Eastern European labor helps British farms be competitive.
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