Strangelove wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2019 1:13 pm
BingoTough wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2019 3:18 am
Strangelove wrote: ↑Mon Oct 21, 2019 2:30 pm
"Sure, off the record some of (leaders of the Leave campaign) admit they couldn’t have pulled it off if it weren’t for the racist vote"
I doubt it, but I'm genuinely curious...
https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-24/ ... are-voters
One government minister in support of Britain's exit, or Brexit, told the BBC: “'Vote Leave' does not want to major on immigration, but the problem is that on the economy we are playing defense.”
Not a smoking gun, in that you could cry 'fake news' at the unnamed source...
A campaign low arrived in the form of a poster showing thousands of refugees crossing the Croatia-Slovenia border last year. The words "BREAKING POINT" were emblazoned across the picture, above a line that read: "We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders."
... but where there's smoke there's fire.
You missed the point and are doing the very thing I claimed Per was doing:
Confusing
issues with immigration and
racism.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/per ... there.html
They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird. Like Zeus, back there in the Iliad, he has turned his shining eyes away, far over the lands of the Hippemolgoi, the drinkers of mares' milk. He has forgotten domestic affairs, and here, as it happens, in this modest little country that elected him, hell has broken loose.
Definitely no racism, it's all just NIMBY prejudice about immigration. Nothing to see here folks.
Seriously though, I don't find it reasonable to claim concerns about immigration aren't tightly coupled to racist undertones, and the national conversation highlighted that. If it the concerns were legitimately about 'immigrants place undue burden on our services and take an outsized proportion of welfare/benefits' that would be one thing, but both are provably false. Immigrants to the UK are net contributors (contribute more than they receive in kind from the state) and support a great many industries that are short on labour both highly skilled (NHS staff, IT, Finance, etc) and low skilled (insufficient fruit pickers in the UK is leading to fruit rotting in the fields).
However, these facts are either not considered (I will concede that ignorance does not equal racist) or are discounted. So if the economics aren't the concern? What is it? It's the immigrants are 'different'. They speak different languages (or with english as a 2nd language), have different ethnicity, different culture or all of the above. In any case, not liking somebody because they speak a different language or are ethnically different is racist.
Would I like it if the town I lived in transitioned overnight from being 'Canadian' to be suddely 'filled' with another cultural group (i.e. millenials)? Probably not. Is that xenophobic? Yeah. Would it then be legitimate to discriminate or vote against that group. No.
With all that said, in my view, campaigning on immigration is pandering to the ignorance and xenophobia (i.e. racism) but I'm not sure the xenophobia is black and white. You'll have some out and out racists but an awful lot of people who don't like the change they see on the streets and in the hospitals.