Examples of what I was thinking of:
I'd be seriously stunned to find that Trump isn't a racist , etc, but the kind of drums his detractors are banging on to"prove" their point are only unconvincing me, TBH.
The kind of view you stated above really needs to be stated explicitly. To suppress a whole side of that argument would only have the effect of inflaming prejudice , not putting it to bed. And leaving everybody feeling uneasy. So, kudos to Trump for having the balls to state it, and kudos to America for letting him.
Also, I hope you don't mind me repeating it here, but a previous conversation we had regarding Brexit and immigration.
"Conservative" is way too much of a generalization, but the type of conflicts you've talked about, like poor British renters vs wealthy immigrant landlords, remind me of the POV of small town USA people who are inherently suspicious of the cities and the wealthy people there. A big subset of Trump's supporters come from that background, which in the USA is called conservative. But there's a lot more to it than that, ie the assumed racism, bigotry, religious values etc. that I know you don't share.
Ah, I begin to see what you mean. And I've been trying way too hard to construct a reply, It's insanely difficult to pin down and extract all spurious assumptions that come in, both potentially and actually, that basically arise from living in different countries, under different circumstances. I don't mean between you and I , specifically, but across the freakiing board; and even within England, which has effectively split into two very different countries . And I don't mean by Brexit. Brexit only went to demonstrate how extreme our traditional North-South divide has become, That division dates back to Industrial Revelotion (and probably beyond?)and is more of a demographic division than a geographical one. The "Satanic Mills" and their labour force being very much concentrated in the North, with the South left free to focus on farming and more genteel pursuits; which is not to say that there was no such thing as a working-class southerner ofc, but in the past that would have been largely comprised of farm labourers and servants, who would be more inclined than the city-dwelling Northerners to share the conservertive view of their masters. Thus the North-South divide represents a corresponding Socialist-conservative division, which has only deepenened, in recent decades, in tandem with with the dismantling of British Industry, and ever- increasing austerity.
I should point out that land here is at such a premium that the concept of "poor farmer " is laughable. Not even the poor farm labourer can be seriously said to exist anymore, because it just isn't possible to lsubsist on the highly erratic , low wage of a farm labourer, especially not in the South, where none of the low-paid workers can pay the high rents, not without help on the form of top-up benefits, and especially not in the villages , ( most which have largely turned into dormerville for middle class commuters long ago, even up here in the Midlands. You also have to remenber that England is a very small country, and therefore much of England is in easy commuting distance of London..for those who can afford to commute. And that a cottage in the countryside is a much-sought after thing. A luxury item, however humble it might look. Thus the original villagers have mostly been priced out of the vilages ). Farm labouring is simply "casual work" which people do,,when they get can it, in addition to bar work, shop work and whatever else they can get, But there are not many places left in England where the laborours live near enough to the farms to make farm work a realistic option.
Back in the eighties, the farmers round here had a scam going of picking up unemployed labour by the truckload from the City Cenre and paying them "piece rates" which worked out way below minimum wage, (I know, I've actually been in those trucks) . Though that was no sort of living wage, it was just about acceptable for the workers insmuch as it enabled them to top up their enemployment benefits to the point where they might realistically buy the kids new shoes and.or begin to pay off some of their debts; That wouldn't work at all if they declared such earnings (the government would let you keep £5 per week, after taking so long to review your entitlement that you'd have big problems surving the interim. That £5 barely paid for the extra food you need when doing hard manual work)). The DWp screwed that one by their vigouous puirsuit of the evil "Benefits Frauds" who were accepting such work (they actually sent investigating officers out into the fields , and mounted a poster campaign to covince people that failing to declare a bit of casual work was just as real and just serious as the more dramatic forms of benefit fraud. Not that any of the locals were convinced. We tended to feel that the farmers were the real criminals. A man who's working hard for a fraction of the money he made before being made redundant ,in a desperate effort to keep the bailliffs from his door, isn't anyone's idea of a benefit fraudster, really. But the posters were scary anyway. of course) The farmers never found any other good solutions to the labour problem , AFAIK, short of building dormitories for migrant wortjker.s on their land, and actually paying them a legal wage, They've been bitterly grumblimg about the "work shy" native Brits ever since .
Also since then, the myth of "work shy" Brits has only gatherered momentum and now amounts to odffficial government propaganda, used to jusify a really punising series of "Welfare reforms", which make welfare ever harder to get, unreliable (it gets withdrawn at the drop of the pin, on various pdretexts) and ever-lower. in real terms. To the Government's embarassment, many such reforms affect the low-paid just as much as the unemployed. They've had that rubbed in their face to such a degree that they've had to make steps to address that, but the rhetoric of being on the side of "hard working families" cuts very little ice in the North. When we do the maths , we still don;'t find anybody getting better off other than the weathy The disparity in income between rich and poor in this countryjust continues to grow and grow. And now, after something like 40 years of being promised "jam tomorrow" if we only take our punishment and allow the Ecomnnomy to recover. we're pretty sure we know what a "healthy Economy " looks like, and who actually benefits from that.
Yeah, it's taken 40-odd years of ever worsening conditions in the Midlands and North for the working class people to really rebel. Untuil Brexit , we were basically becoming increasingly hopeless and depressed.The two major political parties had both become so right-wing that we didn't even feel as if we actually had a vote worth the paper it was written on. And given that the North serves as a receptacle for anyone who can't afford the housing down South, including most of the original Londoners , as well as the migrants and immigrants, we feel we get a much better view of the real purposes behind mass immigration . The self-righteous bleeding-heart messages from southern liberals to the effect we ought to be willing to sharing our "privileged lifestyle " come across as either hopelessly naive at best, or just taking the piss.
Anti-immigration feling isn't remotely based upomn racism, but rather on ever-increasing poverty, overpopulation, homelessness etc. and the sense that the South either don't have a clue what's going on, or else don't give a flying fuck. Those kind of conditions can breed racism of course, but they mostly don't. However, Anti -Islam feeling is something else again , with an entirely different basis. And when ant-immigation is concatenated with Anti-muslim feeling , and condemned on the same (mostly spurious ) grounds, we tend to despair of ever being understood .
One problem is that the Political right in britain managed to speahead
both the Remain and the Brexit campaign. You can perhaps appreciate what a brilliant propaganda coup that turned out to be, for the Tories?
Both Brexit and Anti-immigration stem largely from left -wing Northerners, but the lack of left-wing leadership at the time makes that statement highly unconvincing to any kind of outsider. We'd been dismissing the Labour Party as a bunch of "junior Tories" for decasdes, and , somehow, no serious alternative was emerging, Splinter groups like the Socialist Party (formed by people that Labour had thrown out for being too left wing)
were campaigning for Brexit, but they weren't very salient nexct to the right -wing-clowns that are now taking credit for Brexit . In the opinion ofyour average Northerner those clowns actually undermined Brexit more than they helped it. And in the opinion of your average Northererner, the genuinely left wing Labour leader, Corbyn, had reluctantly been pressured into supporting remain by the hostile , unruly right-wing Blairites who still predominate in his party. . Be that as it may, it certainly presented a completely false picture., and left the average Northerners a little bit conflicted in his attitude to Corbyn. It was not the best of starts, as regards getting Labour back on track. There were fears that he just isn;'t strong enough to swing it.
I've had to start saying England rather than Britain, in many contexts , by the way, because it's coming home to me how radically different, again, the Scottish experience is. Where England is overcrowded, with a very real housing crisis, Scotland has a falling porukation , and housing to spare. Scotland is traditionally left-wing for the same readon that the Notrth of England is,. It's population is larhely comprised of working class peoplem=, struggling on the verge of destitution. But there the similarity ends, because working class people struggling on the verge of destitution really don't want to live in Scotland, by and l;arge, where unemployment figures are higher still, heating bills are higher, and your chances of survival if you do become destitute considerably lower. There's a longstanidng tradition of down-and-out scots moving South into England(my paternal grandfather was one suich) and movement in the other direction is almost uneard of. A lot of Scots stil buy the logic that mass migration might actually ficx their economic problems, so they swallow that longic along wuth theaccompanying bleeding heart political rhetoric. Atv least, that's the best explanation I've heard for the striking difference in attitudes. And if we have to wait for Scotland to become overcrowded before they rethink...
Well anyways , I think that background probably irons out a few apparent paradoxes? And I haven't even started on the Islamn thing. The English experience of Islam is also unique in it;'s way, and it pisses us off mightily when people try to tell us what we think about Islam, and why we think it , rather than listening . But hey! I've really struggled to explain this much. already. I really have!
