Movers and stayers

Have you read Ivan Krastev’s ‘After Europe’? He deals with this re Easern Europe:

“Curiously, demographic panic is one of the least discussed factors shaping eastern Europeans’ reaction toward refugees. But it is a critical one. Nations and states have an unfortunate habit of disappearing in the recent history of eastern and central Europe. In the last twenty-five years, around 10 percent of Bulgarians have left the country in order to live and work abroad. According to United Nations projections, Bulgaria’s population is expected to shrink by 27 percent by 2050. Alarm over “ethnic disappearance” can be discerned in many of the small nations of Eastern Europe. For them, the arrival of migrants signals their exit from history, and the popular argument that an aging Europe needs migrants only strengthens the growing sense of existential melancholy.

When you watch on television scenes of elderly locals protesting the settlement of refugees in their depopulated villages where not a single child has been born for decades, your heart breaks for both sides—the refugees, but also the old, lonely people who have seen their worlds melt away. Is there going to be anyone left to read Bulgarian poetry in one hundred years? In the politics of threatened majorities, a democratic imagination is a demographic one. The nation, not unlike God, is one of humanity’s shields against the idea of mortality. It is in the memory of our family and our nation that we hope to continue living after our death. The lonely individual is mortal in a different way than the person attached to a particular group.

It is thus not surprising that the demographic imagination shapes not only society’s hostilities to foreigners but also its negative reactions to social changes like gay marriage. Postcommunist societies, most of which are very secular as a rule, are quite tolerant when it comes to sexual life. But for many conservatives, gay marriages signify fewer kids and further demographic decline. For an eastern European nation haunted by low birth rates and migration, the endorsement of gay culture is like endorsing your own disappearance.”

John, don’t you think that it’s a bit late in the game to still be singing this song?:

This in turn produces support for Trumpism and its variants

It’s very clear that what’s happening now has absolutely nothing to do with economic anxiety. Any discussion of anti-immigration politics that starts with – or at any point incorporates – this idea is completely misguided. Opposition to immigration is based on pure racism, not on any economic response to the phenomena of movers and stayers.

In my opinion, this sort of reverses the logical order of things.
Cultures are to some degree always conservative as they are a set of values and ideas passed through generations, but on the other hand cultures also naturally continuously change.
In some conditions, some cultural boundaries will become salient, in other they will stay dormant.
If we look at migration, apparently everything migrants do is wrong: if they come, they steal jobs of locals of the destination country, if they go they break the economy of the departure country;if they find a job they steal jobs from locals, if they don’t they are a weight on the welfare state, if they are entrepreneurs they outcompete lo a ones.
These claims are mutually contradictory, yet people who are against migration use all these claims interchangeably.
This shows that the arguments are a form of motivated reasoning : people are against migrants in principle and just search for reasons to rationalize their pre existing preferences.
But these opinions are weaponised by political parties that use these fears to push some specific policies, and these policies magically are always the same: low taxes.
If we try to find a logical connection between low taxes and being anti migrants it is difficult, but in practice it comes from decades of low tax parties painting a picture where local, natural communities are opposed by somewhat artificial, parasitic governments (which is a good strategy if you want to argue against taxes in general) that always act for the good of some one else, who is not part of the local, victimized community.
In Italy for example there is a common idea that it is the EU that is forcing us to accept migrants.
So my opinion is this: we are still living through the dismantling of the new deal institutions, right wing populist parties are just a more advanced form of the old anti redistributive government parties, and they still play on this “people vs governments” narrative dichotomy, only at times the ideological bs becomes so strong that they are forced to go against the economic interests that generated them (see brexit).

That sounds like everybody short of xenophobes and other people on the extreme end of the psychological spectrum would be running out fo the door.
Id rather expect that the vast majority would strongly prefer to stay and who leaves, or stays away for the long term is based on lots of randomness as well as specific push/pull factors (e.g close family connections abroad, particular supply/demand for ones education home and abroad…)

“In economic terms, the obvious solution would be to replace the movers-out with movers-in, but they are of the wrong religion, skin colour and so on, and are therefore rejected. “

The experience of the UK is not this. There are, roughly speaking, three of us in this relationship. There is a ‘ruling class’, which, roughly speaking, is around 15/20% of the population, there is ‘immigrants’, which are again somewhere in the region of 15% and then there’s ‘the rest’ which is somewhere in the region of 65-70%. What we have been experiencing is a coalition between the ruling class and political representatives of the immigrant section to bash ‘the rest’. Pretty much most cultural life in the UK comes from representatives of those two groups, so that, for instance, actors from the 65% are so scarce that we know them individually. There are lots of statistics comparing immigrant groups against the ‘white’ population, as if there is such a thing, but only occasionally is there a breakdown of outcomes within the ‘white population’. Those analysis always show that poor white working class boys are doing worse than any other section of society. Needless to say there is nothing being done about this other than to blame ‘cultural factors’ and walk away.

Furthermore, the economic arguments in favour of mass immigration show a marked resemblance to the arguments used by Nick Leeson prior to the collapse of Barings Bank. Leeson said two things: I’m very profitable, and I need more cash. Only one of those statements had a basis in truth. Similarly, proponents of mass immigration say it is very profitable, and we don’t have enough money to spend on public services. After the collapse, everyone asked the obvious question, which is why did anyone in Barings think that someone of average ability had uniquely managed to make large profits from what was in every other bank a plain vanilla low margin business? Similarly, at some point people will ask why on earth the UK thought that employing millions of immigrants to do manual tasks was the route to prosperity. If employing old African men to stand in hospital car parks and tell people there are no spaces (actual example from my local hospital) is the route to a leading first-world economy, how come there isn’t a bidding war to import old African men? Why is it just us? Why is it a surprise that the UK, having built its economic future on employing millions of migrants on low-pay, is now experiencing an acute housing shortage for low-paid workers?

The analysis of immigration as a process of three players – rulers, indigenous ruled, and immigrants, seems to give a lot more realistic explanations than the two player natives vs immigrants explanation.

It’s very clear that what’s happening now has absolutely nothing to do with economic anxiety.

‘Very clear’ meaning that I Faustusnotes don’t want to consider this possibility. ‘Very Clear’ does not require any evidence.

Any discussion of anti-immigration politics that starts with – or at any point incorporates – this idea is completely misguided.

Because I Faustusnotes don’t want to consider this possibility.

Opposition to immigration is based on pure racism, not on any economic response to the phenomena of movers and stayers.

Because anything else would upset my carefully constructed world view…

= = = John – I think the reason for (white) rural voters supporting Republicans probably has more to do with the fact that Republicans at least make some effort to speak their language, and share some cultural touch stones (religion, hunting, ‘tradition’). Democratic politicians come from a class that I think (based upon my interactions with them) despise rural areas. And generally people won’t vote for people who despise them. -= = =

Absolutely. Look at the 2004 US Presidential election for example: the Democratic candidate George W. Bush had an very priviliged childhood split between the elite & wealthy suburbs of the City of Houston and the ultra-elite and wealthy zones of Connecticut and vacationland Maine, had his path greased to a fun Texas National Guard slot flying fighter jets within the continental US during the Vietnam War, and kept a phony “ranch” prop where he “road wire” and “chopped brush” whenever he wasn’t at the White House. Whereas the Republican candidate John Kerry enlisted in the US Navy after college, volunteered for close quarters combat during the Vietnam war rather than the DC desk job the son of a Navy lawyer and State Dept diplomat might have taken. Kerry – unlike the Democrat Bush – was a lifelong outdoorsman, hunter and a private pilot [1]. Nothing but contempt for the working man in the Democrats’ nomination I tell you.

I’d also recommend the young Ezra Klein’s interview with Tom Vilsack, a very conservative rural Democrat, for a depiction of how the despising works:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/03/vilsack_i_took_it_as_a_slam_on.html

[1] In the US private pilots and light airplane owners run 95% Republican (or Libertarian, but I repeat myself)

@John: there are two problems with your perspective.
First, the migration as economic opportunity narrative is deeply ingrained in the imagination of the urban middle-class, especially American, because it is part of our family’s upward trajectories. It ignores the fact that not everyone who moves wanted to follow that trajectory – just as British or Russian peasants haven’t joined the industrial economy willingly, so would a lot of people be willing and ready to sacrifice their apparent economic self-interest for a chance to stay put. It also ignores the fact that many immigrants are not upwardly mobile. In Eastern Europe, as in other historical emigration regions, everyone know many more of the “aunt who just disappeared” or “cousin who came back broke and a drunk” than “rich uncle in America” stories. And people do, deeply, know that.

Anyway, I was just making two very small points. First, re: voting against your economic self-interest. I think that in many other contexts, people would have no trouble accepting that people may loathe economic “progress” that comes at the cost of destroying the non-monetary networks of solidarity that they rely on. Migrants cannot easily replace the children who left, because the elderly, or the young parents etc., don’t have the kind of very rich and advanced social state that would allow them to monetarily compensate all the unpaid labour that used to be provided within the family.
Second, the “stayers” and the “movers” are not as distinct as you would think. A lot of experts tend to severely underestimate the costs of mobility, but to many, maybe most, people, mobility is a necessity they deeply resent. A lot of people outside of the urban middle-class feel that the EU has forced their children to leave, and then seems to force others to come there, just as unwillingly for all those concerned. They want to stop the whole merry-go-round. And yes, they are willing to punish their own urban middle-class by closing their own borders. They resent that middle-class not only for enforcing the mobility, but for celebrating it, instead of decrying a necessary evil.

I am not defending them. I am also a product of successful migrations, over several generations, and I am deeply ashamed at the EU’s immigration non-policy.
But analyzing the consequences of migration in purely economic terms is just wrong, or literally “weltfremd”, as the Germans say so well. And I just cannot figure out why that is the one topic where social scientists wholly accept this purely economic narrative, which they routinely reject otherwise.

Dipper

The analysis of immigration as a process of three players – rulers, indigenous ruled, and immigrants, seems to give a lot more realistic explanations than the two player natives vs immigrants explanation.

I have no idea whether your explanations are more realistic or less realistic because I have no idea what your explanations are. I do not understand why, if you have explanations, you have not disclosed them. You have framed some interesting questions, but you have not answered them. For example:

If employing old African men to stand in hospital car parks and tell people there are no spaces (actual example from my local hospital) is the route to a leading first-world economy, how come there isn’t a bidding war to import old African men?

If my local hospital was employing people to stand in their carparks and tell people there are no spaces, I would think it was odd. If I had a strong desire to know why they were doing this, I would probably ask the hospital. (Has it occurred to you to try doing that?) I know that I would not want to ask the hospital why the people they are employing for that function are old African men, because my curiosity on that specific detail would be insufficient to pursue it, but somebody who wanted to know specifically why the people employed are old African men could also ask the hospital that–you could do that if you really wanted to know the answer.

So the question ‘Why is Dipper’s local hospital employing people to stand in the carpark telling people there are no space?’ is an interesting one. But you have offered no answer to it. To me, the question ‘Why are those people old African men?’ is of less interest, although still of some interest, and I can see how it might interest some people more than it does me: but you have offered no answer to that question either.

So you’re telling us that you have an analytical framework that provides better answers to questions, but you’re not showing us those answers. Show, don’t tell! There are good reasons why authors are given that advice.

When I came to my county in Wisconsin–famous at once for being the site of the farm girl in The Prince and Me and the murders of Making one–Manitowoc–in 1981, there were almost no factory-scale farms in it. Now there are almost no small farms at all. To model rural America in terms of thinking of the small farm is rapidly being replaced–and in my county now is predominately replaced–by corporate farming. It’s still true that the small farmers that remain are wildly Trumpsters (as of course are the factory farmers, for obvious reasons). Which is begging for an answer why.

I offer a simple answer: AM radio. It’s completely dominated by right-wing talk shows, and still is a central venue for information for many people who are still marginally on the grid. In my city–which used to be in the 80s a Democratic haven–it has been completely overtaken by Republicans, especially the over-40s, who vote in droves–and one can hear it by dialing up the local AM station call-ins, or any AM station talk-show from Milwaukee (even though Charlie Sykes was a late-coming No-Trumpster after abandoning his AM format). We all focus on the dreadful Fox network and the like, but believe me, good old-fashioned AM radio had as much to do with electing Agent Orange as anything else in delivering what rural vote still counts.

@ J-D “I have no idea whether your explanations are more realistic or less realistic because I have no idea what your explanations are.”

This is getting ridiculous. Is this your out-of-office auto-reply? Is it my job to describe in detail what should be pretty obvious to an intelligent person? Or should I just take refuge in the well known saying that “it is easy to wake a sleeping man, but impossible to wake a man pretending to be asleep”?

Just ask yourself why the modern radical left has such a love-affair with militant Islam? Why do they hold a candle for the Iranian regime?

Dipper

Is this your out-of-office auto-reply?

No; I’m pretty sure that in my whole life I had never previously written or spoken that sentence.

Is it my job to describe in detail what should be pretty obvious to an intelligent person?

No, but then we both know that it’s not your job to comment here at all. I don’t know what make you think your job comes into it.

Whenever I tell you that I don’t understand your point, your options include the following:
(a) expand on your explanation in the hope that it will assist me to understand;
(b) make no response whatever;
(c) bitch and moan and whine and complain and carry on at length about how monstrously put-upon you are by my outrageous behaviour and how my responses to your comments are cruelly and shamelessly ruining your life.

(There are plenty of other options, too.)

How you choose to spend your time is, of course, up to you; and, by the same token, how I choose to spend my time is up to me.

Or should I just take refuge in the well known saying that “it is easy to wake a sleeping man, but impossible to wake a man pretending to be asleep”?

When I tell you that in my whole previous life I have never encountered this saying, no matter how well-known you have found it to be, I wonder whether you will conclude that I must be telling you a deliberate untruth, because no other explanation is possible. Mind you, if quoting it makes you feel better (I can’t imagine why it would, but stranger things have sometimes turned out to be true), then jolly good luck to you and I wish you well.

Just ask yourself why the modern radical left has such a love-affair with militant Islam?

All right, I will.

I: Why does the modern radical left have such a love affair with militant Islam?
Myself: I don’t know. I didn’t even know that the modern radical left has a love affair with militant Islam. Are you sure that it does?
I: No, now that you come to mention it, I’m not sure that’s true. I just got it from Dipper. Huh, maybe Dipper’s got that wrong. I’d ask ‘un about it, but ‘a gets terribly upset when I ask ‘un questions.
Myself: Why is that?
I: Honestly, I can’t tell. I’d ask Dipper about that, maybe, except …
Myself: … I know, ‘a gets terribly upset when you ask ‘un questions.

Hi John, as others have noted, you’ve addressed an important and complex topic. On the topic of information deficits and fake news, the current RCP most-read articles all address variations of this theme. The most interesting of these is a well-researched piece on the NYT bestseller list, which we discover from the NYT’s earlier legal defense of manipulating evidence is actually defended as “an opinion piece” rather than a factual report of who’s buying which books. The finger on the scales leads NYT readers to believe that books by conservative reporters are “takes” rather than solid reporting, and not as widely-read as books which have in fact been purchased by a lower number of readers. The recent case of a top 44 advisor having her book on the best-seller list despite selling very few books is another case in point.

There are very few easy answers and the most “reliable” sources have biases and agendas which need to be scrutinized carefully. The notion that “our side” tells the truth, whilst other “lies” is one of the most dangerous pieces of fiction we can imbibe. That’s even more important when trying to understand complex issues such as immigration trends. Painting those we disagree with as “fools” and “knaves” is worse than a waste of time. The current president and Brexit need never have happened. The declines in real income and the wage depression caused by unfettered immigration, legal and otherwise, are have long been a matter of record.

There are no easy solutions to any of the related problems short of imposing the sort of rigorous laws employed by fascist dictatorships such as Canada and Australia. The only refugees Canada is interested in are precisely those who meet the sorts of criteria set out by the current occupant of the oval office. Not liking that fact changes nothing.

Dipper: “Also, the EU is creating a billiard-table economy. There is no resistance to movement, so if there is any tilt on the table all the balls end up in one corner.”

Since its EU immigration rate has always been close to double that of the UK, can we assume you’re referring to Germany?

Seriously though, what percentage of EU migrants ended up in the UK in 2017? And since things might have changed a bit post-referendum, what percentage of EU migrants ended up in the UK in 2015?

Was it “all the balls”? Or, more accurately speaking was it about 15% of the balls?

Dipper@25:

Just ask yourself why the modern radical left has such a love-affair with militant Islam? Why do they hold a candle for the Iranian regime?

Now who’s setting an auto-reply? Beyond the obvious “they don’t”, there are a number of equally popular (and equally dubious) explanations for these two claims, some of which are mutually contradictory. If you’re going to make vague but contentious claims like this, you need to have the moral courage to actually state your position so it can be evaluated on its merits and faults rather than winking and waggling your eyebrows. Insinuation is often an act of cowardice, and in this case I’d stipulate it’s moral cowardice.

@ various. eg @Another Nick, Scott P

The EU has various projections of population growth, which vary between +10 million and +15 million between now and mid-late century, largely due to future and previous immigration. This is equivalent to a country somewhere between Sweden and the Netherlands in size. It needs to be built, and quite a lot of it is projected to be built round where I live and it is making living here very difficult. Short journeys take forever. So I’m grateful for all those telling me that this isn’t happening, but the local reality as well as the stats says different.

re the left and radical Islam, clearly again people haven’t been watching. @ Orange Watch “Beyond the obvious “they don’t” I gave the link- – Corbyn has taken the money from Iran and continues to argue the Iranian case. Labour loves those muslims votes and will say anything to get them. Moderate muslim voices get very little air time or support.

Dipper@35:

Your link@25 was broken, so you’ve still given no evidence for your dubious claim. And while you came closer to stating your position, you’ve given no explanation why “pandering to Muslims for votes” would in fact consist of “pandering to radical theocrats whose social and political aims are at odds with the radical left’s social and political aims”, nor how the radical left manages to pander by supporting positions that are antithetic to militant Islam – to the degree that as broad and diverse a range of movements as “militant Islam” can be said to have a cohesive agenda, it’s not particularly compatible with the radical left nor even the not-so-radical left à la Corbyn’s Labour.

Hidari@36:
A phrase like ‘Labour loves those muslims notes’ (note the lower case for Muslim) is bordering on racism incidentally (imagine I wrote ‘The Tories love those jew votes’).

I’m not sure I’d say “bordering on” in this case, as it seems like Dipper is suggesting that cozying up to Tehran is proof that Labour (and the “radical left” in general) is pandering to militant Muslims in the UK (and elsewhere).

For Dipper’s benefit, I’ll add that in the context of modern UK demographics that sounds about as plausible as a historical hypothetical of Oliver Cromwell cozying up to the Vatican to pander to his supporters. Hopefully, this parallel is sufficiently Anglicized for Dipper to understand exactly how wrongheaded and utterly ignorant what they appear to be insinuating is.

‘But like Hidari on a previous thread, you’re going to wait until they actually throw you in a concentration camp’

roflmao

The role of widespread corruption producing local leaders from what passes for the elite, or local agents from wealthy institutions and people seems to me to be overlooked. In other countries, political scientists like to talk about elites playing bosses over their people in political machines, as in the term caciquismo. But the phenomenon of the big fish in the little pond calling the shots isn’t necessarily (in my opinion,) solely an attribute of the barbarously brown people. Are the people of North Carolina truly so committed to a benighted conservatism, or is it Art Pope counting for more?

A second aspect is the role of religion, which no matter what anyone says is not in practice separable from nation, ethnicity, race, sex and gender. Religion is not just about magic medicine and superstition, but about bigotry. And religion is strongly supported as a matter of policy by the state, which at most tries to seem denominationally neutral when dealing with the larger churches. Clergymen, like farm owners, are businessmen, and they think like businessmen.

@ faustusnotes “In the context of British politics this is such a disturbing lie it’s hard to know where to start. “

Well, we could start with the facts. in 2017, the UK Tax to GDP ratio (according to the OECD) was the highest it has been since 2000. And is, I believe the highest it has been since the days of Harold Wilson. If that number was at an all time low, then you and the Left would be correct in saying that pressure on public services was due to government cuts, but it isn’t. The current government is now collecting a higher ratio of national GDP in taxes than Blair/Brown ever did, hence I think it is reasonable to conclude that the current economic model of high-immigration for manual and low paid work is not working as it isn’t generating sufficient wealth to pay for public services at a level we both would wish.

“Also have you stopped to ask that “African” man if he is actually from Africa” He had a strong West African accent. And obviously I didn’t ask him. But the point remains – most staff in petrol stations are Eastern or Southern European, same for many shelf-stackers, car washers. I simply don’t see how importing people to do tasks that could be automated or done by local people is going to make this country better off, and as the stats in para 1 show, it isn’t. But perhaps you know better Faustusnotes in which case a Nobel Prize for Economics is yours for the taking.

@ Orange watch, Hidari, J-D

“Broken” – was google not working for you guys? maybe this link will work, or this, or this.

tlwest@44:

Of course, given our bubbles, I don’t have much exposure to the rural conservative rank-and-file, but my impression is that the urban liberal leadership is more respectful of rural conservatives than their rank-and-file, and the conservative leadership is less respectful to urban liberals than their rank-and-file.

As a pinko living in a rural conservative area (but who’s lived in latte-sipping urban environments) this sounds like an accurate assessment.

@ faustusnotes the facts speak for themselves. The UK government had an austerity program in that it committed to slashing the deficit so reduced public spending as the current level of spending could not be sustained through taxation alone. Blair was anti-immigration in that he said opening up FOM to Eastern Europe would only bring a few tens of thousands. The argument that the UK needed millions of workers from Eastern Europe was only made after the fact.

@46

‘Just to be 100% clear on this – your argument is that “the Left” writ large panders to militant Islam, and you’re presenting assertions that Corbyn and Labour are too willing to work with and/or not sufficiently critical of the Islamic Republic of Iran as proof that they’re pandering to UK Muslims for votes?’

No his argument is that Corbyn received money from the Iranian ‘propaganda channel’ Press TV and that therefore he is on the payroll of The International Muslim Conspiracy (information Dipper presumably gained from poring over The Protocols of the Elders of Islam) and that therefore Corbyn (and therefore, presumably all Labour supporters) are, implicitly or explicitly, shills for this International Muslim Conspiracy, which controls the liberal media (hence their hushing up all those stories that only the Sunday Times was brave enough to print about brown Muslim men raping our white children).

Not to put too fine a point on it, but you would find it difficult to fit a Rizla paper between Dipper’s views and Breivik’s.

There’s been a lot of screaming about fascism in the media recently, and, given this description of Dipper’s opinions (and one must assume that Boris ‘picanninies’ Johnson’s own political views are more or less congruent with Dipper’s) it’s worthwhile discussing whose views are closer to fascism: those of the Corbynites, or those of the radical ethno-nationalist Right, as evinced by the leaders of the two major parties of the extreme right wing in the world today, the American Republicans and the British Conservative Party.

Dipper

maybe this link will work, or this, or this.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-iran-protests-why-overlook-human-rights-issues-regime-press-tv-a8138696.html

In 2014, not long before becoming the most unlikely Labour leader in history, Jeremy Corbyn spoke at an event at London Islamic centre to mark the twenty fifth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution.

At this event, he praised Iran’s, “Tolerance and acceptance of other faiths, traditions and ethnic groupings in Iran.”

There is more than one possible explanation of why Jeremy Corbyn would say something like this.

One possibility is that he is disposed to say nice things about the Iranian regime because he is receiving money from them: it might be an implicit quid pro quo (or–who knows?–even an explicit one).

Another possibility is that he has been misled by being only partially informed. He might be aware of evidence that the Iranian regime has officially declared policies supporting recognition and promotion of the distinctive identity of minority groups, that minority groups are better accepted and integrated in Iran than the same and similar minority groups in other countries (including Iran’s neighbours), and that the condition of minority groups in Iran under the present regime is better than their condition under the previous regime; at the same time, he might have failed to familiarise himself (as he should have done before making such a speech) with the evidence that the official policies of acceptance are not fully lived up to in practice, that the burden of difficult conditions experienced generally across Iran falls more heavily on minority groups, and that some minority groups in particular are among the most heavily disadvantaged people in Iran and/or explicit targets of official discrimination and persecution.

There may be other possibilities.

What I can’t figure is any way that any explanation of Jeremy Corbyn’s (indefensible) conduct in this case helps to provide a more illuminating analysis of immigration in the UK.

Dipper@50:

I can only assume you neglected to address most of my post so you can retreat to your bailey when I attack your motte, but… fine. One more time: presenting “Corbyn sucks up/gives a pass to Iran” as evidence that Labour is courting militant Islamists in the UK is structurally parallel to a claim that e.g. Teresa May and the Tories have been trying to get DUP constituents to defect to the Tory party by sucking up to the Vatican. How credible would you find that claim on its face?

I have to say, though, going for “the Left isn’t sympathetic to feminist critiques of Islam” less than a week after pretending that the veil debate in France does not include such critiques on the left and is a clean conservative-vs-progressive fight shows a tedious lack of consistency, and looks an awful lot like the sadly-not-uncommon conservative habit of supporting feminist discourse only when they’re a useful rhetorical cudgel and at best ignoring their existence the rest of the time. Although I suppose in that case, you may have just been holding out on a subject based on shoddy superficial third-hand understanding instead, though the same principle of only caring to know enough to bludgeon your opponents would still apply.

Hidari@51:

You’re probably right, and I’m probably putting too much thought into this.

“This comes back to the question of why rural voters support conservative parties, even when those parties serve the interests of the urban rich. ”

There is another seeming paradox in the same direction that is occupying my mind at the moment. Support for the Green Party is much stronger in cities (particularly university cities) than in rural areas. Cities are also more environmentally efficient than rural areas. But the biggest and easiest gains in the fight against global warming can be made through changes in rural land use. And people who actually live in the environment (and are dependent on it) should care more about it, shouldn’t they? How can this divide be crossed? And isn’t this a paradox.

@ Orange Watch, Hidari

“You’re probably right, and I’m probably putting too much thought into this.”

Yes, because when people don’t agree with your world view, that’s probably because they are unspeakably evil. Life’s a lot simpler when its dressed up like that isn’t it? No need to ask yourself hard questions, just bask in the warm glow of self-satisfaction that you are always right and everyone else is evil and wrong.

Dipper, you really don’t seem to understand the way the UK government has spent money over the past 20 years. Before you carp on about immigrants taking up resources, you might want to make an effort to understand how those resources have been funded, by whom, and why. You could start by trying to understand “austerity” and maybe also going back to whatever statements you were making on blogs in 2009 about how the Blair government was spending too much money. Once you’ve got that story straight, you can begin to ask yourself why it is you thought that immigrants were the problem when the government was spending too much money on infrastructure, and why they’re still the problem when it’s spending too little. Maybe then you’ll start to wonder what exactly your “economic anxiety” is really all about.

Dipper

And as I’ve said, if large-scale immigration is a way of generating wealth then how come we have under-funded public services when we are running a record high tax take?

‘How come public services are under-funded when the tax take is at a record high?’ is a very good question. ‘Because of the level of immigration’ is very unlikely to be the answer. ‘Because we’re wasting a lot of government spending on activities which are of no service to the public’ is an answer with a higher degree of likelihood. ‘Actually, the tax take is not at a record high’ and ‘Public services are not actually under-funded’ are others.

Dipper@59:

You just proved my point. Instead of making the least effort to defend your prior insinuation (never claimed, just insinuated!) that Labour is pandering to the UK’s Sunni-majority Muslim population by coddling a Shi’ite theocracy (there, I spelled it out, you can now retreat to your bailey), you played victim and acted as though we had not been observing that you’d been arguing in bad faith, but rather declaring you irredeemably evil. You certainly didn’t deign to actually engage with the substance of my comment. Again.

J-D @63: of your answers to Dipper’s very good question of ‘How come [UK] public services are under-funded when the tax take is at a record high?’, one is ‘Actually, the tax take is not at a record high’. Depends what you mean by record high: if Dipper’s comments are accurate, the tax take is as high as or higher than it has been for a very long time. Is he wrong? Are you comparing today with rather serious past emergencies like Big Mistake II?

‘Public services are not actually under-funded’ is quite possible, but if you accept that you have to reject the cry for higher funding of those services.

‘Because we’re wasting a lot of government spending on activities which are of no service to the public’ is also quite possible, but if you accept that you should support the drastic cutting of such services. Your candidates?

Wow dipper you’re revealing a very shallow understanding of the economic underpinnings of your argument. Have you heard of counter factual?what would tax revenue be without migrants? And are you aware that spending and tax revenue aren’t intrinsically linked? You chose to vote for a government that refuses to spend money on social housing, social care or welfare, and as a result conditions in the uk are deteriorating. That would happen regardless of the migrant population. If you’re so concerned about public spending why did you vote for the party that promised to slash it?

Also consider some overseas examples. The migration the uk is experiencing is tiny compared to the migration that Tokyo experienced in the 1970s. Even now Tokyo- a city of 37 million – sees about 75,000 new residents a year and this is tiny compared to its growth 20 years ago. Yet social services here function fine. Why? Or consider any city on the Chinese eastern seaboard, experiencing population growth of millions. Changsha I think doubled in population in 10 years. What is the difference between the experience of these cities and your paltry population growth in the uk? Why can’t you handle a couple of hundred thousand migrants while a Chinese or Japanese city can handle millions? Because you can’t and won’t plan or spend on public goods, and you blame migrants instead of your own social policies.

Stopping migration won’t fix that problem. Who are you going to blame then?

@ Collin Street “Unless you can trust others who tell you you’re being wrong you’ll literally never know, go through life making a fool of yourself in ignorance.”

You’re wrong. And you’re wrong.