UK Politics Thread: Virtual Insanity

[Magna-Parva]

[...]

would you be upset if Europeans immigrated to non european countries to the point where the demographics and cultures changed?

Nah. More diversity makes places more interesting.

Also, look at the crime statistics; some nationalities are more likely to commit crimes than others.

That is explicit racism, and a misunderstanding of statistics to boot, as there are many factors that lead to crime. I won't respond to further arguments along these lines because they'll be obvious flamebaiting.

[NewAlbion]

would you be upset if Europeans immigrated to non european countries to the point where the demographics and cultures changed?

Nah. More diversity makes places more interesting.

Also, look at the crime statistics; some nationalities are more likely to commit crimes than others.

That is explicit racism, and a misunderstanding of statistics to boot, as there are many factors that lead to crime. I won't respond to further arguments along these lines because they'll be obvious flamebaiting.

affinity bias? everyone has it. Diversity makes places more interesting when its diversity of similar values and interests, e.g. English/Scottish/Irish diversity

[Langnord]

British is British. By blood or by paperwork.

Being British is more than a piece a paper.

Anyone can be British if they are willing to participate in its society and contribute to it. There’s no reason why someone named Mohammed could not have a descendent named Martin.

You Europeans should learn from our melting pot.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

Being British is more than a piece a paper.

Anyone can be British if they are willing to participate in its society and contribute to it. There’s no reason why someone named Mohammed could not have a descendent named Martin.

You Europeans should learn from our melting pot.

Glasberg says those things because he thinks Rhodesia was a paradise... and not just for the KKK.

[Neu California]

Nah. More diversity makes places more interesting.


That is explicit racism, and a misunderstanding of statistics to boot, as there are many factors that lead to crime. I won't respond to further arguments along these lines because they'll be obvious flamebaiting.

affinity bias? everyone has it. Diversity makes places more interesting when its diversity of similar values and interests, e.g. English/Scottish/Irish diversity

Considering how much (say) Japan and the west have mixed culturally without major issues, I'd say diversity of very different values can make things more interesting in a good way as well.

[Langnord]

Anyone can be British if they are willing to participate in its society and contribute to it. There’s no reason why someone named Mohammed could not have a descendent named Martin.

You Europeans should learn from our melting pot.

Glasberg says those things because he thinks Rhodesia was a paradise... and not just for the KKK.

Rhodesia sucked lmao. Still, I think European countries should expand their minds when it comes to this.

[Magna-Parva]

Diversity makes places more interesting when its diversity of similar values and interests, e.g. English/Scottish/Irish diversity

"diversity of similar values and interests" is an oxymoron.

[NewAlbion]

Diversity makes places more interesting when its diversity of similar values and interests, e.g. English/Scottish/Irish diversity

"diversity of similar values and interests" is an oxymoron.

no its not

[Magna-Parva]

"diversity of similar values and interests" is an oxymoron.

no its not

Yes. It is.

diversity (noun) variety in kind; being varied or different.
—Chambers Dictionary

You can't have variety in similar things. If they're similar, they can't be varied. A bowl of different kinds of oranges is not a "diversity of fruit".

[The Xenopolis Confederation]

You can't have variety in similar things. If they're similar, they can't be varied. A bowl of different kinds of oranges is not a "diversity of fruit".

No, but it is a "diversity of oranges." Just like a bowl of different kinds of fruit would be a "diversity of fruit" but it wouldn't necessarily be a "diversity of food groups."

[Imperializt Russia]

Not really. You’re complaining about demographic shift and perceived cultural displacement.

"Straw man fallacy is the distortion of someone else's argument to make it easier to attack or refute." Literally exactly what you're doing. When did I call anyone subhuman?

I don't need you to say it out loud. It's abundantly clear that you won't and I won't play the game with you that not doing so means you don't believe it.

I think if someone was born in Britain, they're certainly British. If someone was born outside of Britain, but moved there as a child and have spent all their adult life participating in Britain, they're certainly British. If someone was born outside of Britain, and moved there for work some time as an adult, but are now a citizen and happily participate in Britain and identify as British, they're probably British.

Again if standing on Isle of Great Britain while holding a piece of paper issued by a bureaucrat saying that says you're a citizen, and saying "I'm British", makes you as British as a Welshman who's family has been there since Roman times then the word British is effectively meaningless as a category. Might as well say that everyone is British regardless of where they are in case they decide to move in someday.

Bureaucrat confirmed anti-white

[Imperializt Russia]

Anyways this getting quite boring so I think I'm done debating with a bunch of commies and libs.

My brother in Christ you made an alt to do so

[Celritannia]

So, I wake up to see the thread taken over by 2 posters espousing the rehrotic of Oswalrd Mosley

I recommend sticking them on ignore.

Four Labour councillors resign from party

[The Notorious Mad Jack]

I mistook him for another Tory with Michael Howard.

In fairness you could confuse any generic Tory with Michael Howard and David Davies, because nobody actually cares enough about the 1997-2008 Conservative Party to care what was going on.

I never had this problem, mostly because of Bremner, Bird and Fortune's portrayal of him as a vampire. IDS and William Hague however? No fucking idea.

will ppl have to recite the 1337 wool, cloth, importation, fur and cloth (no. 2) acts (11 Ed. 3) from memory to even be considered? <.>

The British (English, Welsh, Scots, Cornish, etc) are a distinct group of people with the right to their own homeland. The way Britain is today and has been in the past is a direct outworking of the nature of the British people expressing itself through their shared assumptions, traditions, culture, and institutions as shaped by their unique history, ethnogenesis, and identity. If the British peoples were to become supplanted by other groups so that they were no longer the majority on their own island, the fundamental nature of the society would be changed.
It's somewhat cliche but if anyone can become British because that's what it says on their passport than effectively no is British at all the word British doesn't mean anything anymore. For categories to exist they must exclude things that don't match the definition.

Sorry but the English are Germans not Brits. I've got no more in common in you than I do with Somalilanders, Karens or Shoshone people.

[The Notorious Mad Jack]

So, I wake up to see the thread taken over by 2 posters espousing the rehrotic of Oswalrd Mosley

I recommend sticking them on ignore.

Four Labour councillors resign from party

Intensely amusing to see Chamal Lal blame Labour's record in Birmingham given that he's been a councillor since 1994. That "series of serious, avoidable and deeply damaging failures" the council has suffered under Labour is partially his fault.

[Old Tyrannia]

You do raise a good question. Their are states today which do define their identity that way, the State of Israel being the obvious example although other nations as well to a lesser extent. Whether something like that would be good for Britain is open to debate.
The facts are that drawing hard lines between ethnic groups can be tricky to do.
For that reason in these discussions its very common for people to fall into what's called a "continuum fallacy" which is an informal logical fallacy where someone argues that because there is no precise, defining boundary on a continuum, no meaningful distinction can be made between two extreme points on that continuum. Outside of math that majority of things are not pure binaries but that doesn't mean that categories and distinctions don't exist.

I think if someone was born in Britain, they're certainly British. If someone was born outside of Britain, but moved there as a child and have spent all their adult life participating in Britain, they're certainly British. If someone was born outside of Britain, and moved there for work some time as an adult, but are now a citizen and happily participate in Britain and identify as British, they're probably British.

If it is possible for a person to be British-Pakistani, British-Indian, British-Chinese, British-Nigerian, etc., then it necessarily follows that there exists a separate category for people who are "only" British. The existence of these dual identities fundamentally demonstrates the existence of a distinction between legal nationality and ethnic identity. In turn, that demonstrates the existence of an ethnically British demographic, and thus the possibility of being British in a sense beyond legal identity. If a person can be British-Pakistani, then by necessity, I, who have no ethnic or cultural identity besides my British identity or identities given I'm both English and Scottish by descent and culture, am British in some sense that a British-Pakistani person is not and will never be. It is therefore disingenuous to argue as if Britishness as an identity is purely a matter of legal identification or that, as Glasberg put it, "standing on Isle of Great Britain while holding a piece of paper issued by a bureaucrat saying that says you're a citizen."

Mass immigration has been a massive societal and cultural change in the UK, one that has been imposed on the British public by global capital and the political elite against the consistently expressed democratic will of the nation. You can argue that mass immigration has been a positive development, but by doing so you have to acknowledge that you are in favour of the indigenous cultural identity of the British Isles being eroded and native Britons being marginalised in their home communities. You have to argue that a people do not have a democratic right to determine their own identity and choose how they wish their country to develop. And you have to confront the empirical evidence that ethnically and culturally homogeneous countries are generally safer, more stable, more egalitarian in economic terms and more democratic than highly diverse countries. We are past the point where you could shut down any criticism of open immigration policies by shouting "racism."

I don’t really see the big deal about white people being a minority in “white” countries.

"Whiteness" really has little to do with it. Mass immigration was controversial in the UK even when it was primarily immigration from "white" European countries like Poland and Lithuania that dominated the news cycle. There is more to ethnic identity than race. I've said before that I wouldn't have an issue with a future England where everyone was as dark as Nelson Mandela if they attended Anglican churches, ate roast beef on a Sunday, watched football and cricket, adhered fo English common law and respected the monarchy. I would even consider it an improvement over the status quo. But immigrants to these shores don't generally just disregard all prior cultural identities and values to become perfect British stereotypes; they retain their prior identies and values which frequently set them at odds with the indigenous culture.

[The Notorious Mad Jack]

I don’t really see the big deal about white people being a minority in “white” countries.

"Whiteness" really has little to do with it. Mass immigration was controversial in the UK even when it was primarily immigration from "white" European countries like Poland and Lithuania that dominated the news cycle. There is more to ethnic identity than race. I've said before that I wouldn't have an issue with a future England where everyone was as dark as Nelson Mandela if they attended Anglican churches, ate roast beef on a Sunday, watched football and cricket, adhered fo English common law and respected the monarchy. I would even consider it an improvement over the status quo. But immigrants to these shores don't generally just disregard all prior cultural identities and values to become perfect British stereotypes; they retain their prior identies and values which frequently set them at odds with the indigenous culture.

Is this not just the nature of how immigrant communities assimilate and develop? The second and third generations (third especially) are always much more integrated than the first?

[Ariddia]

Also, as a side note, I would like to remind everyone that there is no genetic basis for race

This.

'Race' is a distraction. As a Brit of English and Welsh descent, I have far more in common with a black Englishman or black Welshman whose parents were born in Bristol or Aberystwyth than I do with a white Lithuanian.

I have infinitely more in common with the black man wearing an England rugby jersey and whom I was screaming with at the widescreen TV in a pub in Suva during the final of the men's 2003 Rugby World Cup than I have with white thugs who go on Tommy Robinson marches and purport to wave the England flag but would never dream of celebrating the Red Roses' World Cup victory.

[The Archregimancy]

<logs in the next morning to take a quick look at what's been happening overnight>

Rarely has a current thread title seemed so apropos.

[Platypus Bureaucracy]

me, screaming, crying, throwing up etc: "Y-yes, that's right officer, after I colonised a quarter of the globe, I, God, I can barely say. I-I had to tolerate the metropole's capital having only a plurality of my precise ethnic group! I-Is there some kind of victim support group I could, oh, okay, perpetrator support group then. The French won't be there, will they?"

I mean, honestly. If the former colonial subjects of Britain had banded together and invaded Britain, razing everything and salting the earth like Carthage, you could understand Brits being upset (but also, play stupid games, win stupid prizes). Peaceful immigration and a paltry foreign aid budget while being one of the richest countries in the world is the getting away scot-free outcome. It's the best the Twee Tory, What a Jolly Old Empire types could possibly hope for. It's what they should want, in fact.

If they were sincere, and not just a bunch of jingoists nostalgic for being (more unambiguously) at the top of an ethnic hierarchy, that is.

[The Archregimancy]

I note that, incidentally, no one on the hard right seems to complain about the all of the Canadians who hang out at the Maple Leaf pub and restaurant at Covent Garden, mingling with their own, watching ice hockey and Canadian football (what, you didn't realise Canadian football was a thing?), and eating poutine. I bet they were even supporting the opposition in the recent Women's Rugby World Cup final.

Why won't those Canucks integrate, dammit?

You know what's particularly insidious? So long as they don't open their mouths, or start humming strange native music such as songs by The Tragically Hip, they can pass as one of us. And has Nigel Farage raised his voice once to speak out against this threat? No, he has not. Why? Just how much is Ottawa paying him to remain silent?

[Philjia]

Embarassingly I missed that the Green conference backed a motion to make abolishing private landlords party policy. Obviously landlords will hate this, I'm interested to see what the general public reaction is like (19% of households privately rent). Anecdotally, renters seem increasingly discontent with their lot, and with the entitlement of landlords to provide decidedly mediocre housing for exorbitant rates. I am very fortunate to be a homeowner, a position few of my generation seem able to attain, to the detriment of their personal financial situation.

[The Archregimancy]

London is 56.9% British by national identity, per the 2021 census

That's still low to be fair; you'd probably think it was a bit odd if only 56.9% of people in (picking a random country...) Cairo identified as Egyptian.

Ah, well... writing as a former resident of Cairo, that rather depends on how you define 'Egyptian'.

If the metric is "people who identify as citizens of the Arab Republic of Egypt", then the percentage is probably well into the 90s. But there are two important caveats here:

1) Until the 1950s, Cairo was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Middle East, with large Jewish, Greek, French, Armenian, Turkish, Levantine, and other communities that were long-standing legacies of the Mamluk Sultanate, Ottoman Empire and even earlier states (in the case of the Greeks and Jews). But Nasser expelled most of these after his Arab nationalist government declared the Republic of Egypt in 1953. So within living memory Cairo was significantly more multi-ethnic than it is today.

2) If we change the metric to "people who - rightly or wrongly - explicitly position themselves as the authentic ethnic heirs of the people of Ancient Egypt", then we would get down to somewhere between 5-10%, depending how many Copts there are in Cairo - which is a bit tricky to calculate.

Short version: Cairo has been subject to significantly more waves of migration and cosmopolitanism (since the foundation of its roots as the confusingly named 'Babylon Fortress' under Diocletian) than many people realise.

Edit:

Fun Egyptian fact... when I was in Alexandria for the Eid holiday back in late 2019, I found myself attending an Orthodox liturgy with some of the very last Greeks of Alexandria. And very welcoming they were, too. The city's synagogue was no longer in use, but was at least being renovated.

[Platypus Bureaucracy]

Embarassingly I missed that the Green conference backed a motion to make abolishing private landlords party policy. Obviously landlords will hate this, I'm interested to see what the general public reaction is like (19% of households privately rent). Anecdotally, renters seem increasingly discontent with their lot, and with the entitlement of landlords to provide decidedly mediocre housing for exorbitant rates. I am very fortunate to be a homeowner, a position few of my generation seem able to attain, to the detriment of their personal financial situation.

I imagine a lot of the public discourse (what little there is, because obvs Green policies don't get a lot of attention) will be the "abolish landlords" headline, filtered to the public through journalists pretending not to understand it. Plenty of "these dumb trots will make you and millions of others homeless overnight when they pass the 'Abolish Landlords Act'" etc.

Hopefully those renting will mistrust such framings.

[The Notorious Mad Jack]

As someone living in private rented accommodation in the area of my county with some of the highest waiting lists for council housing, any changes to the rental accommodation system are met with trepidation about my landlord deciding to sell rather than "this is a good idea" or "this is a bad idea".