Bigots

In her remarks Gillian Duffy — I shudder we’ll have to listen to her prattle on now for a full 24-hr. news cycle — linked the deficit and taxes on pensions to Eastern European immigrants overloading the dole. Objectively this was wrong, objectively this was bigoted, and Brown saying so actually makes me like him better. The problem is that by calling her a bigot, rather than contesting her statement, he gets caught appearing to be name-calling against a 65-year-old little old lady. Bully all over again. But one careless, unguarded statement after stupidly failing to take off the mark, and he’s finished? The tabloids and TV will run it ad infinitum, and we’re very close off the election. It shouldn’t matter, but it will, despite his obeisance.

The best thing was she said ‘these people from eastern europe – where do they come from?’ Erm…i think the answer might be in the question, lady.

Sounds a bit like Obama’s remarks about “bitter people clinging to their guns” during the US election. Did him little damage.

Not that I think Brown is going to pull off an Obama-style win!

But the pundits do make more of these things than ordinary people. Everyone knows at least one Gillian Duffy.

If Duffy was mistaken about the effect of immigration, then Brown should have good-naturedly corrected her on that. I would expect a campaigning PM to have a statistic or two memorized for just such an event.

Instead, he merely viewed his exposure to someone he disagreed with as a failure of campaign management. And by failing to correct her, he more than half implied that Duffy was right but that it was inexpedient for him to admit as much.

(But perhaps Brown is a leftist of the “it’s not our job to educate you” persuasion. Seems to be working well for him.)

Christopher @4 – preventing that is his staff’s job. It wasn’t Brown’s fault his staff didn’t vet the plebs well enough.

Anderson is 100 percent correct.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14f3aOC929w

Watch the whole sequence to appreciate how mortifying this is. It’s especially bad because Brown tries to be charming at the end of the conversation, then climbs in his car and says what a disaster. This onstage/backstage disjuncture is what everyone suspects about politicians, but rarely is it confirmed with such narrative economy.

@Christopher Phelps

Embracing bigoted plebs is not a particularly viable [strategy for social cohesion and electoral success] either.

Isn’t that what actually existing liberal democracy is all about?

Yep, it’s good. The non-car part was also pretty spectacularly charisma deficient. I especially liked the “now look …” and the finger slapped into the palm with each point of policy iterated.

Still, bad faith on the part of the broadcaster. Couldn’t they be done for it somehow? He is still prime minister, I think.

I also liked the guy standing behind Brown who nodded at everything he said and repeated the ends of his sentences.

I thought that the anti-immigration stuff was unpleasant (I didn’t call her bigoted). I heard Brown’s comments BEFORE I saw the exchange, so that may have influenced my reading of the exchange, but, like him, I didn’t believe that she was a lifelong Labour voter, and I think that it was his sense of this that led him to say something so stupid. No doubt we’ll find out whether she was, and I don’t trust my own instinct on this (but, if I were him, with his experience, I would trust my instinct).

Tom — yes, I liked him too. You could probably hire him if you had enough money…

Sounds a bit like Obama’s remarks about “bitter people clinging to their guns” during the US election. Did him little damage.

The difference being that Obama was talking about his opponent’s base and Brown was deriding his own.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7646088/General-Election-2010-Gordon-Brown-versus-Gillian-Duffy-transcript-in-full.html

—
[GB gets into car with aide]

GB: That was a disaster.

Aide: Why what did she say?

GB: Well just… They should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that?

Aide: I don’t know I didn’t see her

GB: That’s Sue I think. It’s just ridiculous

Aide: They’re pictures … I’m not sure they’ll go with that one will they?

GB: They will go with it

Aide: What did she say?

GB: Oh everything. She was just a sort of bigoted woman that said she used to be Labour …. ridiculous.

—

Did anyone see the film “In the Loop”? The backbiting and blame-shifting…

I don’t defend the way the voter’s mind moved to flocking E. Europeans, but Brown had actually parried that bit more or less effectively. “Bigoted” is mainly petulance on his part — something mean to call the voter (aside from “that woman” … ), and a slap at the aide.

Yes to Colin Danby.

Perhaps the difference is less marked in the UK, but in America, it should be a particular strength of the left/liberals that we are supposed to be the open-minded, rational ones capable of discussing issues with people who disagree with us. The American right cannot tolerate dissent or discussion — disagreement is heresy, pure & simple.

But we sacrifice that advantage when ordinary folks with, for instance, racist prejudices are Teh Other whom we mock (“plebs,” rednecks, whatever) and treat as loons to be perfunctorily smiled at immediately prior to escaping their presence and laughing at them.

We of all people should be keyed in to how much effort goes into instilling and perpetuating prejudices in the general population, how subtle and insidious it all is.

And really, how hard should it be for us to look good compared to GOP candidate Pat Bertroche of Iowa?

I think we should catch ’em, we should document ’em, make sure we know where they are and where they are going. I actually support micro-chipping them. I can micro-chip my dog so I can find it. Why can’t I micro-chip an illegal?

I find myself concurring with Anderson again, to the point that I’m prepared to retract “plebs” even though I swear I was just using it playfully in response to its earlier usage. On the other hand I am not prepared to go along with some here who seem prepared to just waive away how quickly and instinctively Mrs. Duffy went from the debt to immigrants. I’m sorry, there is an issue here (and Brown’s public way of handling it is feeble). A lost opportunity, squandered in name-calling caught on mike in the limo:

GD: How are you going to get us out of all this debt, Gordon?

GB: We’ve got a deficit reduction plan to cut the debt by half over the four years. We’ve got the plans that have been set out to do it. Look, I was the person who came in and tried…

GD: There were three things that were drummed in to me when I was a child: education, health service and looking after people who are vulnerable.

GB: That’s what I…

GD: There’s too many people now who aren’t vulnerable but they can claim and people who are vulnerable who can’t claim, can’t get it.

GB: But, they shouldn’t be doing that. There’s no life on the dole for people anymore. If you are unemployed you’ve got to go back to work. In six months…

GD: You can’t say anything about the immigrants. All these eastern Europeans what [sic] are coming in – where are they flocking from?

GB: A million people come from Europe but a million have gone into Europe. You do know that there’s a lot of British people staying in Europe as well.

Okay, then a slight dissent, to make you more comfortable. Do you find “plebs” in its Latin to be akin to “proletarian,” simply a term for commoners that is not necessarily derogative? I am a little off on this, I guess, because I once had a yellowed copy of Plebs, a periodical put out by a Labour educational association in the 1920s, and several pamphlets issued by the same. I think it was then taken as a badge of pride.

Sounds a bit like Obama’s remarks about “bitter people clinging to their guns” during the US election. Did him little damage.

The difference being that Obama was talking about his opponent’s base and Brown was deriding his own.

The other difference is that Obama made the comment at a fundraiser to a group of people outside his campaign. It was a closed event, so it wasn’t quite a public statement, but it wasn’t the kind of clearly private communication that Brown engaged in talking to his aide.

On the one hand, Chris Phelps (who I’m more or less inclined to agree with throughout this thread…take that, Anderson!) is entirely correct when he notes that this is “the kind of offhand private impatient remark that everyone in the world sometimes makes”; on the other hand, there’s something particularly unattractive when one hears Brown’s public exchange and private comment back-to-back. It immediately reminded me of the (apparently apocryphal) story of the children’s radio host who, after his program ended was captured by a live mic saying “that ought to hold the little bastards.”

Hidden somewhere in the tale of the Brown gaffe is an interesting story about our expectations about the private behavior of our public figures.

But as others have said on this thread, my general tolerance for New Labour is low enough that I have a very, very hard time feeling sorry for the PM.

Oh yeah… petty nationalism and brutal neoliberalism don’t go well together, but since when has inconsistency stopped right-wingers?

Actually, they’re perfectly consistent:

Step 1: Petty nationalism

Step 2: Right wins power on basis of petty nationalist vote

Step 3: Right implements brutal neoliberalism

Step 4: Brutal neoliberalism encourages further xenophobic resentment; return to Step 1.

Aha! … This will explain that although I realized we were using a quaint and antiquarian word, I did not think it an offensive word. From Wikipedia:

Plebs’ League

The Plebs’ League was a British educational and political organisation which originated around Marxist ideals.

Central to the formation of the League was Noah Ablett, a miner from the Rhondda who was at the core of a group at Ruskin College, Oxford who opposed the lecturers’ opposition to Marxism. In the 1907 – 8 academic year, Ablett began leading unofficial classes in Marxist political economy which were attended by Ebby Edwards, among others. Ablett returned to South Wales in 1908, where he began promoting Marxist education through local branches of the Independent Labour Party.

A mixture of students and former students at Ruskin founded the Plebs’ League in November 1908, also launching the Plebs’ Magazine. In the first issue of the Plebs, dated February 1909, Ablett contributed an article on the need for independent working class education. The League ran classes teaching Marxist principles and later syndicalist ideas.

During 1909, student agitation for Marxism continued at Ruskin. The students were supported by the Principal, Dennis Hird, and when he was dismissed the students went on strike, refusing to attend classes. The rebels formed the Central Labour College, which worked closely with the Plebs’ League.

By 1910, the Plebs’ League was active in South Wales, Lancashire and Scotland. Activists included A. J. Cook, William Mainwaring and John Maclean.

The League had sympathies with De Leonism, primarily represented in Britain by the Socialist Labour Party. It later had a relationship with the Communist Party of Great Britain.

The League was absorbed by the National Central Labour College the year after the 1926 United Kingdom general strike, although the Plebs’ Magazine continued to appear for many years.

The Shorter OED lists “pleb” in its non-Roman sense as “usually derogatory,” but then, the swells who produce the OED would say that, wouldn’t they?

Hey, who’s this other Anderson, and how did he steal my comment?

Racism in British political discourse has always mostly operated on a nudge-and-wink, the trouble with some people if you know what I mean sort of basis. I think Brown got Mrs Duffy about right: when she asks a question about too many people claiming benefits even though they don’t deserve it, it’s pretty clear what kind of people she’s talking about, particularly when she parries Brown’s reply with You can’t say anything about the immigrants.

He thinks she’s bigoted? Yes, but so what? I’m pretty sure she’s bigoted. He called her a bigot to her face? No, he called her a bigot behind closed (car) doors, not realising his mike was still on. What exactly is the story?

As someone pointed out on one of the Grauniad’s “Comment is free” threads, there’s a certain rough justice in this happening to the leader of a party as keen on surveillance as New Labour is.

As someone who has done his fair share of arguing with British relatives, friends and colleagues about the “Polish scrotes” and “illegals” “taking over” the country who, in the words of my grandmother, “will get what’s coming to them” when the Tories take over, can I just say that the notion that Brown can confront this woman’s ideas and somehow change them or use them to make any impact on the broader immigration “debate” in the UK is really fanciful. The clue is in her question about “where are they coming from?” She’s swallowed so much of the Daily Mail cool aid that Eastern Europeans are no longer actually a factual group, they’re just the latest catch all phrase for Johnny Foreigner, about whom the existence of simple “facts” such as where they come from or what benefits they can or can’t receive is irrelevant; they are just Johnny Foreigner, and so obviously must be a problem.

This is because, while other working class communities may still have some residual class consciousness, the British working and lower middle class only have race consciousness, which is manipulated on a daily basis by the tabloid scum. The idea that you can confront a nascent race warrior with quaint ideas like “facts” and “reasonable debate” is laughable, and anyone who believes otherwise should try it on with the local British pub bore. If you don’t get glassed within a few minutes, you’ll still suffer permanent brain damage from the brute force of their obstinacy.

Not that this doesn’t mean Brown is doomed; but it’s precisely his party’s inability to confront the race consciousness of its own electorate, and unwillingness to try and shift the debate back to Britain’s actual problems (class) that has left him standing in car parks being clobbered over the head by his own voters’ confused race politics.

The episode makes me a little bit more sympathetic to Brown. I have despaired at the way Labour has pandered to the bigots among its supporters over the last couple of parliaments. But Brown’s gaffe suggests he doesn’t actually approve of bigotry, he just feels obliged to be polite to bigots for electoral advantage.

PS — I showed a large group of (midwestern, admittedly) students the clip with the subtitles, and they drew in a collective sharp breath when hearing/seeing Browns bigot comment. It is his contempt that is the issue, and, as some have said, its at-odds-ness with the pleasantness of the actual encounter (and the shock that he was rattled by her).

Oh well, this’ll be fun. I imagine that whatever happens he is now unlikely to remain leader (not because of the encounter, but because of the whole election).

Don’t mention the bigot. I mentioned her once, but I think I got away with it.

(Wasn’t the first question in the first debate….immigration?)

Yes, and one of the questions in the second debate.

But “you can’t say anything about the immigrants” of course.

It should be pointed out that once upon a time, the Labour party was an internationalist party whose whole raison d’etre was workers’ solidarity. It’s been a long time since it abandoned that for the petty nationalism of the tabloids. And what legacy will this transition leave? A workforce at loggerheads with those from without, draconian restrictions on the free movement of labour (more if we get the Conservatives), and the free movement of capital undiminished.

The sad thing is, though, ScentOfViolets, all these concerns in England are so much to do with that great unspoken phenomenon of British life, class, and the natural party to redress these concerns, the Labour Party, explicitly rejected that debate and ceded the whole territory – the debate about broken Britain, about disappearing jobs and the declining standard of living – to the right-wing fringe.

These concerns are natural fodder for right-wing lies, and the British, being so awfully race sensitive, are easily misled by anti-immigrant populism and scapegoating. And the Tories want to talk about these issues but have to avoid the discussion of class for obvious reasons, so they can’t counter the lies either.

Which leaves Brown hoist on his own petard – he can’t talk about the problems his party failed fix in any kind of language that the electorate understands or that he even wants to use, but the more he puts it off the more headway the fringe right make.

The Daily Mash have summarized Brown’s tactics succinctly, as ever.

I think class in Britain is so entrenched that the different classes are almost culturally different, with corresponding different affiliations in many areas of life, including politics. So for example you have that woman who heckled Brown disagreeing with him on everything he stands for and him calling her a bigot, but she still claims she intends to vote labour – and someone else in the Guardian report saying nothing could change their mind about voting labour. The Sun and the Mail have been trying to prize the Northern and Welsh working class away from Labour for years to no avail; but the European elections did seem to indicate some cultural shifts in that regard, with the Tories outpolling Labour in Wales for the first time in 90 years.

One assumes that the Labour inner circle know how much their politics is unpopular with their working class base, but I think they’re so disconnected from the “bigots” they claim to represent that they might actually miss it… and it certainly seems likely that, if anyone’s going to find a way to disaffect core voters permanently, Brown is the man to do it.

The problem is that the English bigots don’t realize how good they have it. The American bigots would be thrilled to have pale Eastern Europeans flocking to their country rather than all the Mexicans.

democracy_grenade@#45 said:

On a depersonalised level, though, this doesn’t go very far towards repudiating the well-loved Rightist idea that the Left privately detests the working class.

Thats obviously the big story and the sub-text underlying the rise of the BNP. Not to mention the revival of Cultural Rightism in the post-communist EU.

Over the past few weeks the CTs have made much mirth poking fun at libertarian silliness. Whilst at the same time doing some high-concept thinking about how to re-invigorate the political Left.

Well, here was an actual and existing old-fashioned Left-wing voter who obviously has little time for new-fangled libertarian policies. A little old lady who has likely done more for the country (raising children and paying taxes) than most will ever do. A prime target, you would think, for a Left-wing populist appeal.

And the response been from Left-wing cultural and political elites? Preening snobbery.

You know that plan you have to win-over the world you want to make-over?

Good luck with that.

_who has likely done more for the country (raising children and paying taxes) than most will ever do._

Really? I’ve raised children and paid my taxes, as has Gordon Brown, as have most of the contributors on the CT masthead. It really isn’t that exceptional Jack.

Holy smokes, there is a plebs.com — I am not making this up.

Well Jack, your own misconceptions and crazy fantasies aside, noone here is actually advocating the new labour pathway to wealth and glory for the British working class or your imaginary “Bridget Jones-Canary Wharf” crowd (what do you have against big pants anyway?)

But if we’re going to look at the historical victories of the organisations involved, why don’t we think about what would have happened if Labour had followed the Daily Mail’s opinions in the “mid 20th century” and supported Hitler? That would have certainly delivered a resounding victory for the working class, wouldn’t it?

Exactly what sort of populism did you have in mind, anyway? The kind of “round up the immigrants and shoot the canary wharf set” populism favoured by the Daily Mail, or something more extreme cooked up by the BNP? And how would you suggest this powerful new leftist movement go about explaining to the British middle class that all their booming recreational activities of the last 15 years have to go out the window because the foreign workers who made them happen are all being shipped home in boxes?

Gosh, Jack seems to be coming out as a national socialist …..

_Politically speaking, the Old LAB national statist position won the LABs land-slide victories and several lengthy stints in office._

Several? Well there was the 1945 Labour government (which initiated mass Commonwealth immigration) and then the 1964 one (which presided over many of the cultural changes Jack so regularly deplores in his comments here). No one could credibly say of the 1974 version that it sprang from an landslide victory. In 1997, of course, and then in 2001, “Cool Brittania New LABs getting all hugger mugger with the adorable Bridget Jones-Canary Wharf crowd” did achieve landslide victories and a lengthy stink in office. Clearly, Jack isn’t one to let the facts get in the way of his prejudices.

Chris Bertram@#78 said:

Gosh, Jack seems to be coming out as a national socialist …..

FTR I am not married to any ideological position, beyond a wishy-wash form of evolutionary utilitarianism. “Unscrupulous opportunist”, thats me.

And I did take pains, on a couple of occasions, to call the Old LAB policy “national statism” to distinguish it from its more disreputable “socialist” cousin. “National statism” is nothing more than a neutral description of LAB’s politico-economic policy from the mid-thirties through mid-fifties.

Is it too much to ask for a political scientist to be forensic with political concepts or familiar with political history?

Charlie@18:

“Still, bad faith on the part of the broadcaster. Couldn’t they be done for it somehow? He is still prime minister, I think.”

Bad faith is the basic currency of the British press. If you removed everything intentionally misleading from the Daily Mail you’d be left with half a crossword.

Just out of curiosity, what makes Brown such a horrible human being?

Why he is tarred with the brush of being a horrible human being by the media is that he lacks the superficial charm necessary to stroke personalities who believe it is their due to be stroked. Brown is a wonk, tendence nerd, and has to work at being a political operator, whereas Blair was an operator to the soles of his feet, who never had an idea in his life.

Why he is actually a horrible human being is that he’s a bully. So, according to civil service informants, was Blair.

Live-mike accidents are newsworthy because citizens know, or think they know, that the flattering politicians are actually very different in private. This incident confirms that in people’s minds and thus interests them, as we always enjoy having our prejudices and suspicions confirmed.

Not sure why that needed to be explained. but there it is.

Jack Strocchi @70 Well, here was an actual and existing old-fashioned Left-wing voter who obviously has little time for new-fangled libertarian policies.

She is opposed to lots of Eastern European immigrants – you can’t stop that unless the UK withdraws from the EU, because EU citizens have freedom of movement within the union. For all the Tory bluster about immigration, all they can do to reduce numbers if they don’t withdraw is cut the relatively small percentage of non-EU workers, plus make decisions on asylum seekers even more cruel and arbitrary than they currently are. (Or possibly target foreign students in this country, and watch the UK’s university system crumble).

If we withdraw from the EU, what remains of our manufacturing industry would probably collapse even more, because the majority of our trade is with Europe. I suspose we might be able to survive as a version of Switzerland, and rebrand ourselves largely as a tax haven, but it’s hardly likely to produce the kind of society you want.

@ engels (

GD: There’s too many people now who aren’t vulnerable but they can claim and people who are vulnerable who can’t claim, can’t get it.

I’m a pensioner and a claimant. It’s common for qualified claimants to be turned down (CAB win most cases on appeal) but ‘can’t claim’ is nonsense.

A sign of how monarchical we Americans ended up: I find myself something less than shocked but more than startled that the Average Voter in this kind of encounter addresses the incumbent Prime Minister by his given name.

I’m from New Hampshire, and during primary season we might address lots of possible *future* presidents casually (after all, some of them travel around the state with their first names followed by exclamation points practically tattooed on their foreheads). But when the incumbent comes back during his reelection campaign four years later, it’s always only “Mr. President.”

magistra, I think some countries did put limits on eastern european migrants – France and Denmark, maybe? Or at least there’s a general view floating about in Britain that controls could have been put on migration.

engels, Duffy is just talking in daily mail nudge-nudge speak. It’s the quick way of saying “I have a set of people I consider deserving, who should get more from the govt, and a set of people I consider undeserving, all of them foreign or gay, and they should be [insert nasty act here].” I think that’s how Brown read it, too, but with typical New Labour spine, instead of telling her to grow a brain, he implied he agreed with her and was trying harder to [insert nasty act here]. “British jobs for British workers,” and all that.

I have decided not to be aware of any comments that were made in private (if those were not of a criminal nature). I understand there’s business in it. I understand that if you don’t report on it you will get less of that business. So I’ll make it my business to withdraw at least my part of that business.

For example, Disability living allowance has something like a 160 page form to claim.

40 pages, actually. Large print and simple English.

http://www.dwp.gov.uk/advisers/claimforms/dla1a_adult_print.pdf

A sign of how monarchical we Americans ended up: I find myself something less than shocked but more than startled that the Average Voter in this kind of encounter addresses the incumbent Prime Minister by his given name.

Well, we’re fairly monarchical in the UK as regards our actual monarch…

A reporter a while back said that the most likely explanation for stupid things on campaign was sheer exhaustion. Many days start at 5 AM, and run through 1-2 AM; people get really, deeply tired

101–

there’s an easy cure for it, though, lb:

just elect a democrat. as we all know, democratic presidents are neither the head of state nor the head of government nor, least of all, the commander in chief.

they are usurpers, communists, traitors, tyrants, and enemies of america.

problem solved! no more pesky excess deference!

At least he didn’t comment on the woman’s breasts:

http://www.nndb.com/people/441/000141018/

No, that’s fascism. Though it must be a relief to the Irish to learn that they’re white.

And didn’t South Africa make Japanese people ‘honorary whites’ a few decades back? Back to the future, eh?

New Statesman:

The woman at the centre of bigotgate, who inadvertently made Gordon Brown’s life a misery yesterday, is being represented by public relations firm Bell-Pottinger.

A call to the PR agency’s London offices confirms the news that Gillian Duffy is its latest client.

The “Bell” in Bell-Pottinger is Lord Bell, Mrs Thatcher’s one-time PR chief. We’re assured that Lord Bell is very “hands off” these days but an intriguing link nonetheless.

My source, with impeccable connections to the industry, says Mrs Duffy’s daughter works for a law firm who is already a client of Bell-Pottinger North.

Of Gordon Brown’s nemesis, the source adds: “Personally, I wonder who’s paying the bills, because Bell-Pottinger don’t come cheap.”

Oops, the blockquote should have ended after “cheap”

Of course, it’s all a set-up! Don’t be a prat, if he hadn’t gobbed off into the live mike, it would have been a mildly uncomfortable but by now entirely forgotten encounter. Or did she spray him with secret Tory gobshite gas from her buttonhole when nobody was looking?

No mouthing off, no story. All Gordon’s fault, even if she turned out to be a Tory plant from deepest Surrey who learned her northern accent at RADA…

Oh, puhleeze. Calling a spade a spade is not “mouthing off”. And saying it’s “All Gordon’s fault” is right up there in terms of confusing “responsibility” with “bearing the repercussions” with management honchos saying it’s all the worker’s fault for being unemployed because they didn’t “retool” and get the right job skills. What’s next, are you going to go on about this being a “synergizing opportunity”?

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/word-%27bigot%27-loses-all-meaning-201004292689/

Gordon Brown is now standing for Parliament for the eighth time. So he’s done a fair amount of talking with the average voter—much more than I have.

This is an easy mistake to make when looking at the raw data of ‘stood for Parliament eight times’. The reality, in fact, is that Gordon Brown has never won a competitive election in his life. His seat, Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath, is the 3rd safest Labour seat in the whole country, out of 345 (I think – I was looking at a spreadsheet with this data on a couple of days ago, but I can’t find it now – if it’s not 3rd, it’s in the top 5). Labour couldn’t lose this seat if they tried. He has had to do almost no campaigning in this constituency, going back decades – there’s just no point, it’s wasted time. Not only that, but he also wasn’t elected party leader in any meaningful way either, which also helped destroy his ability to actually persuade people of his policies. It’s important to understand, Scottish Labour is a political and patronage machine that’s like a grimmer, wetter version of Mayor Daley’s Chicago, with the same complete lack of debate or necessity to ever espouse an ideology that goes beyond ‘we aren’t the other guys’.

You aren’t quite right; you’ve probably met ten times more ‘average voters’ than Brown ever has.

@112 – no live mike incident, no story, no disastrous, embarrassing press coverage. How hard is that to understand? Maybe here it has turned into a discussion of what a dreadful racist that woman was, but out there it’s “what kind of a hypocritical, insulting, idiot is he?” It just is; and if he hadn’t said what he said on-air…

Anyway, anyone else have to put their hands over their eyes when he turned on his dreadful rictus grin in the closing seconds of the TV debate?

One other note: My 13 year old daughter who is extremely interested in politics, listened to the debate, and was terrified over the immigration section in the first debate. She had visions of our visas not being renewed. I have a feeling the same kind of conversation is being played out in Bangladeshi, Polish, and Sudanese households all over Britain.

Not that hard for this “outsider” (if that is what I am though I live here) to understand, since the Murdoch press–FoxNews–has done the very same in the U.S. On the other hand, in Obama for all his many obvious limitations there is a personification of inclusive multiracial democratic potentiality. I don’t see anyone articulating or representing that very well on the British national level, and its more the absence of that than the vehemence of the gutter press that unnerves me.

On a more positive note, the constant appealing to “fairness” that pervaded the debates–including even Cameron–is something that strikes me as much superior to American political discourse and a sign of a terrain well to the left of American politics, whatever its limitations. When someone comes along who can link that ethos of fairness to tolerance on the immigration question and still garner popular support, it will take some of the BNP steam away. My sense is that cannot be done without setting aside New Labour’s market dogmatism and getting back to economic and social justice as the focus, in policy not just verbiage.

Christopher, I grew up in England in the 70s and 80s, and when I hear people, particularly politicians, talking about “a strong cultural tradition of fair play” or “multicultural britain” I just switch off, and I think most of the rest of Britain do too, because not only do they remember a Britain completely lacking in those values in any kind of practical setting, they also don’t want to see them in action now. The common trope of modern lower-middle and working class Britain is the “soft touch” idea in which the fair-handedness of the cultural elite (so beautifully mis-represented by Jack’s self-parody above) is being taken advantage of by foreigners and scumbags (who are mostly gypsies or black). The Human Rights Act was famously called a “charter for grafters” as part of this trope.

I recently spent 18 months in England, and during that time I had the good fortune to spend quite a bit of time amongst the foreign casual worker community – mostly Japanese people working in restaurants part time while they studied English, but also other Australians and some Europeans – and I have to say they move in a world which the ordinary white, middle-class educated Briton neither understands nor comprehends. If the British left (or right, for that matter) saw the way British people behave towards the foreign worker community, and how hard it is to get any kind of a good break without really strong community and family ties, they would be considerably less interested in talking about “fair play” in British history and a lot more interested in calling ordinary Brits bigoted. They’d also be considerably less sympathetic to Gordon Brown’s “British jobs for British workers” dog-whistling, and decidedly more critical of the immigration debate than they currently are.

As I said above, the British working class has switched class consciousness for race consciousness, and as Hidari says, New Labour has refused to engage with one of the most fundamental responsibilities of a leftist social democratic party, which is to smack that shit upside the head.

Well, if people hadn’t been encouraged for decades to consider themselves to be the ‘clients’ of a welfare bureaucracy, simultaneously helpless and entitled to whatever the state deigned to give, they might feel less betrayed when that state appeared to be giving ‘their’ benefits to ‘others’ for no identifiable reason beyond spite and disdain.

Well-meaning [I charitably assume] politicians and bureaucrats have created a culture in which working-class communities can do nothing except feel resentment, because they have been stripped of agency while being repeatedly told that their relative poverty is the fault of bad people elsewhere. And being ordinary people, they are more inclined to identify ‘badness’ with visible difference and mutual incomprehensibility than with ‘class position’. But who has had time, space and opportunity to try to persuade the working class of their ‘true’ interests if not the political party/parties and professional state servants that make up, to all intents and purposes, the whole of the ‘left’, which has instead shackled them to an imperious top-down welfare state.

It’s not the whole problem, but it’s the part of it that the organised left should accept responsibility for.

sg, I concur totally about the reality you describe. Weirdly, I have even experienced it myself–one of our movers, a working-class Liverpool guy, dressed down my wife and told her we’d be moving back soon. Didn’t matter that we were white; mattered that we were immigrants, I guess taking away jobs in American Studies. What I meant was not a blindness to the social reality and past but a politics that would fashion a different future by appealing to certain values people like to think they hold, which is to say, the only way to build a new politics. The U.S. if anything has a much deeper legacy of racism–slavery, Jim Crow–and yet in Myrdalian manner, refracted through a certain remembrance of Martin Luther King, has persuaded itself, halfway, that bigotry is incompatible with the American Creed. That’s the kind of sensibility that will need to be fashioned somehow despite the equally powerful reality that racism is as British as shepherd’s pie, to adapt H. Rap Brown. Some recourse needs to be made to an inclusive language that can somehow make claim to the best in the national tradition and past. Cynicism on this, by contrast, will be self-fulfilling.

Which part of “it’s not the whole problem” are you not seeing? Do you actively deny that one of the central concerns of the relatively-deprived communities that are at issue is their anxiety about who does and does not access state benefits on which they and their families have come to depend, and their self-perceived helplessness in the face of arbitrary external decisions? Who has everyday political contact with these communities if not Labour Party MPs, councillors and local activists, and social workers who are, almost by definition, bless ’em, sometimes the same people? Doubtless these people are not solely responsible for the total failure of their message to penetrate such communities effectively, but a failure it nonetheless is.

If there aren’t other factors at play here, then your “cultural history of British racism (or, for that matter, the racism of the organised workers’ movement the world over until the 60s)” rather implies that it’s the common people’s fault they’re racist, while their “organised” betters have managed to move on, so they ought to shape up and take orders. Which strikes me as both patronising and futile.

Meanwhile, of course, getting from how the Mail felt about Hitler in the 1930s to how ‘race’ plays in 21st-century politics in one move would be good if you could pull it off, but it’s not exactly a subtle and multilevelled analysis, is it?

Where, for example, does the Daily Mail’s love of Hitler fit into your little theory that the British working class has only recently settled on scapegoating as a rhetorical move?

The Daily Mail in the 30s was entirely focussed on a lower middle class readership (it still is, in fact, but the distinction was clearer then), who would have been a far more fertile audience for a fascist editorial line. The working class at the time read the Mirror and the Herald and Reynolds’ News.

@112 – no live mike incident, no story, no disastrous, embarrassing press coverage. How hard is that to understand? Maybe here it has turned into a discussion of what a dreadful racist that woman was, but out there it’s “what kind of a hypocritical, insulting, idiot is he?” It just is; and if he hadn’t said what he said on-air…

Riiiiiight. ” If you hadn’t been so critical of me on spending the mortgage money on booze, this wouldn’t have happened. You made me hit you.” I’m real glad I don’t live with you alex, if you think that responsibility is the same as bearing the consequences. Note that alex has not only performed a bit of a walkback here, he’s now saying that it doesn’t matter whether the woman is a racist because of what other people are talking about there.

Well, alex, since this is what we’re talking about here why don’t you play by your own rules and address what has happened in that context, here? If you want to pontificate there (where by your own rules, that’s okay), be my guest. But don’t play Calvinball.

no alex, you can’t waltz in claiming that the British working class have some post-welfare state fear of immigrants taking their jobs and ignore, for example, the fact that this “they’re taking our jobs” thing is as old as the history of British racism. Christ, this anti-Polish stuff was going on 100 years ago in East London, it’s not like it’s some novel idea that poor British people came up with in response to some actual facts on the ground, or anything.

Also you might notice that Gordon Brown pointed out to the scapegoating woman in question that actually the people she’s talking about can’t get welfare; Christopher Phelps has already pointed out he can’t; so the modern “facts” you’re pointing to aren’t even correct. So why do you think all these welfare-dependent people believe something that’s not true? The answer lies in the history of attitudes towards foreigners.

You also don’t get a free pass on the assumption that ordinary people blame their problems of relative inequality on people who look different. Is this what ordinary people everywhere do, or what ordinary people in Britain do? Because British people are much, much more likely to worry about that than Australians or Japanese – it’s not actually a universal phenomenon,.

Jack, if someone presents themselves on tv with questions like “these eastern europeans, where are they flocking from?” and gets lauded by the press as a model British citizen raising “real concerns,” you don’t get to claim it’s a “trumped up charge of thought crime.” As I said, I grew up in this British working class world and I know exactly how racist it is, and all the “pure as the driven snow” crap doesn’t wash.

It also doesn’t wash with your previous admissions that national statism is necessary to protect the working class from international competition. You admitted yourself that a lot of British people want to throw out foreigners; square that with “trumped up thought crime” if you want, but don’t ask anyone else to suddenly deny it on your behalf.

Christ almighty, I thought the left was supposed to be in favour of the working class; you’re coming within half an inch of saying ‘fuck the racist bastards’.

SoV @134, really, eh? Go back to the top and read the OP – it’s not about her, it’s about him. Without what he said in the car, there’s no “it”.

Since I am under no illusions that CT commenters represent ‘the Left’ the fact that the choice of views on offer here appears to run from SG’s ‘Britain’s “broken society” is the fault of ingrained working class racism’ to Alex’s ‘”entitlement” and “welfare dependency” in “whole communities” is the breeding ground for fascism’ fortunately doesn’t disturb me overmuch.

Engels, you really should call yourself Trotsky. (Meaning his analysis of the class basis of fascism corresponds to a T, or should I say C2, with yours on the BNP.)

SoV @134, really, eh? Go back to the top and read the OP – it’s not about her, it’s about him. Without what he said in the car, there’s no “it”.

Chuckle. Since you are refusing to address my points, I take this as the best you can do in admitting that you’re wrong: “Without her bigotted comments, there’s no “it””; “Without the press jumping on this, there’s no “it””.

But of course, according to alex’s Calvinball rules, we have to talk about this Brown, not anyone else up or down the causal chain, even though we’re talking about it here, and not there.

Engels, you unreconstructed trotskyite! I’m not saying Britain is broken because the working class are racist; I’m saying it’s broken because of its oppressive and omnipresent class system, and that the people suffering most from this – working classs and lower-middle class – are failing to act in their own interests because their reaction to problems is driven by race- rather than class-consciousness.

As an example of how different Britain is in this regard (and this may help answer Chris B’s question too), while I was in Britain I was continually exposed to crime. Every time I or my partner left the house something bad seemed to happen in front of us: my partner saw a woman stab a man on her first week in London, we saw three brawls at the NYE fireworks, I was offered a good glassing by a stranger, a stranger tried to start a fight with my diminutive female Japanese friend, a stranger tried to steal my friend’s drink and start a fight with him, my house was robbed, a man tried to piss on my partner in passing, I saw two tavern brawls, my partner saw two men start a fight over a seat on the Tube, I saw a man try to start a fight on a bus, I saw a man pickpocket a man on the bus (and get attacked), my flatmate was punched on the bus for no reason by a guy who had actually run after the bus and got back on in order to do it, etc. That’s just the stuff I can think of quickly off the top of my head – in 18 months in London.

So I would regularly end up telling these stories of violent acts to my colleagues on a Monday morning, and I would ask them “why is there so much crime in London?” and their response would always be the same – London is more “diverse” than other cities. What is this “diversity” I would ask, and it would always come down to the same thing – immigrants, everywhere. That’s what they would tell me. And these people were postgraduate educated, Labour or LibDem voting leftist Britons. Yet all those criminal moments I experienced in London were always by a British person, usually a cockney-accented nutjob. So where does that figure? They seriously couldn’t think of another explanation.

Whenever I met any of my Father’s friends or my partner’s family, and they found out we lived in London, it would be the same response: the slow shaking of the head, the talk of London as crime-riddled, and the problem of “the immigrants.” In the end my own grandmother told me that probably Londoners resented me because I was a foreign worker.

When Japanese people talk about causes of crime, they will highlight lowering education standards, increasing inequality, and a lack of respect for elders amongst the latest generation of young people. Australians will talk about poverty and boredom, and will mention race mostly in connection with gang crime in specific highly racially segregated areas (like Redfern or Maroubra). But in England, the only explanation that is ever proferred is immigration.

It’s the same in non-crime related areas. My partner’s family in North London used to say “I’m going to the P**s,” rather than “I’m going to the corner shop,” and I know from talking to British friends that this was a common way of speaking. I have never – not even in 1986 when I first arrived in Australia – ever heard such a repulsive piece of unnecessary race-consciousness in Australia. For so many British people the first question is always “what race is he/she?” followed by an assessment of personal merits based on the result.

This is race consciousness, on display daily in the British newspapers and the interactions of ordinary British people. It may be anecdotal, but I’m pretty confident it’s true. And until the working class and the lower-middle class start focussing their problems on their bosses and away from the foreign workers in their midst, they’ll continue to have a terrible standard of living and horrible rates of crime, and no solution no matter who they vote for or how bigoted they get.

Chris, I’m not attempting to argue that other countries are not racist, or are perfect by any stretch of the imagination, or that they don’t also have a lot of people who believe silly things about race and class. I’m simply saying that the analytical framework in Britain is more intensely focussed on race as an explanation for all the world’s ills, even against copious evidence to the contrary. I think it necessarily has to be – Britain has a strong class culture, and it wouldn’t have survived this long if the people on top hadn’t managed to find a way to trick the people on the bottom into not fixing it. Deferential toryism and howling race fantasies are their main methods. It is the typical responsibility of organised labour and their political representatives to confront class disparity, and New Labour ostentatiously dropped that issue from their political discourse.

When I lived in London and was constantly beset by these troubles, my colleagues and my British friend would say the same thing as you – they don’t recognise the Britain I saw. I think this is partly because of the earlier experience I alluded to, that there is a different Britain for foreigners coming to Britain, who don’t have family connections to support them, and also partly because the British left have a remarkable unwillingness to discuss the issue of broken Britain. Interestingly, all the British people I met who had returned to Britain from Japan immediately noticed these problems, and were either desperately trying to return to Japan, or desperately trying to find ways to justify their decision not to.

Basically, if the British left refuse to talk about Broken Britain and consciously drop class from the issues they’re willing to discuss, they cede a huge amount of cultural ground to the racist right. And given that Britons have always been focussed on race, this is a recipe for disaster.

Now then Chris, where exactly did I do that? The “problems” my British friends noticed were of crime, dirt, and poor service quality, not specifically a comparison of race-based politics. Perhaps I should take a break to consider your use of straw men?

But what argument would you be making anyway, in this case? That Spanish and Japanese people are racist too, so it’s okay for British to be?

I’m making a couple of quite specific claims here about British society: a) that British people in general neglect class analysis in favour of race-based analysis; b) that Britain has a significant crime and social order problem that the British left refuses to recognise or discuss; c) and that by leaving this debate to the far right the British left, particularly its organised political arm as represented by Labour, has failed the British lower classes. I’m additionally claiming that a) is more noticeable in Britain than in Japan or Australia; and that the problems referred to in b) are much worse in Britain than in Japan or Australia, but that the British left won’t recognise them.

I’m not claiming perfection for other societies, or that Britain is the worst in Europe (about which I would know nothing). But, btw, I live in Japan now and every aspect of life here is easier for me as a foreigner than it was in London, where I was a citizen, even though my Japanese is not good enough to handle all the possible situations I could be in, and Japan is very very different. For example – it’s easier for me, a foreigner, to open a bank account or rent a house or a DVD or get a mobile phone or go to the doctor here than it was for me as a citizen; and I don’t encounter any barriers to these activities due to my foreignness, whereas I regularly encountered such problems in the UK due to my not having lived in the country for 3 years continuously as an adult. Don’t even get me started on the trouble I had with mobile phone companies because I didn’t have a record of long-term residence!

Also, as an aside regarding mixed marriages as a measure of tolerance: my Grandmother, who is British, and who believes that “them blacks will get what’s coming to them” after Cameron wins, and that all immigrants should be shipped back home, married a Spanish socialist after the war (my Grandfather, who fought for the POUM and has sadly passed away). He in turn ended up voting for Thatcher (as she does), and arguing that all immigration should be stopped. My Grandmother still chuckles at the story of how her sister married a black man and rocked up to her sleepy Dartmoor town after 10 years in America, with a 6.5′ black husband in tow. But my Grandmother literally (this is not an exaggeration) sounds like a reading of Mein Kampf whenever she speaks about Britain’s problems, and so do all of her descendants and relatives. So I don’t think this is a boilerplate measure of race-free analytical prowess.

Yeah Chris, because there is a detailed and quantitative analysis, proffered daily by the British left, about these kinds of things, and which one can read easily, which manages to somehow prove that the racist rantings of the British tabloids, and the kind of bigoted crap we see spouted by people like Duffy, are completely unrelated to any broad social phenomena in the UK. So anyone who notices otherwise – having lived in 3 countries and seen Britain and Australia as both a child and an adult – is obviously going out on a limb by comparing personal experiences.

This response of yours is completely consistent with my claim that the British left doesn’t want to talk about broken Britain. I lived in Finsbury Park, which is a middlingly-good suburb by London standards (the guy whose house I went to look at in West Ham thought it was “quite posh”), but its crime rate is on a par with the most dangerous suburb in Australia (where I have also lived, btw). Its crime rate is probably 10 or 100 times greater than a bad area in Japan, like Saitama. People who live in these areas notice these things and begin to wonder if maybe something is wrong. When the British left responds to these questions with ridicule or claims that “you’re just unlucky,” people start to think that maybe the British left don’t know what they’re talking about.

Unless the left can come up with some defense of their claim that Britain isn’t broken, rather than getting sniffy, then Cameron and the people to his right will seize that ground. They’re talking a language that a lot of Britons, who i suspect are in much less comfortable positions than most people posting on this blog, understand. And the people to the right of Cameron are deliberately turning the class-based reasons for this bad situation to their advantage through manipulating naive ideas of race.

Jack, I don’t think you would have needed to write most of that comment if you had actually understood what I wrote. If you go back and reread it, you might see what I mean.

No-one doubts that Japan is a low-crime society. However, it would be absurd to tout a county as a paragon of tolerance when the society is so intolerant of, say, marriage between Japanese people and outsiders and so unwilling to grant citizenship to non-ethnic Japanese people (except Brasilian footballers).

As for the other stuff, well any suggestion that Australia is a low-crime society compared to the UK is just absurd. Australia leads the world in burglary and is ahead of the UK on rape and murder. You are somewhat more likely to be the victim of a street robbery in the UK (where Spain is way out in front, further demonstrating that sg’s claims about UK exceptionalism are unsupported by fact.)

http://www.nationmaster.com/index.php

Ought to add, to prevent needless objections, that I don’t see at all see us as typical immigrants given concepts of race and nationality and class that get applied to these categories, and I understand that–just saying that the mover earlier described was an outlier in our time here so far, though a pretty shocking one at the time.

Yeah Chris, because there is a detailed and quantitative analysis, proffered daily by the British left, about these kinds of things, and which one can read easily, which manages to somehow prove that the racist rantings of the British tabloids, and the kind of bigoted crap we see spouted by people like Duffy, are completely unrelated to any broad social phenomena in the UK.

Going on my personal experience, I’m going to assume that sg is correct until proven otherwise. Nothing fancy, that’s just the norm, human nature. I’ve got relatives living in a small town near the Boothill of Missouri who lament the loss of jobs and blame it on various ethnic groups . . . despite the fact that there are maybe three people of the African-American persuasion living there, and maybe ten Hispanics. If “those people” are sucking up the jobs in those parts, they must be working some hellacious hours.

Try convincing my relatives of that simple mathematical fact, whatever their degree of education. My personal theory is that at some level these people know what is going on, but they are too cowardly (or too pragmatic) to confront the reality head on, and so will settle for a straw man they can attack with fear of loss of employment.

chris, I’m not sure you should be relying on the UNODC. The Australian Institute of Criminology has Australian assault rates at 8 per 1000; the rate in Islington according to the Home Office is 31 per 1000, and in England 14. I have to go to bed now, I just watched Twilight and my brain is bleeding; I don’t think the UNODC survey is reliable (you can download it and see why from the UNODC site).

sg@#154 said:

Jack, I don’t think you would have needed to write most of that comment if you had actually understood what I wrote. If you go back and reread it, you might see what I mean.

No, I understood exactly what you meant. And I’ve heard it all before on countless occasions.

Its a version of the Far Left’s same-old same-old “we wuz robbed” sob-story about how the workers representatives (and the workers themselves) have let down the revolution for “a pocket full of mumbles”. Its been playing ever since Lenin concocted the charge of “trade union consciousness”,  Trotsky’s “disappointment” with the proletariat and Brecht’s “elect a new people”.

You are suggesting that the UK elites (or “ruling class”) are guilty of playing divide and rule politics with the working class, weakening class consciousness by strengthening “race” consciousness. The story goes that by blowing subtle “dog-whistles” the ruling elite are able to drive a “wedge” into the working class, based on racial differences. Thereby derailing the otherwise unstoppable juggernaut of the socialist revolution.

And that they reinforce their social hegemony by using cultural institutions to brainwash the masses with insidious racist propaganda. Like the BBC for instance, that well-known Establishment organ which is forever parroting the Powellite line. Or EU headquarters in Brussels, where the officials constantly watch re-runs of Steptoe & Son and Till Death Do Us Part just to cheer on Steptoe Snr and Alf Garnett.

That at least was Gramsci’s product line and its been selling like hot-cakes with Cult Studies students first got hold of it around the mid-60s. (To be fair, that is how things did go in the US from the 60s through 90s. But the South is different in ways that you dont even want to know about.)

I am not buying it. If the UK ruling class had so much power, why did they go to the bother of inviting to the UK all these multitudes of diverse peoples, who they allegedly despise, just to dampen the working classes revolutionary fervour? It seems like an awful lot of bother when they could go directly to source, so to speak. (As they do in Japan.)

When Hitler, whom we can all agree was a racist, decided he wanted to break the power of the unions and working class organizations he closed the borders, expelled trouble makers and then later killed all the foreigners. None of this complicated divide-and-rule, “trick them into not fixing it” fancifulness.

Now even I think that was a bit harsh. But one cannot fault the Occamite economy of his plan.

Your theory, by contrast, is an absurdly complicated Rube Goldberg contraption. And it failed a critical test. When WWI was declared the world’s most developed and class conscious workers party, Germany’s SDP, had the chance to defy the Kaiser and vote for the brotherhood of international class, rather than the Fatherland of nation state, on the issue of war credits. They chose the nation because that is what their members and constituents wanted. Same story in all the other European nation state. It turns out that old-fashioned people had a fatal weakness for their own kind.

No doubt things would have been easier and better if the workers had felt differently. But when I put that form of argument to my wife it usually gets short shrift.

There is a grain of truth in the Cult Studies “end of grand narrative” line: Post-modern liberalism weakens the flow of majority group sympathy – class, creed or color consciousness – on both sides of the elite/populus divide. Not just in obvious areas such as race, religion and regent. Even in class matters. Look at how Goldman Sachs ruthlessly sold their fellow capitalists down the river in the GFC. I didnt notice any disgraced stockbrokers throwing themselves off sky scrapers in that firm. No ruling class solidarity there!

But it seems to sharpen collective consciousness on the part of minority groups, eg rainbow coalition. Well, at least someone is showing a bit of team spirit…

Of course the zeit of post-modern liberalism has not utterly triumphed for those of a certain geist. One look at Gillian Duffy’s defiantly old-fashioned clobber confirms that suspicion. Doubtless short-sighted and parochial, but at least she sticks together.

So her ilk continue to harken back to the team-spirited days of national yore: Rule Brittania, Workers United. (Think how many early modernist organizations have “United” in their names, why even the United States and United Kingdom got in on that act.)

But not anymore, nowadays everybody wants to be Different.

phillip, I’m aware that Britain isn’t just London; I grew up in Wessex and I regularly visited Devon (where my family live) as an adult; my partner’s family are in Watford and Newcastle.

anthony, Australians certainly have some horrible views about Aborigines but it would be really silly to claim that we think Aborigines are responsible for crime – many Australians may think Aborigines are likely to be criminals but we just don’t see them as numerous enough or active enough to be responsible for crime. That’s the big difference in racial analysis between the two countries – poor australians don’t create fantastic theories about very small groups in the community.

Chris, your statistics source is a bit dubious. I don’t think the UNODC is a particularly reliable source of information about crime statistics, and that’s what nationmaster uses. You can compare stats directly between the Australian and UK Government sources (AIC and Home Office), which is what I did when I moved to Finsbury Park. I tried very hard to juggle the figures to convince myself that Finsbury Park was safer, but in the end I couldn’t.

And these stats match my experience perfectly. I witnessed more violent crime, and more property crime, in 18 months in inner city London than in 10 years in inner city Sydney, living a broadly similar lifestyle but in a better financial position in London. The level of rudeness and personal aggression, and the number of near-misses, was astounding. Also the sheer staggering difficulty of interacting with any public service or company, and not just for me but for all the people around me. These aren’t “a few frustrating anecdotes” either, they formed a consistent pattern across institutions and companies.

These things are clearly being noticed by people in that large stratum of British society who, rightly, feel their quality of life being stretched by the extremely high cost of living and the rapidly decaying social order. Dismissing these problems may make you feel like the British working class are the salt of the earth who will line up with you in the struggle for a better country, but it also guarantees they’re not listening to what you say, and instead blaming the immigrants for the poor service, the crime, and the rubbish.

Also chris and anthony, I think your statements about Japan are wrong. I think some of them are just factually wrong. But it’s tangential and I can’t be bothered with it.