Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 128 posts

Re: Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

#101

Post by sefrost »

jltsiren wrote: post #89
sefrost wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t suggest either of those things. Like I said I’m not voicing my personal opinion. But we can look at the polling data going back decades now on this issue. People were not happy when it was 50,000 net migration. At one point it hit 950,000. Obviously the issues that people are concerned about on housing, on transport, on education and more aren’t resolved by reducing the flow for a couple of years. My point i…

> My point is simply that these feelings have existed for a long time and the government has generally gone against what the electorate have asked for. The electorate repeatedly asked for those policies by voting the parties that enacted them. If they had other opinions, they didn't express them in any way that actually matters. That's a feature of first-past-the-post elections. The system deliberately prioritizes re…

There has never been a British election where the majority votes cast have been for parties that pledged to increase immigration.

I take your FPTP point, but when has the winning party under FPTP had a manifesto commitment to increase immigration?

Let’s just face facts. We might disagree personally but a majority of people have always voted against immigration and it’s regularly a top 3 issue. Often the top issue!

Re: Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

#102

Post by mcphage »

Dig1t wrote: post #52
kjkjadksj wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are fed up with immigration they are stupid. “Gee we have declining birth rates and we want to deny this pool of labor that might correct course because they are brown.” The american empire was built on easy immigration. Turns out the tired and poor that we took in can build empires and win europe’s major wars for them.

[flagged]

> If America had instead been grown by importing people from India or Africa, the American Empire would not exist.

Oh man, wait until you learn about American history and where we imported people from—it is going to blow your mind.

Re: Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

#103

Post by mcphage »

AaronAPU wrote: post #57
4dregress wrote: post #6

Simple answer is power, look at how things have changed since Musk bought the largest communication platform on the planet. Look at who's backing him and what they want. The UK's stance goes right against the values and goals these billionaires want and that's basically to do whatever they want without recourse. What better way to sow diversion than to stoke civil unrest and cause change to the systems that stand in…

[flagged]

That a significant cause of death in the UK, then?

Re: Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

#104

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #85

It appears archive.today has removed the Javascript and CAPTCHA requirements as well as the DDoS against the blog Your IP address and any optional headers you send, e.g., user-agent, will be returned in an HTML comment at the top of the response body

Now a user-agent is required again. LOL

Re: Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

#105

Post by jltsiren »

sefrost wrote: post #101
jltsiren wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point is simply that these feelings have existed for a long time and the government has generally gone against what the electorate have asked for. The electorate repeatedly asked for those policies by voting the parties that enacted them. If they had other opinions, they didn't express them in any way that actually matters. That's a feature of first-past-the-post elections. The system deliberately prioritizes re…

There has never been a British election where the majority votes cast have been for parties that pledged to increase immigration. I take your FPTP point, but when has the winning party under FPTP had a manifesto commitment to increase immigration? Let’s just face facts. We might disagree personally but a majority of people have always voted against immigration and it’s regularly a top 3 issue. Often the top issue!

People pay too much attention on what politicians say, and too little on what kind of people those politicians and their allies are.

My impression is that Reform and the Greens are the only mainstream parties with an actual opinion on immigration. The other parties approach immigration from a more technocratic perspective. They form policies based on expected outcomes, regardless of what the people with opinions think about that kind of immigration. (Except to the extent those opinions influence the outcomes.)

As long as people keep voting Tories, Labour, or Lib Dems, they are effectively saying that immigration is not that important issue after all.

Re: Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

#106

Post by _DeadFred_ »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #42
rob_c wrote: post #38

Yeah that article is missing a very major point that immigration in the UK hasn't meant assimilation or a coherent mixing of cultures as people want or may have observed at times. The problems in the UK are actually focused around sticky blobbyness caused by a) lack of integration, b) left vs right flavor of the moment causing further segregation and c) long term socioeconomic factors leading to govt(councils) fixing…

British people miss the fact that assimilation happens in the generation after the immigrant generation. Italian immigrants were looked down on in the US too. Too catholic, not speaking the language and not engaging in american culture practices. The next generation speaks fluent english and is scarcely different than any other american out of the school system.

I wonder if we (the countries experiencing mass immigration numbers) are also missing that between 1908 and 1923 35% to 40% of all immigrants who arrived in the U.S. eventually returned to their home countries. I wonder if those were people who were unable to assimilate and if those numbers are true today or if with access to media from home, etc, it no longer occurs as much and the dynamics today are incomparable to historical immigration/assimilation patterns.

Re: Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

#107

Post by Gud »

Smoosh wrote: post #86
Dig1t wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

“Replaced” seems very pejorative here. The times are clearly changing, as they always do. Are you saying that it is “natural and sensible” to be racist and xenophobic? Perhaps it is. But perhaps we can do better.

The “times are changing” is certainly one to frame it.

Don’t seem to happen in many other countries though, like Poland, Cuba or many other countries.

Why is it that Western Europe is a god given right to live in for the rest of the world?

I am genuinely curious.

Re: Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

#108

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

archagon wrote: post #98
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #43

I agree with most of what the article has to say, but I feel like it's dancing around the fundamental issue. Like: > These apparently disparate events all feature one obvious commonality: race. In each case, the riots were sparked by an act of violence in which the victim(s) were white and the attackers were not. The context: these events were focused largely in ethnically diverse working-class neighbourhoods, commun…

It could well be the case that the growth of white identitarianism is almost entirely driven by white supremacist media moguls, who are unfathomably rich and shape the zeitgeist to a large degree. See also: antisemitism in Nazi Germany. I’m sure some Jewish people committed serious crimes against non-Jewish Germans. But that was incidental, not causal, to the vile propaganda that eventually led to the Holocaust.

It could be, but I really don't think so. The splintering of Reform UK and then Restore Britain strongly suggests to me that there's a mass movement. If it were a plot by media moguls, I would have expected them to carefully manage discontent to keep people within the Tories.

Re: Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

#109

Post by Caius-Cosades »

Smoosh wrote: post #86
Dig1t wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

“Replaced” seems very pejorative here. The times are clearly changing, as they always do. Are you saying that it is “natural and sensible” to be racist and xenophobic? Perhaps it is. But perhaps we can do better.

>Are you saying that it is “natural and sensible” to be racist and xenophobic? Yes and I am tired pretending it is not.

Re: Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

#110

Post by 1dom »

lawlorino wrote: post #61
1dom wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most likely candidates are places like Bradford and Birmingham, which are still - according to wikipedia - 60%+ white british, that's without even considering british asian or other people born in and native to the UK. Again, sorry, I can't find any sources to support your facts here, maybe I looked in a different place to you, so perhaps you could share your sources?

I’m not taking sides on the wider argument here, but I think it’s you who should check your sources? Copy pasting direct from wikipedia: > The city of Bradford is 45.8% White according to the latest 2021 census data, with the White British population being 40.5%. 45.3% of the city's population is Asian, primarily from the Pakistani community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Bradford > According to figures from t…

I'll take the bradford example and lazily assume Birmingham is the same.

Bradford Ethnicity (2021 Census)[89] Ethnic group Population % White 333,850 61.6

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradford#Demography

The difference we're seeing in numbers here is because the centres of cities are historically have a higher number of immigrants.

Fortunately, ONS did a specific report on "Bradford", which is the source for the wikipedia page I cited. The source link was broken on wiki, here it is though:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/censusareachanges/E080...

Which also concludes:

"In the latest census, around 437,800 Bradford residents said they were born in England. This represented 80.1% of the local population."

I chose Bradford because it's locally referred to (pejoratively, not by me) as "Bradistan". But despite that, according to ONS, 30% cite Muslim as their religion, which is more than "no religion" at 28%, but still lower than Christianity, at 34%

I encourage you to go check the sources for your sources, like I should have done (and you forced me to). If you look at this debate with an open mind, I believe you will find the majority of us rightly don't feel represented by the statement "Brits are legitimately fed up with immigration" any more. My bias' are that I'll almost always be pro immigration, within reason, but I completely recognise there have been times over the past 10 years where I've felt that position has been legitimately hard to defend. Now is not one of those times

The real issue is that every single time someone or something suggests immigration is a problem in the UK, it can trivially be reframed as an inequality issue.

To get back to the original topic, I think beneficiaries of inequality - like certain big tech players - are strongly motivated to keep the general public blaming anyone other than them for the problems caused by inequality.

edit: I just understood the census page a bit more, it's a generic report by area. You can put Birmingham in there too. It says basically the same: the overwhelming majority of residents are UK born and Christian or of no religion. Yes this is changing, slowly, like the world and populations change, slowly - not at a new or concerning rate.

Post reply on HN