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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.
Wouldn't this same logic hold for all sorts of other policies that did and continue to get enacted? I'm thinking of stuff like carbon taxes, tariffs, tax raises etc. It's plausible that economic considerations held back anti-immigration measures, but if that were an essential part I'd expect more or less total gridlock on a large number of issues where, in reality, there don't seem to be any hesitations at all for the Western political class in comparison to immigration.
Well it depends on what the voters think the trade off is. If the voters buy that carbon taxes will get them less pollution, then that may be a trade off they are willing to accept, to an extent. Especially if they believe the bulk of it will fall on say corporations rather than themselves. Likewise if you say to voters we will tax you more in exchange for better services or more NHS hospitals then that may be a trade off they will accept. Or not (see below).
And I am not saying that there is no ideological commitments that override what voters might think, but that even these are often subject to practical considerations. In general Labour prefer higher taxes to pay for more or better services. That is one of their ideological cores. But Blairite style neo-liberalism still won out because voters were simply fed up of the more blatant tax and spend policies combined with union problems through the 60's and 70s. Whereas even though the Tories generally ideologically prefer to cut taxes, Liz Trusses budget tax cuts were very unpopular to the extent that it ended her leadership.
If the Tories as a whole were anti-immigration at their core, then they may have been willing to risk economic issues and loss of voters in return (though big business is a significant bloc for them), but they aren't really. They just aren't really pro-immigration either ideologically, except in the neo-liberal sense that free trade and cheap workers are positive economically.
There are some things the parties care a lot about they are willing to risk losing votes over to an extent (though the shift to the economic right under Blair and back again under Corbyn, and then back again again under Starmer) shows that even some of the pretty fundamental beliefs are up for grabs if they are unpopular enough. But they definitely are not going to risk votes/the economy for things they don't really care about.
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