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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29324 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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It's all kicking off in Merseyside. Big protest against the UK government's ongoing policy of housing groups of unknown and unvetted asylum claimants who have illegally crossed the channel and are attempting to stay here, in hotels, at the taxpayer's expense. The inciting incident being passed around social media appears to be this. Reports include that a police van has been torched as attendees accuse police of "protecting the nonces".

As you might guess, it is unlikely that these events will be described as "fiery, but mostly peaceful". Several publications such as the Guardian have already gone for calling all in attendance far-right. Accusations are flying that protesters were bussed in from elsewhere because the famously bloc-left voting Merseyside would never do this. Some are remarking that this was organised by people passing out flyers in the days beforehand, and that this should make it a premeditated riot. Opinions are split exactly as you'd expect along culture war lines.

I can only see this sort of thing getting hotter and hotter as time goes on. There's a large contingent of the country who quite simply don't want the migrants here, and reports like the tweet above turn off even more. But the state -- controlled by people calling themselves the Conservative Party -- seems to have no interest in closing the floodgates (they make noise, but no more than that). No solution is in sight, as far as those concerned can see. So I really don't see how this is to be defused at all.

Is there any real way to get rid of the migrants? Does the UK have the capability to deport them to Albania or wherever, or is it a binary choice between ‘shoot them or let them in’?

In theory yes, in practice no, but in reality yes... but also really no.

There are many things we could do, but most of those things would be objected to by the Blairite Supreme Court and shitloads of charities, NGOs and other subversive elements, as well as foreign entities like the ECHR. They'd then be tied up in the legal system for years and years like most deportation attempts are already.

With the massive majority they have, the government could cut right through the Gordian knot by straight up leaving the offending treaties and organisations and just deporting whoever they like. But the gutless, spineless, Conservative-in-name-only Party would never do any such things. They're more concerned with hand-wringing about what their mates at Davos would be saying than whether it's what the public would want or not. Public is a tertiary concern, after making money for themselves and hobnobbing with their trendy peers and keeping up with the latest fashionable policies.

We should be mandating deportation with no appeal for any crime that carries a sentence of jail time. We should be reducing our "refugee" intake to 0 while we re-litigate every claim submitted for the last 15-20 years. We should have harsher punishments for employing illegal migrants (and for not reporting any who apply). But we won't, because the Tories only worship at the altar of Line Go Up.

But we won't, because the Tories only worship at the altar of Line Go Up.

More accurately they have internal models that suggest that reducing immigration (which even before Brexit they could have almost halved with no real legal problems) will mean the economy will not grow and as the party of making the economy grow they are terrified that will lock them out of power, long term. They believe they can largely make immigrants Conservative (see Sunak, Patel et al) over time and that localized issues are less of a problem than widespread economic issues. The Davos set are not particularly part of their thinking here. Avoiding things like the Winter of Discontent which gutted the Labor party for decades is their biggest driver. Talk tough, do nothing has been the Tory position on immigration for a long time.

Source: Worked for the Conservative party.

More accurately they have internal models that suggest that reducing immigration (which even before Brexit they could have almost halved with no real legal problems) will mean the economy will not grow and as the party of making the economy grow they are terrified that will lock them out of power, long term.

We have had both high immigration and Conservative government for many years, but little economic growth to show for it.

And tecent by-elections have not been great for the Tories, even with Labour's somewhat anemic opposition. How quickly they turned on Truss despite her carrying out a fairly basic Tory tax change (cut taxes on high earners) should show how nervous they are.

If Labour were less divided themselves and more willing to re-embrace New Labour they would be under even more pressure.

And GDP per capita, which should be the real measure at play here, has been falling, iirc. Tories only care about total GDP though.

Do they have elections anytime soon to worry about? I was under the impression they didn’t.

Probably not for a couple years unless they're foolish enough to call one early. They could have done everything they wanted by now and it would be old news by the time the election rolls around.

as the party of making the economy grow

They've done a pretty bad job of that! The UK economy is where it was back in 2006 in real terms. I wonder how long they can create technical growth in total gdp or gdp per capita (before inflation). At some point there needs to be real growth, or else the government will lose its legitimacy.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locations=GB-AU-US

By European standards no growth since 06 is excellent. That's second best record, basically tied with France and behind Germany (And Russia, but their economy is trash anyways) Most of Southern Europe hasn't grown since ~1990.

Edit: I'm only referring to the major economies here. There's still limited growth in the nordics and small eastern euro countries.

No growth since 2006 is a serious indictment on Europe and the EU. Hasn't computing improved in the last 17 years? Don't we have better automation, better machining, mining, medicine and so on? In material, technical terms prosperity should be increasing.

The fertility crisis is a major problem. I suspect increasing the ratio of dependents is sucking out wealth from the real economy. Fewer capable young people means less innovation. The rest of the EU bureaucracy isn't helping either. Singapore shows us that one can have good growth even with minimal fertility.

Most top European talent also immigrates out. Its impossible to start a new industry upending business in Europe because of regulation. Spacex, Uber, and many others could never have started anywhere in Europe because they would have been regulated out of existence.

Hasn't computing improved in the last 17 years?

Not really; the last major revolution in computing was VT-100s that fit in your pocket and networks for them to talk to and everything since has just been minor revisions that allow development of those services to be as fast as possible. The iPhone, combined with the refusal to go full Great Firewall at that time, was the final nail in the coffin for European technological competitiveness- now, not only is all the institutional knowledge gone (to American companies that acquired them) but the Union arguably wouldn't survive Facebook and Twitter disappearing given the now total dependence of the population on those services.

While it's true that much of the modern Internet infrastructure serves European software (web browsers) from European software (Linux) on hardware whose instruction sets are European English-designed (ARM) and fabricated on European machines (ASML), those things don't actually give Europe any strategic leverage in the sector to spread its culture of US-imported moral mediocrity. It's not that they couldn't do it- they actually do have technical chops and China has quite clearly demonstrated they can outdo US companies- but if they try they'll have have to accept the hate fact that the WEF won't invite them to any more dinners.

Well the World Economic Forum is based in Europe, so they ought to be sympathetic to the bureaucratic leviathan that is the EU. Especially if the EU is doing more regulation to make the internet more 'democratic' or whatever abstract noun they're shamelessly skin-suiting to cover up their ambitions. The WEF is all about increasing social-democratic governance, reducing people's freedom and so on.

Also, I was mostly thinking of Moore's Law based improvements. Back in 2006 we were dealing with 65 nm chips as state of the art, now we're down to 3nm. That should have some economic effect. There are surely all kinds of industrial applications that benefit from more processing power, AI first and foremost.

In material, technical terms prosperity should be increasing.

Never underestimate the ability of government to absorb all gains (and then some).

Well then I can only hope for them getting outflanked to the right by a new party as they were with regards to the EU. Why do they have to be dragged kicking and screaming into actually doing anything conservative at all?

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