Hacker News Reader

Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

"but for the safety of the nation, it is worth it"

That's a pretty chilling phrase.

UK politics is very simple: People have a lot of economic grievances and they are frustrated. People are made to believe that the source of their problems are immigrants/non-white people. So for a lot of people in the UK, anything against immigrants, even more drastic measures, are worth it and it makes the government appear to do something about their problems. Nothing ever really gets better of course, but they have no way to think about it any other way.

Fair to add that, despite every winning party promising reduced immigration on some level, and everyone that wanted to remain in the EU rightfully annoyed that Brexiters were simply voting because of migration, nobody in power has ever given the people what they want in this regard.

And no one will, because the UK wants cheap foreign labour. To no one's surprise, immigration rocketed after Brexit.

This allows the ruling party - the one whose names and faces keep changing, but whose policies don't - to keep using immigration for political leverage while also benefiting from it.

> nobody in power has ever given the people what they want in this regard

Net migration in the UK dropped by 400,000/yr in the last year and they’ve toughened the criteria further so seems unlikely it won’t drop further.

It doesn't really matter, people's grievances won't go away because those have nothing to do with immigrants anyway. They will just move on to the next scapegoat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com