Climate change and oil use have generated predominantly non-violent protests.
Palestinian rights have generated direct action protests but not riots.
Energy hasn't really been on the radar (except in the context of climate-change protests).
It's just an immense right wing noise machine which makes it impossible to actually focus on finding solutions. We're back to people who want to improve electricity per capita by decapitating people.
People hate electricity prices, but they hate electricity infrastructure as well. They hate pylons, they hate renewables, they hate nuclear. People hate pollution and hate anti-pollution measures (see the LEZ insanity). Every solution will encounter angry blockers, often angry about things that aren't even real (anti-5G lunatics). And they want to blame everything on foreigners. Absolutely childish behavior of our """elite""", the dead hand of which sits on our media and most of our parties.
I think everything that needs to be said in this thread probably already has been by someone. Re-litigating the same issues.
Try this out. Have the government mandate that everyone buy a certain type of car/van. Tell them it's good for the environment and give them tax incentives to do it. Then, years after everyone's invested in that type of car/van, have the government ban that type of car/van in major urban centres. Tell them to throw the car/van away and buy another one.
And tell them that if they don't do that, you'll fine them every day, when they drive to the place they've been driving to all their adult lives for work, etc.
Announce that this applies to everyone at the same time, so there's near-zero resale value in the old type of car/van, and there's massive demand pushing the price up for the new type of car/van.
Most people don't have a spare £20,000 kicking about, and if they did, they wouldn't choose to spend it on that. Throwing away their existing car/van and buying another doesn't give them £20,000 of value. It gives them £0 of value. They already had a car/van. It might give some kids' lungs value, but not them.
Honestly, try it. Try forcing millions of people into spending a lot of money all at once, and see how popular you are. Bonus: now try blaming social media or some other fifth column for your unpopularity!
When I say radicalized, I mean this guy: https://www.cps.gov.uk/national-news/news/updated-sentence-m...
> "The ULEZ camera had already been cut down"
Those opposing ULEZ conveniently ignore the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson (ex mayor of London) made ULEZ implementation a key requirement for supporting TfL funding during the pandemic
Despite anti-ULEZ folk claiming it's hugely unpopular Kahn convincing won the next mayoral election including some boroughs that were affected by the ULEZ zone expansion
I think you overstate this. While there are wingnuts on Twitter who hate Khan for who he is, massively more people hate him - any politician, not just him - for dipping into their pocket and taking their money. "For the greater good".
Even the most beloved politican on the planet will become the most hated as soon as the propose increasing taxes, or increasing household costs. Which is why they're always looking for the sneakiest way to do it.
> Those opposing ULEZ conveniently ignore the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson (ex mayor of London) made ULEZ implementation a key requirement for supporting TfL funding during the pandemic
Alternatively, the central authority with all the money (Johnson's government) tells the devolved authority (Mayor of London) it doesn't like handing out free money, so what if our lockdown has decimated your cashbox income... so in exchange for money now to keep the lights on during this pandemic, I demand you make more of your own money in future, by fining people and by driving up public transport usage in your area. Also, I know how unpopular it is, which is why I delayed it when I was Mayor of London, so good luck at the polls ha ha!
> some
"some" indeed.
Well he flipped one of them from Conservative and didn’t lose any of the ones that had previously voted for him and his vote was up overall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Uxbridge_and_South_Ruisli...
> Both Labour's leader, Keir Starmer, and deputy leader, Angela Rayner, blamed opposition to ULEZ, with Starmer suggesting the Labour London Mayor Sadiq Khan should rethink the policy. Khan defended the policy and Starmer soon sought to heal the rift. The defeated Labour candidate, Beales, also criticised the ULEZ policy.
So someone paid the electoral price for Khan's policy, it just wasn't him.
Yes, in 2023 ULEZ was a campaign issue but so was it when Khan was reelected mayor and Labour won a general election
ULEZ is fundamentally a good thing whether you like it or not
In general, diesel vehicles are more likely to exceed the emission threshold.
So a lot of people moved to diesel cars/vans from 2001 onward.
Then in 2019, the Ultra Low Emission Zone was set around central London, which issued daily fines to:
- petrol cars/vans that didn't meet Euro 4 standards (most vehicles pre-2006)
- diesel cars/vans that didn't meet Euro 6 standards (most vehicles pre-2015)
This didn't bother that many people, because central London already has a daily congestion charge, so anyone taking a vehicle in there already had business to justify it. Most people get around central London by train/tube/bus/taxi, it's the best served city in the UK for public transport. There was also a scrappage scheme offering up to £9500 for replacing the vehicle.
What bothered a LOT of people, though, is the widening of the ULEZ area, first to the inner London orbital in 2021 and then to the whole of Greater London (9 million people) in 2023, regardless of whether they went to central London or not. The outer boroughs, aren't as well served by public transport as central London is, and car/van ownership and use is much higher than central London. And of course, the scrappage scheme was cut down to a maximum of £2000, which is not a lot.
You can perhaps see why there was so much opprobrium.
Kahn won the next election including outer boroughs that were affected by the ULEZ expansion
https://metro.co.uk/2024/05/04/map-reveals-london-mayor-elec...
What the election map on your article shows is a bunch of outer boroughs ("some"?) choosing the Tory candidate over the Labour one, there just weren't enough of them overall. Elections aren't usually single-issue, and there's probably enough value in reelecting Kahn (or his opponents are odious enough), that forcing a large number of people to set their money on fire didn't entirely wreck his chances.
But you'll note that lessons have been learned. Back in 2019, the IEA were demanding the complete ban of gas boilers by 2026. The government never adopted such a policy, it's only too well aware at how much needless cost and effort it'd put the entire country through by making 80% of households throw out their heating system and buy another one, for the sake of the planet. So that's why the closest the government got to that was proposing in 2020/2021 maybe banning them by 2035. And now? The government is reassuring people that it won't ban gas boilers; not in 2026, not in 2035, not in 2050, not ever. It saw what banning cars in London kicked off. It doesn't want that for itself.
We've known diesel emissions are bad for health for a long time and ULEZ schemes improve people's health, particularly children https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1l1r1zne1ro
But some selfish people still think it's their right to drive highly polluting vehicles and let everyone else bear the cost
ULEZ / LEZ zones are a good thing
It's a pattern that's been repeated several times before in history, most famously in Germany: whenever capitalism creates bad times, society chooses one of two ways out: either socialism or fascism. Right now several countries are seeing surges in popularity of the far left and the far right, which is this exact pattern playing out in real time before our eyeballs. While the established capitalist politicians always promise nothing except more of the same decline, and thus become unpopular when everyone is feeling the decline and inequality, socialist candidates promise to directly fix the cause of the inequality, and fascism is propped up by the causes of the inequality to divert attention away from themselves. Again, this pattern has already played out many times and is pretty hard to refute at this point.
> fascism is propped up by the causes of the inequality to divert attention away from themselves
I think we can agree on this. It's not that the UK is in any way a poor country in total, but it is an unequal one. And open to the negative effects of inequality from the outside - see the involvement of UAE oligarchs in Man City fraud, for example.
It’s much easier to radicalise someone who is already disaffected.
If they are "fairly obviously traceable" then surely you can name some and provide reasonable evidence?
The establishment view is that riots and racism are right wing agitators and foreign power influenced. The people look to rival immigrants and conspiracies, united by anxiety and fear.
They are both looking for scapegoats. This has unfortunately lead to so many atrocities in history.
This explanation seems to ignore much more obvious motivations. Most of the recent violent protests were triggered by concerns about immigrants committing violent crime and sexual offenses or harassment, often following concrete incidents.
Public safety seems like the clear primary motivation here.
One could make an argument in the direction that this is fueled by elites trying to distract from other issues.
However, I think that glossing over the primary concern to claim that the outrage is essentially engineered or purely driven by economic factors and living standard, will not convince the public. At least that's my opinion.
Which elites, possibly? The anti-immigrant views are represented by fringe parties (albeit ones that are getting more votes than many would be comfortable with) and all sorts of mainstream political leaders are constantly condemning them. Social media is the only reason the stories spread, practically speaking; international news barely even cares about things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Ceuta_migrant_crisis (where the number of people involved approximately matched the population of Ceuta itself).
At any rate, I can't say I particularly hear these protesters, or their representatives, talking about economic factors all that much. Certainly it comes up, but only with explicit reference to biased government policy and not as just some natural pie-sharing effect.
Or that politicians are not trying to solve immigration issues in order to stay in power.
Really I've heard all kinds of theories used to discount the actual issues or the motivations of those who make politics about immigration.
Most of them are likely nonsense with maybe a kernel of truth here and there, but that's just how politics are, right?
If migration is responsible for 5% of an issue, and other causes are responsible for 95%, it's far too easy to make the population imagine the numbers are swapped.
Though it still won't help your argument, because 1) correlation != causation, and 2) there are literally thousands of comparable correlations, so why is it immigrants, and not any of the others?
Rounding things off to "migration" is ignoring the state's role in all of this, deliberately, in order to present complainants as racist.
If you feel attacked by the word "migration", take it up with modo_mario.
Even in Japan people claim immigrants are the problem even if they are a group that barley exists at all.
Lol. Ask people in Crowborough and Piddington if that's true.
Individual examples are results of specific circumstances and not indication of a universal trend.
Because to me, it sure looks like you're only here to spread your agenda, and not to have any meaningful conversations.
I'm not sure why you think I'm jumping around between ideas.
> It's not "an agenda", it's a policy position.
No, it's not a policy position, it's an agenda you push. And it's one I've been seeing you push for months, if not years. You never really engage with critical responses, you just keep jumping to the next idea so you can keep pushing your agenda.
Yeah, ok bro.
>>No, it's not a policy position, it's an agenda you push.
I'm not sure how you define the difference. Is it an agenda if you disagree with it?
Doubly so when every argument you regurgitate boils down to the exact same talking points being disseminated through far-right media outlets. What can anyone learn from your comments, that they couldn't get by e.g. opening Breitbart?
It's also notable that there are several accounts in this thread doing the exact same thing.
> Lol. Ask people in Crowborough and Piddington
Awww, you guys have stopped citing Luton then?
‘I feel perfectly safe’: white Lutonians on the town’s supposed no-go zones - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/oct/08/luton-white-...
that's the way, just move onto another UK backwater and claim that as the new hotbed of brown people plotting against the King.
I have a rape gang enquiry report you should read.
>>Awww, you guys have stopped citing Luton then?
Not sure what "guys" you are referring to. I'm referring to the fact that dropping 1,250 male asylum seekers from countries with a completely different culture (such that need to be given brochures saying women need to consent to sex) next to a village with a population of 350 is one of the most appalling ideas ever.
Hence you have places like Fox news run coverage about cities all the time, telling you how they are lawless places full of crime. Scaring rural people about what all these immigrants will do once they final start to move to bum-fuck nowhere.
You seem the same pattern in most democracies.
There is no correlation between contact with immigrants and anti-immigrant voting.
It turns out if they have mind boggling unemployment and inactivity numbers (majroity non eu working age women are housewives), make up the majority of prisoners, cost a load of money and put pressure on certain groups of wages, housing/land prices, alongside a host of other issues then what's the point?