Nigel Farage backpedals after saying UKIP would abolish laws against racial discrimination

[butt2089]

[QUOTE=CrumbleShake;47311066]That's exactly what I'm saying... those are the real significant issues, and yet they're ignored in favour of trivial non-issues like immigration, and Farage has played a part in moving this emphasis. Immigration hasn't been this big an issue for the public in a long time. What's changed? The recent economic woes? Looking for someone to blame? Everywhere you look seeing people blame immigrants?

You can't deny that corporate power is a significant issue more at need to be addressed than immigration.[/quote]

Immigration has been a public issue for ages, way before Farage really became a mainstream politician. Voters are always going to raise concerns over immigration over something like corporate power, because it's actually tangible to them, much like the NHS or the economy or whatever - none of the things you listed come under that.

[quote]I'm not trying to be condescending, that's just how it is. I don't think people are stupid, not at all. People's concerns are based on how they're informed, and people are being misinformed en masse, by the media and by a wide political debate. Xenophobia is an intrinsic part of our nature, and it's evolved for a reason - we don't like people we don't know, who are different, and who are from the next tribe over - and this part of us is constantly evoked by a media and by a political debate that's focusing on immigration, drawing the attention away from real issues that are actually causing the problems in this country. I refuse to blame anyone for being xenophobic, it's just how things are, I really struggle to know how to approach it.[/QUOTE]

You don't think people are stupid but they react to instinctive hatred of the unknown? I think you ought to leave that there.. Most are just fearful that their jobs are going to be hoovered up by harder working Europeans who expect lower pay

[RainbowStalin]

The funny thing about Farage is a big part of his success is making people think he's like them. Like an average joe who cares about this country.

He isn't, hes a hugely rich ex banker who plans on privatizing everything and kicking out anyone with a funny sounding surname.

But none of the main parties can do anything because they have the social skills of potatoes, whenever they try to look human they look like uncomfortable sweaty robots in suits.

[Baron von Hax]

Why is anti-immigration racist? Why should a country not be able to control who comes in?

[crumbleshake]

[QUOTE=butt2089;47311663]Immigration has been a public issue for ages, way before Farage really became a mainstream politician. Voters are always going to raise concerns over immigration over something like corporate power, because it's actually tangible to them, much like the NHS or the economy or whatever - none of the things you listed come under that. [/quote]

It has never been as important an issue as it is today. It's never been one of the main talking points. While we've had anti-immigration parties for a long time, immigration has never been a big enough issue to bring one into the frontline of the political debate.

If anything's condescending, it's claiming that people aren't capable of understanding how more conceptual problems like corporate power and related issues affect them. And yet you're right, I suppose. That's why it's been so easy for everyone to just blame the immigrants for their problems. But if the news institutions so much of the world looks to for the news were reporting about the real causes of those problems in the same way they report now on immigration I think we'd be in a very different world.

[quote]You don't think people are stupid but they react to instinctive hatred of the unknown? I think you ought to leave that there.. [/quote]

Yes. You know we're animals? A human being isn't a fully logical, rational being. We're made up of various natural drives, and the foundation of our personality is about survival.

With access to the right information, by actually meeting the people we're so scared of, and by addressing how immigration really does affect our lives and our wealth, it's possible to work beyond those instinctual fears, but they're still there.

[quote]Most are just fearful that their jobs are going to be hoovered up by harder working Europeans who expect lower pay[/QUOTE]

They're wrong though.

You put people in a country, those people need to be fed, they need to be homed, and they need to be connected to an infrastructure, thus creating work. They get a job, they pay their taxes, those taxes get spent on expanding public services to cover these new people. It's not like there's a finite number of jobs and a finite number of people our public services can sustain and the British born population of the UK is exactly this number, so if you got rid of immigration, everything would be fine. The more people there are, the more jobs there are, the more money that's paid into public services.

The reason we don't have jobs right now is because of a few things: For one, the financial crash, the result of serious bank deregulation and other international economic factors, which lead to a number of employers shutting down, and other employers laying off large portions of their work force. We also have a private sector whose goal is to purely produce profit, and as such outsources most work to countries where labour is cheaper, and employs as few people in the UK as possible, all to increase profit. Also, our government isn't instituting any significant jobs programs, as they're trying to produce jobs by deregulating the private sector and reducing taxes, an approach which isn't really working, whilst our public sector is shrinking and having vast swathes of people laid off.

The reason our public services are struggling so much is not because of the strain from immigrants. It's because they're completely underfunded. With more people working in the country, there should be more public money from taxes, enough to cover them, but it's not being spent properly, and [url=http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/selling-nhs-profit-full-list-4646154]our NHS and other services are being dismantled and sold off.[/url]

The reason I think people don't look at it like that is because they've been misinformed all their lives about how immigration affects them, and because this has built up a kind of cognitive bias so they don't believe it when someone tells them otherwise. The information we have access to is what forms our opinions on these things in the first place, so if we're in a political climate and a media that's telling us to blame the immigrants, that's how people's opinions form. This is an easy narrative to believe because there is a part of everyone that is xenophobic, and this narrative speaks to that part of us.