Same reason as always: Wealthy people want less taxes, more power, and will lobby for the parties that always promise less taxes: Those on the right.
The problem is that the conservative and traditional right aren't too popular, so they need to go for the far-right. Those parties are in full MAGA-mode, focusing on things like immigration. It is so, so much easier to sway public opinion by blowing up incidents involving immigrants, than to convince the public that they should accept reduction or degradation of services due to tax cuts.
Far-right politicians discovered some time ago that they can straight up lie through their teeth, and face zero consequences. And those lies will propagate through social media, and people will accept them as facts.
It seems like critical thinking among huge parts of the population is considerably down. I've heard seemingly smart people I know regurgitate lies they've picked up on social media, which they could have fact checked in 30 seconds.
Social media seems to basically be a way of running A/B testing on the population until you find enough folks vulnerable to some sort of powerful misconception that serves your purpose.
For the SM network "purpose" means engagement, but it turns out that (to our disadvantage) it also serves the purposes of an army of grifters, opportunists and power mad sociopaths who are taking over the world. Once again (think the 1930s) it turns out mastery of new media technologies in the hands of bad people has consequences.
As techies, building productive rather than destructive media (and AI is the next "media" of consequence) really ought to be top of agenda.
> Far-right politicians discovered some time ago that they can straight up lie through their teeth
Please when we're that far from normalcy and courteous discourse it's "far of center" politicians. Last week forget all the extreme climate nonsense (the world is still here and just getting worse not disappearing tomorrow) and anti nuclear nonsense that is finally being rolled back under plans to actually build green(er) infrastructure.
Of course that's always matched by "organized immigrants are coming for your babies future jobs in macdonald's" or whatever is being spouted by the extreme right.
Trust me, the climate is in as rough a shape as those so-called extremists would have you believe. You can quite literally read it off the veniers, or at least we could until we hired a strong man to smash them.
Nuclear is another matter -- I reckon the European anti-nuclear movement set climate change ahead by at least several years, but these days the cost/benefit leans solar, as political unrest pairs poorly with nuclear hazards, as Ukraine has learned in the past five years.
Nevertheless, the UK's administrative class' fetish for "sensible" solutions works great except during a generational upheaval, when you can't (to borrow an aviation example) see the horizon and must trust their instruments and the data they deliver.
It's the same here in Canada, I am sorry to report. A Commonwealth cultural tic we would all best be mindful of, lest we wear sensible shoes that take us all the way to calumny.
There's being fed up with something and there's fomenting civil war. The huge wave of immigration, which has since subsided, happened under the Tories.
I think the real problem people are having is that a large amount of those immigrants are now no longer from the EU. But you have Brexit to blame for that.
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.
Why aren’t Japan, Korea, China importing millions from India and Africa to replace their falling birth rates? Because people are not identical interchangeable units.
If you drop 1 million Africans into London they don’t simply become British, they are just Africans living in London. People understand intuitively that replacing the native population with foreigners at massive scale mostly just erases the native culture and people (which have existed for thousands of years).
The American Empire was built by specifically importing millions of Europeans who shared much history and culture (religion, appearance, history). If America had instead been grown by importing people from India or Africa, the American Empire would not exist.
English are rapidly becoming a minority in England. Many towns and cities are well less than 50% native English. There are millions in the UK who are opposed to being replaced by Africans and Middle Eastern people. This is a natural and sensible response to the situation that literally any nation of people would also share.
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 their way.
I'm sure it's about power. I am also sure that having that much wealth, that little accountability, being surrounded by people who've a vested interest in telling you you're a genius, would make anyone go a little insane. Call it Roman Emperor syndrome. Not many people can be Marcus Aurelius.
Billionaires can't have the UK passing sensible taxation policies to curtail the influence of the super-rich. If the UK achieves success in preventing the collapse of their society into a form of feudal poverty, Americans might catch on that there are other options. The Musk-types enjoy playing god and would rather risk systemic collapse than shed some part of their power.
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, communities where resources are stretched.
I know the author is smart and informed enough to see the parallels between this and a number of high-profile incidents in the past decade. There's an increasingly widespread idea that this is simply how a wise person should see interracial crime, not as a series of tragic individual incidents but as attacks on the whole of Group X by the whole of Group Y. The idea has achieved enough prominence that it's starting to overcome the hard-fought taboo on white identitarianism, and now for the first time in decades we have to deal with it as an open political force.
I emphasize that white identitarianism is a bad ideology, incompatible with many of the nice things we enjoy about the modern world, and we have to defeat rather than accommodate it. But defeating it requires taking a serious look at the factors that allow it to grow.
The whole reason the British government pushed Brexit was so Britain could control its immigration. That's how Brexit was presented to the population, that's why people voted for it. Then the government got Brexit, and then Boris Johnson more than tripled immigration, chasing away EU immigration and getting all the immigrants from the (very coincidentally very low-wage Pakistan, I mean there aren't very many countries anywhere that have lower average wages than Greece)
Meanwhile the government did not fix the housing issue, the cost of living disaster in London, the unemployment problem, ... and so on. And the central UK government forced small towns, cities and the like into bankruptcy. Now, in the UK, things like social support are financed by municipalities EXCEPT when it comes to immigrants. So, effectively, the government massively increased immigration, reduced social support and raised taxes on everybody except immigrants.
Then the government blamed very large youth services scandals, like the Rotherham scandal, on immigrants. This, despite the fact that these children had been taken from their homes by youth services and were under their custody AND despite the fact that youth services AND the police have been credibly accused of taking payoffs. Those people were definitely not immigrants, but they did not feature in the court proceedings "for some reason".
So government causes, to varying extents, large social problems. It ostensibly saves immigrants from these problems, and then the government itself blames immigrants for problems the government caused.
The problem here is not Twitter. I mean, they're not helping. But they're not the problem.
It's implied by the article that there wouldn't be much opposition to immigration without big tech. That isn't true if there is widespread opposition to immigration anyway and the government broke its promise about dealing with it.
The project was started by wealth offshoring groups on the Isle of Man that were afraid their loopholes would finally be closed, so if it could deliver on anything it claimed in order to get adequate votes then that would be coincidental. (The structure of EU and Schengen law also meant that leaving was the most likely way to raise the percentage of illegal immigrants making it to the UK.)
The article specifically disclaims that. "To identify Musk as the cause of the riots is to airbrush the messy reality. Comforting, but ultimately deluding."
its a higher percentage than voted for the current government. Its also, obviously, a higher proportion than voted to remain. Its been at least a 100 years since a government was voted in by the majority of the electorate, and only once in that time has a government even got the majority of votes cast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_electio...
you are right, although i would point out that when you use the word “government” you’re mostly referring to a series of conservative party governments.
at the same time. two things can be true. everything you mentioned plays a large part in why we’re in a bit of a mess as a country.
this is being exacerbated by big tech firms, especially social media ones. the fact that a lie from some tech bro with a large soapbox can travel all the way around the world in less than a second makes it very hard to have a reasoned discussion or debate about the problem.
>The whole reason the British government pushed Brexit was so Britain could control its immigration. That's how Brexit was presented to the population, that's why people voted for it.
>Meanwhile the government did not fix the housing issue, the cost of living disaster in London, the unemployment problem, ... and so on.
These two things might be connected. It's almost like Brexit caused a series of large social problems.
Brexit promised a solution just like loads of solutions had been promised within the EU framework prior to it - all these "solutions" were akin in that they were all promised (from left and right within the political establishment) and all not delivered. This is also why people seek to go outside the regular voting pattern with Reform, it's not cause they suddenly love something completely different but because the former voting pattern did not deliver improvements as expected.
What do you mean "not delivered"? The solution to too much immigration was that Boris Johnson and the conservatives tripled immigration (and >10x'ed Pakistani immigration) because they got power through Brexit.
That's not what any reasonable person would call "not delivered".
(note: this was not loose enough for Johnson and with support from Rishi Sunak he loosened immigration policy even further. This was just the first shot)
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 the problem in the cheapest way possible which is unfortunately high profile in the British high street by the public.
A lot of British are moving out of the city centers themselves (or already have) and into suburbs which leaves the cities hollowed out. Lack of footfall means lack of investment means decay and cheap housing/buildings.
All of this is a predicable recipe for friction but very short term British politics combined with a "not my problem" attitude prevalent in the nhs and public sectors means people doubled down in short term solutions for over a generation.
That combined with more hardship causes people to look at the biggest broken problem which is our immigration system needed reforming over 20yr+ ago and unfortunately this was locked into place by EU laws and policy (such ironically we pushed for, for other political reasons).
It's less of a grand conspiracy and more of the dominoes we're set to fall this way after dragging us out of the 80s without fixing anything and then the post recession being used to fuel boom and growth vs fixing underlying issues at a national level.
Most immigrants in UK do assimilate. Seen the stories about the high proportion of births where at least one parent is foreign born? In most cases the other parent is British born.
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.
Comments being used as measure of 'public sentiment' is one of the ways perception is being manipulated by big tech in the first place.
In the archived version (linked elsewhere) there is a sea of negative comments within ~55 minutes of the article being posted, I seriously doubt a large percentage of them are legitimate (all of them doing the same routine, telling the exact same lines and stories).
Same reason as always: Wealthy people want less taxes, more power, and will lobby for the parties that always promise less taxes: Those on the right.
The problem is that the conservative and traditional right aren't too popular, so they need to go for the far-right. Those parties are in full MAGA-mode, focusing on things like immigration. It is so, so much easier to sway public opinion by blowing up incidents involving immigrants, than to convince the public that they should accept reduction or degradation of services due to tax cuts.
Far-right politicians discovered some time ago that they can straight up lie through their teeth, and face zero consequences. And those lies will propagate through social media, and people will accept them as facts.
It seems like critical thinking among huge parts of the population is considerably down. I've heard seemingly smart people I know regurgitate lies they've picked up on social media, which they could have fact checked in 30 seconds.
"Everything means less than zero" (E. Costello)
Social media seems to basically be a way of running A/B testing on the population until you find enough folks vulnerable to some sort of powerful misconception that serves your purpose.
For the SM network "purpose" means engagement, but it turns out that (to our disadvantage) it also serves the purposes of an army of grifters, opportunists and power mad sociopaths who are taking over the world. Once again (think the 1930s) it turns out mastery of new media technologies in the hands of bad people has consequences.
As techies, building productive rather than destructive media (and AI is the next "media" of consequence) really ought to be top of agenda.
> Far-right politicians discovered some time ago that they can straight up lie through their teeth
Please when we're that far from normalcy and courteous discourse it's "far of center" politicians. Last week forget all the extreme climate nonsense (the world is still here and just getting worse not disappearing tomorrow) and anti nuclear nonsense that is finally being rolled back under plans to actually build green(er) infrastructure. Of course that's always matched by "organized immigrants are coming for your babies future jobs in macdonald's" or whatever is being spouted by the extreme right.
Trust me, the climate is in as rough a shape as those so-called extremists would have you believe. You can quite literally read it off the veniers, or at least we could until we hired a strong man to smash them.
Nuclear is another matter -- I reckon the European anti-nuclear movement set climate change ahead by at least several years, but these days the cost/benefit leans solar, as political unrest pairs poorly with nuclear hazards, as Ukraine has learned in the past five years.
Nevertheless, the UK's administrative class' fetish for "sensible" solutions works great except during a generational upheaval, when you can't (to borrow an aviation example) see the horizon and must trust their instruments and the data they deliver.
It's the same here in Canada, I am sorry to report. A Commonwealth cultural tic we would all best be mindful of, lest we wear sensible shoes that take us all the way to calumny.
I find it crazy how the establishment will consider absolutely anything other than that Brits are legitimately fed up with immigration.
There's being fed up with something and there's fomenting civil war. The huge wave of immigration, which has since subsided, happened under the Tories.
Immigration has dramatically gone down in the past few years.
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo... (figure 2)
I think the real problem people are having is that a large amount of those immigrants are now no longer from the EU. But you have Brexit to blame for that.
Who/what is the "establishment"?
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.
Why aren’t Japan, Korea, China importing millions from India and Africa to replace their falling birth rates? Because people are not identical interchangeable units.
If you drop 1 million Africans into London they don’t simply become British, they are just Africans living in London. People understand intuitively that replacing the native population with foreigners at massive scale mostly just erases the native culture and people (which have existed for thousands of years).
The American Empire was built by specifically importing millions of Europeans who shared much history and culture (religion, appearance, history). If America had instead been grown by importing people from India or Africa, the American Empire would not exist.
The job market has imploded and the economy hasn't been growing since 2008. There definitely needs to be a cap.
If only there were more customers to grow markets! Hmm I wonder how that could be done…
You are not going to get more customers with higher house prices or through greater youth unemployment.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm203nn7lzro
Immigration is a duct tape solution to fixing things at this point. It is not going to build you an empire today.
Imagine the irony of Northern Ireland getting mad over immigration.
Another way of looking at it is that they have been mad over it for centuries.
That seems like an inadequate explanation of why Elon Musk, who is not a Brit, is investing so much time and energy into this issue.
[dead]
New genocide hot take on HN: has anyone considered maybe it’s the $VICTIM that is the problem! Wow I’m so freaking smart.
"No, the problem isn't our policies. Big tech is the problem!"
As an American, I can assure you that policy issues and corporate meddling are in fact not mutually exclusive.
As a brit, I can confirm I am not at all fed up with immigration.
Your comment is unnecessary, unsubstantiated, doesn't add anything to the discussion and is just going to cause arguments in its current form.
English are rapidly becoming a minority in England. Many towns and cities are well less than 50% native English. There are millions in the UK who are opposed to being replaced by Africans and Middle Eastern people. This is a natural and sensible response to the situation that literally any nation of people would also share.
You mean the made up idea of immigration as a problem? Sure.
What Brits probably want more is to rejoin the EU, get back some leverage on the world scene and dig themselves our of the brexit hole
https://archive.is/fwrFw
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 their way.
I'm sure it's about power. I am also sure that having that much wealth, that little accountability, being surrounded by people who've a vested interest in telling you you're a genius, would make anyone go a little insane. Call it Roman Emperor syndrome. Not many people can be Marcus Aurelius.
[dead]
Billionaires can't have the UK passing sensible taxation policies to curtail the influence of the super-rich. If the UK achieves success in preventing the collapse of their society into a form of feudal poverty, Americans might catch on that there are other options. The Musk-types enjoy playing god and would rather risk systemic collapse than shed some part of their power.
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, communities where resources are stretched.
I know the author is smart and informed enough to see the parallels between this and a number of high-profile incidents in the past decade. There's an increasingly widespread idea that this is simply how a wise person should see interracial crime, not as a series of tragic individual incidents but as attacks on the whole of Group X by the whole of Group Y. The idea has achieved enough prominence that it's starting to overcome the hard-fought taboo on white identitarianism, and now for the first time in decades we have to deal with it as an open political force.
I emphasize that white identitarianism is a bad ideology, incompatible with many of the nice things we enjoy about the modern world, and we have to defeat rather than accommodate it. But defeating it requires taking a serious look at the factors that allow it to grow.
The whole reason the British government pushed Brexit was so Britain could control its immigration. That's how Brexit was presented to the population, that's why people voted for it. Then the government got Brexit, and then Boris Johnson more than tripled immigration, chasing away EU immigration and getting all the immigrants from the (very coincidentally very low-wage Pakistan, I mean there aren't very many countries anywhere that have lower average wages than Greece)
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/12/30/how-the-take-ba... ( https://archive.ph/krvMU )
Meanwhile the government did not fix the housing issue, the cost of living disaster in London, the unemployment problem, ... and so on. And the central UK government forced small towns, cities and the like into bankruptcy. Now, in the UK, things like social support are financed by municipalities EXCEPT when it comes to immigrants. So, effectively, the government massively increased immigration, reduced social support and raised taxes on everybody except immigrants.
Then the government blamed very large youth services scandals, like the Rotherham scandal, on immigrants. This, despite the fact that these children had been taken from their homes by youth services and were under their custody AND despite the fact that youth services AND the police have been credibly accused of taking payoffs. Those people were definitely not immigrants, but they did not feature in the court proceedings "for some reason".
So government causes, to varying extents, large social problems. It ostensibly saves immigrants from these problems, and then the government itself blames immigrants for problems the government caused.
The problem here is not Twitter. I mean, they're not helping. But they're not the problem.
Which government pushed for Brexit? The government at the time of Brexit campaigned to remain.
People voted for Brexit for a lot of reasons. The leaders of both Vote Leave and Leave.EU said they wanted more skilled immigration.
> raised taxes on everybody except immigrants.
immigrants pay the same taxes as everyone else plus extra taxes such as the NHS surcharge and huge visa renewal fees.
Regardless of whether you're correct, that wasn't the subject of the article.
It's implied by the article that there wouldn't be much opposition to immigration without big tech. That isn't true if there is widespread opposition to immigration anyway and the government broke its promise about dealing with it.
The project was started by wealth offshoring groups on the Isle of Man that were afraid their loopholes would finally be closed, so if it could deliver on anything it claimed in order to get adequate votes then that would be coincidental. (The structure of EU and Schengen law also meant that leaving was the most likely way to raise the percentage of illegal immigrants making it to the UK.)
The article specifically disclaims that. "To identify Musk as the cause of the riots is to airbrush the messy reality. Comforting, but ultimately deluding."
37% of the voting population voted for Brexit, it wasn't anywhere near a majority.
its a higher percentage than voted for the current government. Its also, obviously, a higher proportion than voted to remain. Its been at least a 100 years since a government was voted in by the majority of the electorate, and only once in that time has a government even got the majority of votes cast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_electio...
you are right, although i would point out that when you use the word “government” you’re mostly referring to a series of conservative party governments.
at the same time. two things can be true. everything you mentioned plays a large part in why we’re in a bit of a mess as a country.
this is being exacerbated by big tech firms, especially social media ones. the fact that a lie from some tech bro with a large soapbox can travel all the way around the world in less than a second makes it very hard to have a reasoned discussion or debate about the problem.
>The whole reason the British government pushed Brexit was so Britain could control its immigration. That's how Brexit was presented to the population, that's why people voted for it.
>Meanwhile the government did not fix the housing issue, the cost of living disaster in London, the unemployment problem, ... and so on.
These two things might be connected. It's almost like Brexit caused a series of large social problems.
Brexit promised a solution just like loads of solutions had been promised within the EU framework prior to it - all these "solutions" were akin in that they were all promised (from left and right within the political establishment) and all not delivered. This is also why people seek to go outside the regular voting pattern with Reform, it's not cause they suddenly love something completely different but because the former voting pattern did not deliver improvements as expected.
What do you mean "not delivered"? The solution to too much immigration was that Boris Johnson and the conservatives tripled immigration (and >10x'ed Pakistani immigration) because they got power through Brexit.
That's not what any reasonable person would call "not delivered".
Here is the direct source: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-uks-points-ba...
(note: this was not loose enough for Johnson and with support from Rishi Sunak he loosened immigration policy even further. This was just the first shot)
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 the problem in the cheapest way possible which is unfortunately high profile in the British high street by the public.
A lot of British are moving out of the city centers themselves (or already have) and into suburbs which leaves the cities hollowed out. Lack of footfall means lack of investment means decay and cheap housing/buildings.
All of this is a predicable recipe for friction but very short term British politics combined with a "not my problem" attitude prevalent in the nhs and public sectors means people doubled down in short term solutions for over a generation.
That combined with more hardship causes people to look at the biggest broken problem which is our immigration system needed reforming over 20yr+ ago and unfortunately this was locked into place by EU laws and policy (such ironically we pushed for, for other political reasons).
It's less of a grand conspiracy and more of the dominoes we're set to fall this way after dragging us out of the 80s without fixing anything and then the post recession being used to fuel boom and growth vs fixing underlying issues at a national level.
Most immigrants in UK do assimilate. Seen the stories about the high proportion of births where at least one parent is foreign born? In most cases the other parent is British born.
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.
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Comments being used as measure of 'public sentiment' is one of the ways perception is being manipulated by big tech in the first place.
In the archived version (linked elsewhere) there is a sea of negative comments within ~55 minutes of the article being posted, I seriously doubt a large percentage of them are legitimate (all of them doing the same routine, telling the exact same lines and stories).
The comments on the FT are rarely worth reading even though you need top be a subscriber to comment.
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