It's okay to be angry, but is it directed at the right people?

Immigrants aren't the issue. Obviously case by case, there may be adjacent issues related to immigration, but it is not the root cause at all.

Japan is going through this exact same bullshit "nostalgia for the good old days" (completely ignoring all the bad shit of said days, just like Britain), yet Japan has an immigrant population of...3%. That's it. I promise you that 3% is not the cause of the cost of rent, the falling yen, the rising crime levels (if you can call them that), etc., nor are they to blame for the falling birthrates or the "loss" of whatever nostalgic thing that is gone in their lives.

Ultimately the reason everyone is suffering is the same as most developed countries. Because greedy fucks are sucking up everything they can while purposefully trying to fuck over everyone beneath their income bracket, usually in order to get even more money. Real estate companies are a huge part of that and frankly need to be cracked down on. But that'll never happen because politicians and other rich people have plenty of investment related interest in those areas and are making a killing at the expense of the people.

I could go on, but yeah, it's not immigrants.

I’ll save you all time, it’s capitalism.

Tax the rich. It’s not fucking hard. Billionaires exist in our country too, and they absolutely shouldn’t.

To borrow a phrase, there's no such thing as immigration, there are individual men and women, and there are families.

Yes, England has changed. But in some respects, for the better.

Much of what people romanticise about, they weren’t even alive to experience. And even those who were, their families struggled. Parents with little formal education, grinding through hard labour in poor conditions with barely any protections. You’re getting misty eyed about a time when literacy rates were low, when most of the working population lived in social housing, when Britons barely travelled abroad, rarely owned a home or a car, and had next to nothing saved.

But at some point, that generation wanted more for Britain. Post war, they wanted to be closer to Europe. More trade, more opportunity, more openness to the world. They wanted people from across the globe to come here to study, to work, to raise families. They invited people from the Commonwealth to help build something new. A Britain where education was for everyone. Where healthcare was for everyone. Where public transport connected communities and rail lines crossed continents. Where travel wasn’t a luxury reserved for the wealthy but something ordinary people could do. Britain chose globalism. Deliberately. Enthusiastically.

Then the children of that generation grew up and decided not to value any of it. The boomers inherited a world built on collective sacrifice and collective ambition, and saw it as a personal opportunity. They sold off the best parts of Britain piece by piece, got rich off the state, and called it freedom. We privatised everything in pursuit of wealth so obscene we stopped caring about the planet, about people, about livelihoods.

And now their children, raised in the wreckage of that selfishness, are being told the answer is to go further back. Past the post war settlement, past even the 20th century, all the way to some imagined Victorian golden age. All white and all right. Pointing the finger at foreign policy, at immigrants, at anyone and anything except the people who actually sold the country out from under them.

The root cause was never out there. It was always closer to home.

we are living through the consequences of the Thatcher / Reagan revolution

What a great video. I listened to the whole thing 

Not my video

Creator: @art_and_awakening

I don't think Gary Stephen's is perfect by any measure but he said something that really resonated with me and that was you have to tax these people and these corporations because if you don't they amass so much wealth that they become more powerful collectively than the government. I think that is my main concern now, I know that taxing them won't magically fix our financial issues and they all of course threaten to leave but more than that it means they can't spend like 10 billion dollars to win elections or lobby for policies that make your life worse. Politicians don't work for you anymore because you don't have enough money to donate and even if they ruin your life all it takes is 20 million dollars in commercials on TV to blame the wrong person so they still win. Housing could have been fixed ages ago or just never ruined to begin with but they strategically convinced the people it was a good idea to privatize it and now that it is treated as an investment vehicle there is no incentive to create a world where its value decreases. Amazing how now the entire world blames immigrants when they are all experiencing the exact same issue. China, Japan, and Korea have these exact same issues and they basically don't have any immigrants it is not rocket science.

Every day the rich get richer, by huge amounts.

Funelling all the wealth to a certain group of people is unsustainable.

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