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This comment is nonsense, and it is the usual propaganda based on an ideological bent. I'm sorry but I think you and your family have retained the class/caste based system of you original homeland and it is just manifesting in a weird way.

I am willing to bet your mother never encountered anything of the sort. Most of the old very rough areas in London are now gentrified (people complain about it). You can pretty much walk around anywhere in London, at night, without any issues. Phone snatching is the major problem, but general crime, violent crime, ghettoism, etc are all down since 2000.

I know this, because I am an immigrant from a 3rd world country, have lived in London for 25+ years. And the stats show it too.

Your post really makes me angry.

It's not a matter of ideology, or of punishment. It's simply the dynamics of the system playing out. It's alienating for people inside of it because they're experiencing the effects of historical forces which operate on a scale longer than human life.

OF course people would rather live in a period when things were simpler and easier, who wouldn't? The lie sold by the self-styled reformists (and doubled down upon by the emerging Restore Britain) is that all these unwanted outcomes were done to Britain by Other People instead of being the product of repeated bad decisions - Brexit being the most recent one. Someone else in the thread observed that about 27 immigrants are offered jobs for every native Briton entering the workforce. But this notion of prioritizing market forces at the expense of all other considerations is exactly the legacy of Thatcherite conservatism that has dominated Britain for nearly a half-century and of which the Brexit/Reform/Restor movements are the ost recent iterations.

As John Bagot Glubb pointed out ~50 years ago (and many others have pointed out before him), the root causes of decline are complacency, greed, and individualism (vs the notion of social duty). I put it to you that modern finance capitalism selects for these negative traits because they maximize short-term gain and because the accumulation of money allows the holders of it to be indifferent to the long-term structural problems. The primary reason I do not identify as a political conservative is that they sell tradition to the electorate but conserve wealth and power for themselves.

https://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

>"Mass immigration is your punishment for the British Empire" has a certain ideological appeal. But if you're a British person, you don't care about that. What matters is whether you'd rather live in London as it was in 2000 or London today. And I think the answer to that is obvious if your judgment isn't compromised. My parents went to visit London a year or two ago, and my mom was shocked by the decline in public order and standards, the ghettos, etc. This is a woman who lived in Bangladesh most of her life, and she came back telling me about the decline of London.

I walk around outside my home in the very heart of London: the street is full of Rolls Royces, pretty Russian and Ukrainian girls walk around carrying their Graff jewels and Kelly bags. Men still wear watches worth hundreds of thousands despite what the FT style section says.

What ghetto? Where is it? Everybody here is as rich as Croesus and very much a part of the same global jet set culture.

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I don’t really know what it would look like, it would have to be up to the Japanese, but I think you’re correct that this would be essential.

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> which is why Sane Takaichi became PM ?

??

1. You claim (without basis or evidence) that people in the West have a double-standard about xenophobia and cultural chauvinism as between Japan and Western countries.

2. I say people in the West also dislike it in Japan and Japanese culture (more precisely, the same people who dislike racism and bigotry in the West dislike that it exists in Japan too)

3. You say "but Japan elected a right-wing bigot"

like...ok?

We don't like her and we don't like you :shrug:

> The question was do you believe that without ethnic Japanese people you can call it Japan?

Yes, of course, ethnicity is a collection of observed physical traits. What makes Japan Japan is the way people behave, not the way they look, and behavior is not an ethnic trait, it's a cultural trait.

What the fuck are you even talking about?

I'm not sure that creating mass addiction and collapsing the Chinese economy by forcibly industrializing and scaling up the opium trade was so much better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

I obviously hurt your feelings but thank you for the facts that clearly changes everything.

Pretty much all immigrants are good, or at least good for something. People generally want or need all the same things. Xenophobia by and large is an irrational urge.

Paint me this picture of an immigrant who costs more than they contribute.

yeah that didnt workout in germany

Why should we listen to someone from a country proud of its war crimes?

You belong less to Europe than Caribbeans.

We can distill our disagreement into: "present perspective vs past perspective".

Why do I think that the archaeologic/anthropologic perspective is a great point on this issue?

It's because it's precisely one of the talking points of Japanese anti-immigration or xenophobic politicians or writers to emphasize those points. They always say that Japan is different in that of America or of European countries. However archaeology taught us that this is not true.

Just as European countries have always been connected and mixed together, Japan also has undergone population mixes. Just on a larger time scale. That's for the "ethnical homegeinity".

So that is a great way to explain why this particular argument of "Japanese exceptionalism" doesn't hold.

Now for the "political" homogeinity: this one is a pure illusion. In current Japan, even if very-long-term political circumstances have taught people to stay discreet about political disagreement (quite similar to, say, in Russian mindset of avoiding talking politics), there are a lot of different mindsets, and many subcultures.

Even the cultural "homogeinity" is quite recent (Meiji era), and a product of violence. There were 4 casts etc, and the samurais cast tried (and succeeded) to become the "only legitimate one".

Now what about the world in, say, one century, when all the cultures will have time to mix together and stabilize the result all over the world? It will not be unlike the "homogeinity" that you see in today's Japan.

This is precisely what Japan's ancient history can teach us, and I think it's a great way to disarm the far-right and xenophobic rhetorics that is unrelentingly ruining our ears and brains nowadays.

(PS: Please refrain from using "gaijin" which is widely regarded as a xenophobic slur.)

That's not what most recent archaeological discoveries tell.

Quite distinct groups of humans mixed in ancient Japan, as different and distant at that time as the groups that are mixed in modern times in Peru or India.

Some groups were related to Autronesians, others to Yakuts, yet other groups to Hans, etc.

If I remember correctly, at least three distinct groups are proven to have cohabited and arrived at different times.

Inequality destroy high trust societies, and low trust cultures implement a surveillance state to replace trust.

> Unrestricted immigration destroys democratic high trust societies.

In the United States it's pretty clearly the nativists destroying the society, the immigrants are largely baffled about what the hell we're doing to ourselves and why.

> Unrestricted immigration destroys democratic high trust societies.

I’m currently living through a democratic high trust society that’s destroying itself with immigrants being 0% to blame. I’d swap the Christian nationalists for immigrants in a heartbeat, no matter where they’re from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Accession_1972

> The United Kingdom consulted its citizens directly only after joining the European Communities: following the British general election of October 1974, the Labour government of Harold Wilson held a referendum to fulfill one of its campaign promises. The non-binding referendum was held on 5 June 1975, some two and half years after the UK's accession. It was the first ever national referendum to be held in the UK, and the "yes" vote won by a landslide 67.23% on a 65% turnout with 66 out of the 68 local counting areas returning majority "yes" votes.

I'm inclined to count that.

> the EU effectively constitutes a relinquishment of sovereignty

Agreed, it is pooling sovereignty. The UK already does that with a union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Pooling sovereignty is often regarded as a benefit on the whole.

You remember the story the citizens were sold but not the vote requirement seems odd. From a minimum of research, it seems there was no vote to join the EU, which did not exist at the time (1973) of the European Communities project with common currency and the rest. But in 1975 they had a referendum to stay and decided they would with a 67% Yes.

I 100% agree. They need to be much harsher and will lead to a regime change soon. But not in Russia, but in Germany (AfD), UK (Farage) and France (LePen), as predicted by Emmanuell Todd. ;-)

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Debatable. Britain used to be a bit of a mess around joining in 1973. Check out

British disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_British_disease

Sick man of Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_man_of_Europe

Things then picked up, especially in finance when in 2014: London overtakes New York to be named world's finance capital https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-overtakes-new-...

then Brexit screwed that up. The charges in your link are nothing compared to that lot really.

Headline today: Britain’s debt rising at fastest rate in the world – bar Botswana

I mean you can't really say how it would have gone but tearing up the trade deals with your main trading partners is seldom great for business.

As someone who's pro-EU, I'd also really like to see major reforms within the organization.

While it contributes enormously to the welfare of the continent, the EU is by design dysfunctional and toothless.

I'm a pessimist, there is so much money behind the forces that want to see the EU fall apart because small individual countries are easier to buy off, I don't see how we can defend against that.

We'll only know what we lost when it's gone, but then it'll be too late.

What reforms do you want to see from the EU?

I'm saying that I believe public opinion on Brexit is unrelated to public opinion on Conservative/Labour/Reform. I also believe that public opinion on Conservative/Labour/Reform is unrelated to any particular policy positions of any of those three beyond "things were bad under C, lets try L" and then "things are bad under L, lets try R". That's my explanation for Brexit being unpopular, but Reform nonetheless performing well in polls and the recent local elections.

("unrelated" is too strong, but I think they're weak correlations)

London, white British %, census data

2001: 59%

2011: 44%

2021: 36%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_London

Just look at the data, you say "it isn't happening" but it's easy to prove.

University of Manchester: https://hummedia.manchester.ac.uk/institutes/code/briefings/...

1990: White British 95%

2025: White British 77%

2050 (projected): White British 57%

Many parts of London the percentage in schools is already below 20%.

Here are projections for the near future:

https://www.theflyingfrisby.com/p/what-the-uk-population-wil...

Here is the data from the UK government itself:

https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-tab...

There's a play called The Audience, which is a series of meetings between Queen Elizabeth and her prime ministers. It's a fascinating lens through which to view British history.

It runs up through Tony Blair. I'd love to see a final update:

Truss: Hi, I'm Liz Truss

Elizabeth: Urkh! (dies)

Curtain

(The Audience is the basis of the TV show The Crown. The audience parts of The Crown are the most interesting. As the show goes on, it's less about British life and more about royal scandals, ho hum. Gillian Anderson gives an amazing turn as Thatcher; it's too bad the rest of that season is so tedious.)