How are things going in the UK?

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Hello from across the pond,

Over this past summer I saw lots of videos of protests against illegal immigrants all over the UK. But Over the past 6 weeks I haven't heard or seen much coming from over there.

I was just curious how are things going in the UK, not just with immigration but also with life in general?

So, if you currently live or have lived in the UK I would be interested in hearing your response.

Thanks,

Canadian Freedom Lover

The right wing populists continue to try and keep immigration in the news as part of their agenda.

As we know from history these movements always need a group to focus on to unite unthinking people in hate. Its the populist way. Something that we are seeing in a number of other places at the moment sadly.

In reality immigration is no where near the problem that it is often portrayed as. The UK was until comparatively recent historical times uninhabited and was then populated by peoples crossing over from Europe, initially via the land bridge that existed before it became an island and later via sea. One of the oldest groups in the UK & Ireland the Celts can trace its DNS back to tribes from Northern India.

Without immigration there would be no UK.

In my opinion.

(One of the reasons I tend to avoid interacting with the PNT community here is its propensity to small minded, judgemental and reactionary thinking. Something that occurs in the ND world of course but not to the same extent in my experience!)

Personally I don't see immigration as a huge problem but the right wing media and politics like to make out as if immigration is the biggest problem in the UK

It's not

If no immigrants came we would still be living in the same s**t hole that the Tory government left us in and the media would then find another group of people to scapegoat

The rioters have thankfully been imprisoned.

The are some serious issues in this country - lethargic growth, overstretched public services, exploding housing costs, not enough immigrants, impossible to build anything.

Well the Tories or Reform will get in at the next election so this is probably as good as it gets

I was in Leicester, UK between May and September this year, and the nearest thing to fascist activity I noticed was one night when there was a police presence around a mosque and they'd cordoned the area off and detoured the traffic. No incident, but the cops weren't taking any chances. The media seemed to be saying the whole country was going up in flames but some sources were saying the media had overblown things, and I think they probably had. I didn't see any rivers of blood. But I didn't follow the local news and there may have been things going on that didn't come to my attention. I don't go out much.

Leicester's demographics are about 24% Muslim, which often seems like an underestimate to me because in my district and in the town centre it looks more than double that judging by appearances, but no doubt the areas I frequent aren't representative of the whole city, and I'm probably not good at telling the difference between Muslims and Hindus. Leicester was 41% white in 2021 according to the census, down from 90% in 1971, so I can see where the moral panic comes from, though personally I'm not panicking. The worst people I've noticed in my area have always been white, though that includes a few young males from the Czek Republic who specialised in noise pollution and getting drunk on street corners, and I got the police and the city council to stop their antisocial antics. Of course it's only the as*holes who get noticed. Most immigrants just seem to get on with their lives, same as I do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demograph ... r#Religion

As for more general things in the city, most of the good shops have closed down, the open-mic music venues barely exist any more, and bus services get worse every year.

Muslims and Hindus and maybe Sikhs? (If the men are wearing turbans and small circular metal bracelets, they are probably Sikhs. If the women are wearing loose-fitting pants and tunics, they are probably Sikhs.) Sikhs often get confused with Muslims by outsiders, resulting in lots of hate crimes against Sikhs too whenever there is a wave of Islamophobia.

Yes there are a few Sikhs, but they're comparatively rare (see below for census results in 2021). I presume they mostly wear turbans, and I don't see many wearing those. I do seem to remember the turbaned chaps like a bit of bling. I've made no particular study of different ethnicities and religions. I think the Hindu women tend to wear coloured clothes while the Muslim women are strictly black and white and show less of their faces. The Muslim men often wear white hats of a characteristic shape, thigh-length white smocks, and waistcoats over the top. Don't know what the Hindu men wear. And of course not all immigrants wear their official costumes. I used to work with a fair cross-section of ethnicities, and their clothes weren't ethnic.

As for the jerks confusing Sikhs and Muslims, that reminds me of a moral panic about paedophiles during which I gather some idiots beat up a paediatrician. Among the working class there seems to be a correlation between strong right-wing sentiments and stupidity. Much like the USA I guess.

Christian (24.7%)
No Religion (23.0%)
Muslim (23.5%)
Hindu (17.9%)
Sikh (4.5%)
Buddhist (0.3%)
Jewish (0.1%)
Other Religions (0.6%)
Religion not Stated (5.6%)

Personally, of the Sikhs I've known/worked with only a few wore a turban.

The iron bracelet on the other hand was almost universal.

The leader of the New Democratic Party in Canada seems to always wear a turban. Perhaps the folks you are seeing are Canadian immigrants/refugees.

He's Sikh.

I used to work with a guy named Jagmeet, he was also Sikh.

It's the make up of the immigrants that's the issue and how many of them arrive. They're usually unskilled, have very different, conflicting cultural values, mostly male and arrive illegally.

Most reasonable people don't have an issue with controlled immigration, but uncontrolled, unskilled, from a specific demographic of people is a problem.