The most immediate and palpable threat is the erosion of privacy. The notion that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is a dangerously simplistic view that ignores the fundamental importance of privacy as a human right. Privacy is not about hiding wrongdoing; it is about maintaining individual autonomy, freedom of thought, and the right to a personal life unscrutinized by an overreaching state.
But the risks extend far beyond privacy. History has shown us, time and again, that tools created for one purpose can and often are repurposed for more sinister ends. A government, benign today, could transform into a malicious entity tomorrow, wielding these surveillance capabilities to suppress dissent, manipulate public opinion, and maintain power through fear and control. The technological infrastructure for a surveillance state, once established, becomes a formidable tool in the hands of an oppressive regime.
I think one can even say that an authoritarian government is a more stable "state" than a benign one, and that due to entropy, all sufficiently perturbed governments decay to authoritarianism unless sustained by some external inputs. The input, in this case, being the activism of those who don't want to be surveilled.
> activism of those who don't want to be surveilled.
The tricky bit, as with most UK law'n'order politics, and the rightwing playbook in general, is dealing with how people want other people surveilled. Fear of crime and immigration narratives drive a demand for "something to be done" and "more powers".
The ECHR is pretty weak against surveillance (https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/d/echr/fs_mass_surveillan...), but it has been used in some cases to reduce it. But see how unpopular ECHR is in the UK - because it applies to humans, not just citizens, and there's a lot of people who want the state to be lawless against non-citizens.
"if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is a good phrase to throw right back at politicians who have closed door meetings about surveillance, or anything.
It doesn't work like that, because the justification they respond with is that if they make things public then criminals will know how to better hide their illicit activities. Or something along the lines of "we're having closed door meetings for the safety and security of the people"...
> right to a personal life unscrutinized by an overreaching state.
If it was just the state, then I might even be able to live with it, as my trust in my government is rather high, even if I do agree with your second paragraph on principle.
The problem though is that lax/non-existent privacy laws also allow Joe in marketing and his friends to do all kinds of creepy privacy-invading things, which I worry about much more. It fosters a mentality and culture around how to get the easiest to those who are most susceptible to whatever it is your peddling, and in today's day and age of social media I think it's fair to say that it's increasingly clear that that kind of culture isn't exactly a net favor for humanity as a whole.
It's probably naive from me but I'm honestly much more worried about big tech and their nonchalant approach to privacy than I am about dangers of my government going full surveillance state. The two issues are of course not entirely separate either, they're very much intertwined.
I had occasion to look up Chris Huhne (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Huhne) as the energy secretary who kicked off the UK new nuclear programme, and right at the top of his wikipedia is .. the phone hacking scandal. Private surveillance by the press, which has been used for a wide variety of malicious gossip purposes rather than any kind of "speaking truth to power".
A good example is Venezuela, this was a car crash in slow motion. I remember the incremental changes made to law being reported right throughout Hugo Chávez' term in office right from the beginning. He was wildly popular everyone trusted him, many warned of its implications each time a law was proposed and reported. And here we are today, Venezuela is a dictatorship.
As the saying goes, it happens slowly and then all at once.
Then you're very fortunate to live in one of the minority of places in the world where government is even moderately trustworthy. Many, possibly most people, dont and the tools of the surveillance state are increasingly being applied by their governments to further repress possible sources of change from that governing mean.
>ignores the fundamental importance of privacy as a human right. Privacy is not about hiding wrongdoing; it is about maintaining individual autonomy, freedom of thought, and the right to a personal life unscrutinized by an overreaching state.
It's impressive how many people make this argument and then turn right around to fully support the full plethora of modern KYC and AML laws with all their dubious justifications and even more dubious applications with absolutely no sense of the double standard. One supposes that a rght to privacy, individual autonomy and a life unscrutinized by an orreaching state also should include these things applied firmly to ones financial life, at least enough that any larish transaction isn't treated as if it's potentially criminal right off the bat.
I think it's wrong to say that nothing is being done to investigate them.
However there's a weird thing that I've witnessed. Large crimes are being ignored and instead non-crimes (or minor-crimes) are blown out of proportion. Then the investigations consume all the oxygen eventually sliding off the ruling party like water off a duck.
A rotation of cabinet, a new face to lead and all is forgotten it seems. Faith in the alternative parties is also shockingly low (not that I am a labour supporter under Kier.. but that's also kinda my point).
People would rather lurch even further right for answers, many people loudly supporting "Reform UK" which is the political refit of "the brexit party" and even before that was the "UK independence party"- a purely populist party.
HOWEVER.
The UK has been on the decline since 1992 (or earlier) and managing a nation in decline must be extremely difficult. Nobody is willing accept that they're poorer, financial services need the pound to remain strong so they keep the currency from falling which in turn makes everyone unable to afford to live.
It is a sticky situation with no clear answer other than to muck down and face the reality that if we want to be a wealthy nation again we either need to go back to exploiting other countries or produce things of value.
> Large crimes are being ignored and instead non-crimes (or minor-crimes) are blown out of proportion
As always: by whom? And the answer: the press.
The UK media are pro-Tory and far-right to such an extent that they quietly ignore all this massive corruption in favor of slamming alternatives down at every opportunity. The only exception recently has been the Mirror's dogged "partygate" series.
Cash-for-peerages has been so normalized that there's not even an investigation.
(The court system largely works against whistleblowing in the UK, because of the very high risk and cost of losing a libel lawsuit even if you're mostly correct)
>People would rather lurch even further right for answers
God forbid we have an even more "far right" government than the one that has overseen a full decade of all-time-high immigration, has utterly failed to stop the years-long exponential increase in illegal boat border crossings, has swept under the rug the revelations of rape gangs operating in towns and cities all throughout England, has rolled out the red carpet for agitative gender and race activist groups to take root in every institution from museums to universities to primary schools to the civil service, ....
I think we're more in agreement than you think; the difference is that I think that this is the nature of the right wing in the UK in general.
The issue is that the right wing will tell you things you want to hear and then either: not do those things, or they "solve" them in a way that cuts you off at the knees.
I'm not sure if it's a right wing thing in general but it's definitely something I see the right wing in the UK and US do a lot. Populism seems to be a lot about treating symptoms not causes, so if there's a migration crisis: lets make life so bad in the country that people don't want to live here!
I can't think of any other country (bar the US) that has engaged in a similar war on its own population as Britain did in the past decade. That said I'm scared of what's to come in the rest of Europe in the coming decade with right-wing politics and the field day our own goose-stepping chuckle-ducks will have once Trump gets re-elected across the pond.
But as for the here and now (today), I find it hard to think of a EU country that went from so much to so little in such a short time, and 100% due to its own doing. Not even Italy I think.
I disagree that no other country wages war on its citizens as much as the UK does.
I think if you narrow your scope to the Anglosphere and include Europe that could be true. However there's a lot of countries that are really bad and we must acknowledge their existence.
What is interesting in the UK is that it seems largely to be people voting against their own interests a lot of the time.
It's like the population is told that "bad people drink water, therefore we should poison the water" and they buy into it completely. The country (as mentioned before) is on the decline for sure, but the standards decline much faster than they should largely I think because people are protectionist in mentality.
It's the individualism that causes most problems; there's very little sense of collectivism in the UK. The belief is that everyone is sort of out to get you and that there is a finite number of resources we all compete for.
At least this is my experience having grown up in central England (but expatriated 8 years ago)
>It's like the population is told that "bad people drink water, therefore we should poison the water" and they buy into it completely. The country (as mentioned before) is on the decline for sure, but the standards decline much faster than they should largely I think because people are protectionist in mentality.
State use of propaganda has been perfected over the last century. The go-to emotion is fear. Next time you read the paper or watch it on TV, note how many stores are trying to instill fear.
Read some articles from 10 or 20 years ago and see how blown out of proportion the fear mongering actually was and realize you've been under a constant state of that for your entire news consuming life.
>What is interesting in the UK is that it seems largely to be people voting against their own interests a lot of the time.
Without meaning this as a comment towards your post in particular, I've found that people who say "they're voting against their own interests" tend to project their own solidly middle-class interests (access to abundant, cheap labour, better deals on fees to go to university, etc - completely valid self-interests to have!) onto working-class people who may be unaffected or even harmed by those interests (competing with that same labour pool for work, being outbid for housing from the rest of the population, being unable to afford to have a child).
What this also misses is that people have self-interests besides straightforward economic metrics. Is it not a valid self interest for someone to want their home town to maintain a sense of local identity? For a community to not change beyond recognisability in a single lifetime? For a person to not feel like a foreigner in the only place they've ever been able to call home?
These concerns aren't as strongly felt by the more well-to-do people, since they have the means to live a more cosmopolitan, travelled lifestyle, and give their lives "higher" aspirations and meaning, like academia, or activism. But for poorer people, their home, and local identity and sense of community, is all they have. Like you said, there's little sense of collectivism in the UK, and is it any wonder why when whole communities have been either displaced by market forces, or replaced demographically, in less than a single generation?
My socio-economic status was "poor", "white-british" and from a very deprived area. My Mother continues in this social class though I (through accident of being interested in computers) have seemed to escape.
The reason I point out that "white-british" bit is because there's a lot of social programmes I was looked-over for simply because race was an important qualifier. As you might imagine that made me obscenely bitter about migration and non-native races; but that's something I haven gotten over as the years have gone by.
Cheap labour is not what I consider important at all, however if you vote for tax cuts because you think you'll be better off despite the tax cuts being mostly for the very wealthy: well that's less money for social services.
If you vote in favour of cutting benefits because you think that immigrants get too many benefits despite being on benefits yourself then that's directly against your own interest.
If you vote for a reduction in healthcare spending despite depending on it to live: you have voted against your own interest.
All of the above are some examples of what I mean, and I have tory-voting friends in these exact situations.
I think those are all good points, which is why I opened my comment with "Without meaning this as a comment towards your post in particular" since I didn't have much context about how you were using that phrase. I was more responding to the phrase itself since I've seen it used a lot of times to castigate people for trying to vote for things that might actually benefit them.
I'd imagine that most of poor and working class people "voting for" the policies you mentioned are victims of our terrible voting system, and doing so very begrudgingly because they believe that overall, that set of policies is the least-worst.
Out of genuine interest, when you say you say you have friends in these exact situations, do you actually have friends on benefits who are explicitly in favour of an across-the-board reduction in benefits in a way that would lower their own take-home? I'd be interested to know their reasoning for that. Or are they more in favour of a stricter set of requirements for immigrants to receive benefits?
Anyway, cheers to you for managing to get out of deprivation, definitely not easy.
I think I agree that the nuance is lost with our voting system.
It becomes about perspective at some point. The conservatives are seen as "tough on migration" but the mechanisms with which they are seen that way are actually "tough on lower classes". Thus when someone wants to vote against migration they wind up voting based on perspective.
It's also funny to consider the sorry state of the liberal democrats.
With the risk of your prior perspective of things being somewhat hardened; this is the reality of what happened:
* Lib Dems campaigned on a platform of an alternative voting mechanism and of freezing university caps.
* No clear majority in the GE
* Coalition government is floated, Conservative leader David Cameron says "join me and we will abide one of your major campaign pledges, you can pick which one".
* Lib dems join, pick alternative voting, as it has the best chance of doing the most good in the future.
* Conservatives employ the most underhanded tactics (using the same ad agency as Vote Leave fwiw) to undermine the referendum they hold. "This baby doesn't need an alternative voting system, they need a life support system" etc;
* Referendum fails
* Lib Dems come out as traitors for betraying their pledge to freeze university fees'.
* Nobody will seriously vote Lib Dem now because of this, instead preferring to vote for a party consistently embroiled in scandals after scandals.
Thus: we are perpetually stuck in a "lesser evil" voting system, and it's easy to completely decimate the other side by either eating a bacon sandwich wrong or making a choice that was intended to break this horrible situation.
Everyone loses, A/V is considered unpalatable due to the failed referendum.
Unrelated but nice to see that my tonedeaf and somewhat rude comment sparked such an interesting conversation.
I think I learned something reading this comment chain, so thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Couldn’t respond to others in this comment chain for some reason but fwiw I think politics in my country (Germany) are equally insane at times if not more so…
no I don't. probably because I've been an immigrant my entire life. with the difference that I'm OKish off and people calling me an "expat" probably because I haven't been stepping off a boat chased by some s-hole country militia or Frontex.
what I referred to is the issue of how wealth is distributed, how the society isolates itself in a class-system, and people's mobility between these systems.
the fact that the poor are riled up against foreigners is a common pattern among the far-right world-wide and can also be seen as a failure by leftist politicians (who rather talk about pronouns than the struggling lower classes)
Well wealth currently seems to be distributed away from people who earn it to the government to do who knows what with it.
I agree that socio-economic mobility in the UK is bad and definitely needs to be improved. However, the lower classes are those most adversely affected by uncontrolled immigration due to the increased supply of labour and the downward pressure on salaries.
On which side of the channel are you? I watch from time to time the debates in the House of Commons, it seems much more sane to me than what's going on in our Assemblée Nationale. Their whole democratic system seems much more sane to me, despite the silly wigs, dresses and titles.
We're also not that bad in the race to the bottom on topics like surveillance and immigration...
I don't know if France is currently better or worse than the UK on privacy, but the French government seems equally interested in increasing surveillance.
Much of it is only insane to foreigners. Like, despite the supposed "huge fear of immigrants", the UK has a way more permissive immigration system than places like the US or Denmark, and is generally considered a more open society than it's European neighbours.
This is going to be painful to read and you might think I'm being condescending here. I'm going to guess you're British because this is something that my mum says and it's clear she hasn't really looked into it.
The truth is that France did have less incentive to prevent crossings as there was no longer any financial aid for them doing so. To be clear: the UK would definitely not act differently in that situation; though it's reprehensible.
It's also true that France no longer has infrastructure to cope with it's own migration and tougher laws being introduced in French are pushing migrants to tackle the treacherous journey.
However since the deal has been reached France is doing as much as it can to prevent crossings -- that said, it betrays the real problem.
The number of "small boats" making crossings ("Small Boats" being a parroted line) was 29,090 for the year of 2023 (as of December). Which is a reduction from the year prior due to our agreement with France. But that's nothing compared to the net migration figures of 750,000 (largest on record and by a huge margin) and that also precludes the fact that of those migrants crossing on small boats may not be granted asylum (5,284 as of September '23 - 18%) were denied and sent away.
Not exactly an embarrassingly large number in the grand scheme of things, which makes it a bit of a boogeyman.
Yes, I'm only bringing up small boats in the context of a post from someone up thread from the "other side of the canal" (sic). A lot of boats are escorted from French waters by the French navy, whilst they wait for a collection by RNLI.
Numbers are down, but I'd be interested to see what that is attributed to, once weather effects etc are taken into account.
You also say 5,284 people were "denied and sent away". Were they actually physically deported from the UK?
And I agree, Net Migration is out of control and needs to come down severely.
The second claim is that it's the french escorting people across the channel, there was only one incident that invoked this which was the french navy chasing a small boat into english waters under low visibility, the ire was caught because the french naval vessel requested that a British ferry make way for the naval vessel which cleared a path for the dinghy full of migrants. - as usual, a sprinkle of truth and Farage will parrot it on GB news and the murdoch media will fan the flames as much as possible.
Hate peddlers the lot of them, and all in an attempt to make you scared, scared and fearful so you vote on emotion and not on information. And it's working.
You can literally go to ship tracking websites and see the RNLI boats travel into the channel, and see photographic evidence (despite the efforts of channel ports to block this) of the people (the vast majority of whom are young men from safe countries) being unloaded and put on coaches to accommodation.
You can also see the French warships making no effort to stop the boats and making sure they safely leave French waters.
you are right that you can see this, what is evident however is that you have not been watching it and are preaching something you believe but have never actually confirmed.
The ferret doesn’t have to be reputable since it’s referencing first party data sources directly and linking to them, something The Evening Standard and The Sun fail to do often. And certainly something Farage has never done.
I checked (extensively) the background of “The Ferret” and indeed it is as close as you will ever get to independently funded investigative journalism citing first party statistics.
So, you could not possibly be more wrong when disregarding it.
The vast majority of migrants to the UK arrive by legal means — with tickets for their flight, ferry, bus or train. They also have the required paperwork to work, study, or move alongside their spouse who is doing one of these.
The UK's energy use per capita has dropped more than 25% since 2000 (which to be honest is a pretty successful energy policy compared to what a move away from coal could have been).
It is interesting to compare them to Japan where the downtrend isn't anywhere near as marked and is potentially related to some change in energy policy related to 2011 [0].
It would be a lot easier to get people focused on stuff higher up on Maslow's hierarchy, like privacy, if they were warm, comfortable and could afford to manufacture stuff locally. Otherwise they'll probably need to buckle down for some internal strife, shrinking real pie could result in all sorts of weirdness. I'm not sure what the precedent is for a 25% drop in energy.
Trying to crowbar nuclear in here is ridiculous; the UK has been a surprising renewables success, despite everyone's best efforts, and we're still waiting for Hinkley Point C to be finished.
> could afford to manufacture stuff locally
"UK manufacturing sector climbs to eighth in world rankings"
25% is equivalent to going from an ordinary week to not having energy on weekends. Someone is getting squeezed. Change of that magnitude should tinge the interpretation of all social trends.
If I was an elite in the UK, I'd want to be going totalitarian too. Someone should be getting hopping furious; these numbers are comparable to unravelling-of-social-fabric events. Although ironically the totalitarians seem to be outperforming the UK economy; China claims to have overtaken them on a per capita energy basis back in 2020.
You can't just assert the link without some kind of breakdown.
But I agree that people are being squeezed. Energy and housing are becoming crippling costs. The social fabric is fraying. Attempts to blame it all on foreigners are running out of steam, but managing to promote violence along the way. Liz Truss finally broke something the middle class would notice: interest rates. We're due a Labour government which might start to address some of these things.
Not surveillance, though. New Labour were very keen on it too.
I'm not asserting there is a link, I'm a step or two behind that, asserting that if we're going to consider any social change in the UK then it should be done in light of what is probably the biggest influence on living standards.
In the UK we see an economy with, y'know, substantial debt. A lot of their alleged assets at the national level are US treasuries which are unreliable stores of wealth [0]. Their ability to secure energy just cratered by ~25% from peak.
That is some pretty dire context. Then we have the elites - who are aware of these factors - pushing through extremely heavy surveillance laws. Now it might be that surveillance is cheap these days, but nevertheless the policy disaster that they've engineered needs to be considered as a factor. In their position I'd certainly be tempted by a rats on the sinking ship mentality and the lure of flirting with totalitarianism.
[0] With China apparently selling off their debt the UK is trending towards being the 2nd largest holder of US debt. Which is a bit risky given the US is likely to engage the printing presses in a big way.
The dollar holds its value better than the pound. US treasuries remain undefeated.
> pushing through extremely heavy surveillance laws
The thing is, none of this is new. We had extremely heavy surveillance in the 1980s (see Spycatcher, Zircon) and 1970s, back when British troops were murdering civilians on the streets of the UK. The UK surveillance industry always asks for more power. And it's consistently somewhat popular with the public.
I always feel more controlled in Britain than Germany or Switzerland, with the amount of "You should do this, You should not do that" messages all over the place, and thanks to CCTV, in the places I regularly visit I seldom see any car badly parked.
Although it's worth remembering the UK is still a popular place is "disappear" since it's doesn't have an overarching ID system like most Western countries, and the UK doesn't track people anywhere near as much as it's neighbours.
How does the tax authority keep track of who's dodging taxes? The fact you don't have the concept of ID cards is irrelevant if the tax authority still has an incentive to keep tabs on people (which it does in order to detect tax evasion).
You don't have to declare for tax purposes unless you go over certain amounts. If you do without declaring you may get away with if for a few years but they often catch people if someone gets investigated and they see bank payments going to someone undeclared. Then you get a bit of a bill for back taxes.
It's quite laid back compared to some countries though. They usually only come after your assets. Very few people go to jail.
This still requires them to keep tabs on people and know they exist. So even though you may not have an ID card, HMRC still knows you exist and about your payment habits to be able to tell if something fishy is going on?
I'm not totally up to date but once you are in the system they keep tabs a bit and you have a tax ID number and such like. But for people not in the system, say come in from abroad or young and not involved yet they didn't in the past. I don't know if that will change and they'll make a database of everyone with a bank account and the like.
Some years ago I moved abroad for a while and then they'd kind of drop your records after three years out of the country. Now I'm not so sure.
When I arrived in the UK the first thing I needed to do before being able to work is to make an appointment at some government office to get issued a national insurance number (which is like a tax ID) which every employer requires.
So while people don’t carry ID cards, everyone of working age definitely has this ID unless they exclusively work undeclared, off-the-books jobs. So I’m not convinced that the lack of ID cards is some meaningful privacy protection.
The US and other places can be like that too. Strict if you have something to lose, but not enough to protect yourself. Lawless if you have nothing to lose, or enough to protect yourself.
So bottom 20% and top ~5% to 10% are golden, middle 20% to 60% are hoping (dreaming?) to make it up a few deciles, and 60% to 90% are hoping to make it to top 10%. And until they make it there, they have to dot their i’s and cross their t’s.
I never understood the reason behind these messages, is it because they think everyone is dumb ?
In continental europe messages are meant to forbid stuff, it is rare to see a "mind the gap" message.
"Mind the gap" used to be played only at some 19th-century stations built on tight curves, where the gap between the carriage and the platform could be 20 or even 30cm. (The widest is 37.5cm.) That's a safety hazard, especially for blind people, so the announcements have existed for decades.
It's more recent that the pointless announcement has been made at many stations.
It was really striking when I came back (to the UK) from a short trip to Switzerland. In Switzerland, or at least the touristy parts of Geneva, orderliness, respect, and civility were assumed - and, at least as far as I can tell, followed. While I couldn't read everything (merely the psuedocomprehensibility you get with related languages), I only saw a single "behave yourselves" message. We discussed it at the time and our French speaker said that he had also only seen that one. In Britain there were multiple giant billboards about not harassing various people (mostly staff) before you even got to customs.
I'm skeptical of their effectiveness, and while I hesitate to make broad statements based on just a few days in a country it seems to me to be indicative of a major cultural difference.
If anyone has stories of or suggestions for where to emigrate to from the UK I'd be interested.
The news of ever increasing state surveillance, rising inequality, low salaries, privatisation leading to sewage filled waterways and the deliberate destruction of the NHS, revolving door cronyism and the weather contribute to feelings of dissatisfaction.
Maybe the grass isn't actually greener elsewhere(?)
Nordic countries are still relatively nice. And very receptive to "skilled labor" immigration due to the population aging fast.
We too are circling the neoliberal drain like UK but are perhaps a decade or so behind. And racism is rising rapidly. :(
I'm from a Nordic country but have lived in England. To be frank, in many areas it's a real shithole country, and I'd really not want to live there. Not as bad as USA but getting there fast.
>> And racism is rising rapidly
>> To be frank, in many areas it's a real shithole country
Thanks to Trump, the term "shithole country" has now been termed as a dogwhistle for racists, so I'm genuinely curious as to what you mean when you're calling certain parts of England a shithole?
Shocking I know, but what Trump says and American cultural interpretations of it don’t really hold sway over here.
Pretty harsh descriptor, but I’m from the North and often have referred to my area as a shithole. It’s not the area’s fault, it’s 40 years of mismanagement and underfunding, but still not a good place.
Is it? I just asked a question completely in earnest and it seemed to ruffle a few feathers. I thought Trump was the world's problem the last time I checked, oh, every media outlet.
I've heard this term being used (and I have used it myself) as a dog-whistle to signal how racist others are that are using it.
so if one says Britain (the US, or some other place that used to do very well) is turning into a s-hole country the message and accuse goes right back at them. In this case the (racist[1]) Brits who pushed for Brexit, and by doing so have transformed themselves into a s-hole country.
in that case it is still a dog-whistle for racists but the tune that is produced is 100% an insult against the people who deserve to hear it.
[1] ... "to be absolutely clear it wasn't just racists who voted for Brexit. C'nts did as well! -- Stewart Lee
"Shithole country" is also a summary judgement of a country's overall condition (GDP, safety, government, corruption, etc). That some pundits called it a "racist dog whistle" doesn't necessarily make it so.
What's actually racist (well, technically: "culturally imperialist") is to consider the provincial concerns of US internal politics as some kind of universally applicable yardsticks. People all over the world have used words to the same effect way before Trump and will do it way after Trump.
If anything, one could easily call parts of the US a "shithole country" regardless of their racial breakdown. In many parts of the word, locals will gladly admit it for the status of their own (whether racially homogeneous or not) country too.
That expression has been very common in the UK for decades with no dog whistle aspect and, as some one who lives here, there still isn't a dog whistle connotation ... the expression just means run down, dilapidated and a bit ... well, shit.
Remember Trump wasn't world president so not everything exports across the Atlantic.
People who don't live in the US won't be up-to-date with American slang, especially if they don't live in an English-speaking country. It means the country is a shithole: "A very dirty, poor, and unpleasant place" [1].
Britain's infrastructure is noticeably decaying — potholed roads, buildings in a poor state of repair (let alone well-insulated etc), litter, old buses and trains, homeless people sleeping on the street. There's more of this the further one travels from London.
That's a bold assertion. You can't just claim that random things a person allegedly says is racist just because he said it (much like the moral panic about the "OK" signal regularly used by divers).
I'm very well aware of this, but I'm reappropriating it to refer to true shitholes like USA and UK that even with their massive wealth manage to have a lot of suffering.
You'll move along much faster in understanding people from diverse cultures if you don't start by imposing your own country's uniquely absurd cultural biases on widely used phrases that probably have nothing to do with them.
I'm from Finland, wellcome! People are perhaps a bit more withdrawn than in UK, but e.g. the sense of humor is very similar and I get along great with UK people. And about everybody speaks English.
And of course it's really fucking cold and dark in the winter. But at least it's warm indoors, unlike in England.
Haha, that hit very hard after speaking to a home developer at how dire the building regulations are in the UK compared to the EU or even the US with the gov actively subverting better building efficiency regs.
Cronyism is rife in the UK, it's so open it stinks.
How come -40 degree weather, hardly any sunlight, introvert culture, mandatory conscription, and looming threat of Russia doing something funni aren't a dealbreakers? I'm not sure I'd ever consider moving there myself.
Saunas imo don't outweigh your car freezing up so it can't even start anymore and you can't do anything in an emergency.
> Don't see this as a minus.
You should try it sometime, getting only one half assed hour of sunlight a day would probably drive me to suicide personally.
> Russia can very easily be a threat to any country within ICBM distance
Well once those start flying it's all over so that's not really a consideration. Small things that don't make a NATO intervention worth it are the real problem. Wasn't it just on the news today or yesterday that they've been jamming GPS in the area? Nobody goes to war over one "accidental" stray missile that just happened to go off course during an "exercise" and blew up a few houses a few km over the border, like that one time in Poland. That kind of thing.
> Saunas imo don't outweigh your car freezing up so it can't even start anymore and you can't do anything in an emergency.
Saunas don't really offset the cold at all, although they are nice anyway. Cars not starting up due to the cold is really rare nowadays AFAIU. I haven't owned or need a car in 20 years, so no personal experience, but I don't hear any complaints about it.
And it's not something you need to really worry about e.g. in Helsinki. In UK for example a lot bigger problem is that the traffic goes into total halt when it snows.
In general I agree that the climate kind of sucks (although the summers are nice). But this is an annoyance, not life-or-death stuff.
> You should try it sometime, getting only one half assed hour of sunlight a day would probably drive me to suicide personally.
The lack of sunlight does suck a bit. And if you're really suspectible to SAD, living up north is probably not a good idea for you. But most just get used to it and it's more like people complaining about the rain in the UK.
And you definitely do need blackout curtains (or an eyemask) in the summer if your sleep is sensitive to light, so it's not really a pro. Most get used to it though.
> Well once those start flying it's all over so that's not really a consideration. Small things that don't make a NATO intervention worth it are the real problem.
Regarding the current situation, Finland is further from Ukraine than e.g. Turkey, so a stray missile from there is obviously just not gonna happen. And even if it did, a stray missile is almost certainly not gonna have much casualties in the bigger picture. Everyday risks are magnitudes larger than such.
There's been all sorts of jammings and airspace violations for decades. They probably mean very little. Joining NATO did slightly increase the miniscule risk of war for Finland in my calculus, as Finland became a geopolitical buffer zone for NATO. Those tend to get the worst horrors in major wars (see e.g. WW2). But anyway you're a lot more more likely to get hit by a car or something than being a casualty in a war.
Mandatory conscription only concerns male Finnish citizens under the age of 30. The more immediate concern is the Finnish or Swedish language requirement to getting your citizenship. You'll also have to have lived in Finland for 5-7 years before you're eligible for a citizenship, so if you're over 25 when you move to Finland, you can probably also forget about mandatory conscription.
-40 degree weather is very rare, especially in southern Finland (where the majority lives). Helsinki gets rarely to -20 (currently is though), but these few days you can stay indoors, or just put on enough clothes. Typically it hovers a bit under zero (which sucks a bit too due to slush).
The lack of sunlight in the winter comes of course with lots of sunlight in the summer (although that may have its downsides too if you're not used to it). I don't find the climate ideal but it's not that big a deal.
The conscription may suck a bit, but you can get out of it quite easily if you want, and it probably wont concern you as an immigrant anyway. And generally a conscription military is better for a country's stability than a professional one.
The threat of Russia is not a huge concern. And the overall everyday safety compared to most other countries vastly outweigh this minor risk.
I find the best part is that the wellfare state is still somewhat intact and things tend to just work. This really lowers the everyday stress compared to e.g. UK or USA.
Of course it's not for everybody but for many aspects it's a good place to live (although getting worse due to neoliberalism, like most places). This is probably reflected in that Finland is the happiest country in the world for six years straight now.
hard to recommend a place that is better than another because surveillance has unequal distribution so time is never in your favor.
Countries that have progressed rapidly in their digital transformation are also (generally speaking) further down in their transformation into a "control society".
So wherever you go (and unless you chose to start from scratch living on your own farm) it's impossible to escape for very long.
Another thing to take into account, is whether legislation has also transformed itself in favor of civil rights during the same time. But can only happen as a second step, and much slower (law when applied needs precedent). Odds that civil rights transform equally fast and fair immediately are nil (and in favor of more tech and more surveillance).
To "get out" (if there is such a thing) one would have to move to a place that is far behind in that regard (and even here YMMV because some poor countries transform into control societies ling before they are digitally transformed).
Alternatively, Eastern Europe countries might be an option. It's the same level of shit as the UK, but at least the cost of living appropriately reflects it.
Public services are significantly and noticeably better (my doctor once profusely apologised to me that because of resources my referral could not be the same day he made it but had to be the next morning), the tax rate is lower (because of the Tax Scheme for Researchers) the government isn't spending its days on some War on Woke bs and I'm generally much happier. After a year here I've already purchased a home and am planning to stay for the long term :)
It doesn't have tough surveillance laws, it's got permissive surveillance laws. Tough surveillance laws would mean laws that were tough on the people doing surveillance.
> Tech companies are most concerned by a change that would allow the Home Office to issue notices preventing them from making technical updates that might impede information-sharing with U.K. intelligence agencies.
This is so shockingly shortsighted it's almost funny. Do the people writing these bills not consult with any technical advisors? I mean they somehow took the concept of a backdoor (which in itself is already a very bad idea) and somehow made that concept even worse. At least with a backdoor, a tech company could preserve some semblance of security to a system outside of the parties that have this backdoor access. Keeping exploits in is just egging on bad actors to find the exploits that the spy agencies have already found. I'm honestly speechless.
Agreed. But it was Eastern European migration that turned the working class against the EU.
And it could be that diktats from "one of own" is easier to swallow than coming from "that foreign lot"
Ironically, Eastern European migration is what ran a lot of the low-wage, labor-intensive industries like restaurants, ridesharing, delivery, etc.
These industries have been decimated during the pandemic when the migrants (who mostly could still remain in the UK despite Brexit thanks to (pre?)settled status) decided that it was no longer worth to stay in a place that is not only hostile to them but now offers the same quality of life as their native country.
After Poland joined the EU, Poles acquired the right to work in some EU countries, while most of the members implemented transition periods. The UK, Ireland, Sweden and Malta allowed Poles to work freely without any limitations from the start.
Why do the British put up with this? Are they just docile and subservient by nature? Did turning the old working class into an underclass eliminate the only political faction with balls?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadBut the risks extend far beyond privacy. History has shown us, time and again, that tools created for one purpose can and often are repurposed for more sinister ends. A government, benign today, could transform into a malicious entity tomorrow, wielding these surveillance capabilities to suppress dissent, manipulate public opinion, and maintain power through fear and control. The technological infrastructure for a surveillance state, once established, becomes a formidable tool in the hands of an oppressive regime.
The tricky bit, as with most UK law'n'order politics, and the rightwing playbook in general, is dealing with how people want other people surveilled. Fear of crime and immigration narratives drive a demand for "something to be done" and "more powers".
The ECHR is pretty weak against surveillance (https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/d/echr/fs_mass_surveillan...), but it has been used in some cases to reduce it. But see how unpopular ECHR is in the UK - because it applies to humans, not just citizens, and there's a lot of people who want the state to be lawless against non-citizens.
Philosophy Tube episode on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCUTX1jurJ4
If it was just the state, then I might even be able to live with it, as my trust in my government is rather high, even if I do agree with your second paragraph on principle.
The problem though is that lax/non-existent privacy laws also allow Joe in marketing and his friends to do all kinds of creepy privacy-invading things, which I worry about much more. It fosters a mentality and culture around how to get the easiest to those who are most susceptible to whatever it is your peddling, and in today's day and age of social media I think it's fair to say that it's increasingly clear that that kind of culture isn't exactly a net favor for humanity as a whole.
It's probably naive from me but I'm honestly much more worried about big tech and their nonchalant approach to privacy than I am about dangers of my government going full surveillance state. The two issues are of course not entirely separate either, they're very much intertwined.
I had occasion to look up Chris Huhne (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Huhne) as the energy secretary who kicked off the UK new nuclear programme, and right at the top of his wikipedia is .. the phone hacking scandal. Private surveillance by the press, which has been used for a wide variety of malicious gossip purposes rather than any kind of "speaking truth to power".
As the saying goes, it happens slowly and then all at once.
Then you're very fortunate to live in one of the minority of places in the world where government is even moderately trustworthy. Many, possibly most people, dont and the tools of the surveillance state are increasingly being applied by their governments to further repress possible sources of change from that governing mean.
It's impressive how many people make this argument and then turn right around to fully support the full plethora of modern KYC and AML laws with all their dubious justifications and even more dubious applications with absolutely no sense of the double standard. One supposes that a rght to privacy, individual autonomy and a life unscrutinized by an orreaching state also should include these things applied firmly to ones financial life, at least enough that any larish transaction isn't treated as if it's potentially criminal right off the bat.
Back in 2008...
"UK terror law used for Iceland deposits" - https://www.ft.com/content/55398517-1ea9-3248-8205-3268e037b...
Nothing is being done to investigate them.
It looks like government is simply bribing security agencies and giving them nice toys in a silent agreement "you don't touch us, we don't touch you".
That said, this is not sustainable.
However there's a weird thing that I've witnessed. Large crimes are being ignored and instead non-crimes (or minor-crimes) are blown out of proportion. Then the investigations consume all the oxygen eventually sliding off the ruling party like water off a duck.
A rotation of cabinet, a new face to lead and all is forgotten it seems. Faith in the alternative parties is also shockingly low (not that I am a labour supporter under Kier.. but that's also kinda my point).
People would rather lurch even further right for answers, many people loudly supporting "Reform UK" which is the political refit of "the brexit party" and even before that was the "UK independence party"- a purely populist party.
HOWEVER.
The UK has been on the decline since 1992 (or earlier) and managing a nation in decline must be extremely difficult. Nobody is willing accept that they're poorer, financial services need the pound to remain strong so they keep the currency from falling which in turn makes everyone unable to afford to live.
It is a sticky situation with no clear answer other than to muck down and face the reality that if we want to be a wealthy nation again we either need to go back to exploiting other countries or produce things of value.
As always: by whom? And the answer: the press.
The UK media are pro-Tory and far-right to such an extent that they quietly ignore all this massive corruption in favor of slamming alternatives down at every opportunity. The only exception recently has been the Mirror's dogged "partygate" series.
Cash-for-peerages has been so normalized that there's not even an investigation.
(The court system largely works against whistleblowing in the UK, because of the very high risk and cost of losing a libel lawsuit even if you're mostly correct)
God forbid we have an even more "far right" government than the one that has overseen a full decade of all-time-high immigration, has utterly failed to stop the years-long exponential increase in illegal boat border crossings, has swept under the rug the revelations of rape gangs operating in towns and cities all throughout England, has rolled out the red carpet for agitative gender and race activist groups to take root in every institution from museums to universities to primary schools to the civil service, ....
The issue is that the right wing will tell you things you want to hear and then either: not do those things, or they "solve" them in a way that cuts you off at the knees.
I'm not sure if it's a right wing thing in general but it's definitely something I see the right wing in the UK and US do a lot. Populism seems to be a lot about treating symptoms not causes, so if there's a migration crisis: lets make life so bad in the country that people don't want to live here!
>Keir Starmer pledges to clean up politics and crack down on cronyism
headline today. You never know.
But as for the here and now (today), I find it hard to think of a EU country that went from so much to so little in such a short time, and 100% due to its own doing. Not even Italy I think.
I think if you narrow your scope to the Anglosphere and include Europe that could be true. However there's a lot of countries that are really bad and we must acknowledge their existence.
What is interesting in the UK is that it seems largely to be people voting against their own interests a lot of the time.
It's like the population is told that "bad people drink water, therefore we should poison the water" and they buy into it completely. The country (as mentioned before) is on the decline for sure, but the standards decline much faster than they should largely I think because people are protectionist in mentality.
It's the individualism that causes most problems; there's very little sense of collectivism in the UK. The belief is that everyone is sort of out to get you and that there is a finite number of resources we all compete for.
At least this is my experience having grown up in central England (but expatriated 8 years ago)
State use of propaganda has been perfected over the last century. The go-to emotion is fear. Next time you read the paper or watch it on TV, note how many stores are trying to instill fear.
Read some articles from 10 or 20 years ago and see how blown out of proportion the fear mongering actually was and realize you've been under a constant state of that for your entire news consuming life.
Without meaning this as a comment towards your post in particular, I've found that people who say "they're voting against their own interests" tend to project their own solidly middle-class interests (access to abundant, cheap labour, better deals on fees to go to university, etc - completely valid self-interests to have!) onto working-class people who may be unaffected or even harmed by those interests (competing with that same labour pool for work, being outbid for housing from the rest of the population, being unable to afford to have a child).
What this also misses is that people have self-interests besides straightforward economic metrics. Is it not a valid self interest for someone to want their home town to maintain a sense of local identity? For a community to not change beyond recognisability in a single lifetime? For a person to not feel like a foreigner in the only place they've ever been able to call home?
These concerns aren't as strongly felt by the more well-to-do people, since they have the means to live a more cosmopolitan, travelled lifestyle, and give their lives "higher" aspirations and meaning, like academia, or activism. But for poorer people, their home, and local identity and sense of community, is all they have. Like you said, there's little sense of collectivism in the UK, and is it any wonder why when whole communities have been either displaced by market forces, or replaced demographically, in less than a single generation?
I am so happy that it's me you're responding to.
My socio-economic status was "poor", "white-british" and from a very deprived area. My Mother continues in this social class though I (through accident of being interested in computers) have seemed to escape.
The reason I point out that "white-british" bit is because there's a lot of social programmes I was looked-over for simply because race was an important qualifier. As you might imagine that made me obscenely bitter about migration and non-native races; but that's something I haven gotten over as the years have gone by.
Cheap labour is not what I consider important at all, however if you vote for tax cuts because you think you'll be better off despite the tax cuts being mostly for the very wealthy: well that's less money for social services.
If you vote in favour of cutting benefits because you think that immigrants get too many benefits despite being on benefits yourself then that's directly against your own interest.
If you vote for a reduction in healthcare spending despite depending on it to live: you have voted against your own interest.
All of the above are some examples of what I mean, and I have tory-voting friends in these exact situations.
I'd imagine that most of poor and working class people "voting for" the policies you mentioned are victims of our terrible voting system, and doing so very begrudgingly because they believe that overall, that set of policies is the least-worst.
Out of genuine interest, when you say you say you have friends in these exact situations, do you actually have friends on benefits who are explicitly in favour of an across-the-board reduction in benefits in a way that would lower their own take-home? I'd be interested to know their reasoning for that. Or are they more in favour of a stricter set of requirements for immigrants to receive benefits?
Anyway, cheers to you for managing to get out of deprivation, definitely not easy.
It becomes about perspective at some point. The conservatives are seen as "tough on migration" but the mechanisms with which they are seen that way are actually "tough on lower classes". Thus when someone wants to vote against migration they wind up voting based on perspective.
It's also funny to consider the sorry state of the liberal democrats.
With the risk of your prior perspective of things being somewhat hardened; this is the reality of what happened:
* Lib Dems campaigned on a platform of an alternative voting mechanism and of freezing university caps.
* No clear majority in the GE
* Coalition government is floated, Conservative leader David Cameron says "join me and we will abide one of your major campaign pledges, you can pick which one".
* Lib dems join, pick alternative voting, as it has the best chance of doing the most good in the future.
* Conservatives employ the most underhanded tactics (using the same ad agency as Vote Leave fwiw) to undermine the referendum they hold. "This baby doesn't need an alternative voting system, they need a life support system" etc;
* Referendum fails
* Lib Dems come out as traitors for betraying their pledge to freeze university fees'.
* Nobody will seriously vote Lib Dem now because of this, instead preferring to vote for a party consistently embroiled in scandals after scandals.
Thus: we are perpetually stuck in a "lesser evil" voting system, and it's easy to completely decimate the other side by either eating a bacon sandwich wrong or making a choice that was intended to break this horrible situation.
Everyone loses, A/V is considered unpalatable due to the failed referendum.
Couldn’t respond to others in this comment chain for some reason but fwiw I think politics in my country (Germany) are equally insane at times if not more so…
in this case it seems we are in agreement because I absolutely limited my view to Britain & the continent (+ the US)
You mean like uncontrolled immigration and the highest tax burden for 70 years? That certainly does sound like a war on its own population.
no I don't. probably because I've been an immigrant my entire life. with the difference that I'm OKish off and people calling me an "expat" probably because I haven't been stepping off a boat chased by some s-hole country militia or Frontex.
what I referred to is the issue of how wealth is distributed, how the society isolates itself in a class-system, and people's mobility between these systems.
the fact that the poor are riled up against foreigners is a common pattern among the far-right world-wide and can also be seen as a failure by leftist politicians (who rather talk about pronouns than the struggling lower classes)
I agree that socio-economic mobility in the UK is bad and definitely needs to be improved. However, the lower classes are those most adversely affected by uncontrolled immigration due to the increased supply of labour and the downward pressure on salaries.
We're also not that bad in the race to the bottom on topics like surveillance and immigration...
not clear from the comment but the statement is that France is less a problem wrt to surveillance? Or some other place?
fresh from this year's 37C3: A year of surveillance in France: a short satirical tale by La Quadrature du Net https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-12309-a_year_of_surveillance_in_...
Could you elaborate? Things like the spouse visa requirements don't feel very permissive.
I note also that France is happy to let them cross the channel in rubber boats, with no effort to stop them.
The truth is that France did have less incentive to prevent crossings as there was no longer any financial aid for them doing so. To be clear: the UK would definitely not act differently in that situation; though it's reprehensible.
It's also true that France no longer has infrastructure to cope with it's own migration and tougher laws being introduced in French are pushing migrants to tackle the treacherous journey.
However since the deal has been reached France is doing as much as it can to prevent crossings -- that said, it betrays the real problem.
The number of "small boats" making crossings ("Small Boats" being a parroted line) was 29,090 for the year of 2023 (as of December). Which is a reduction from the year prior due to our agreement with France. But that's nothing compared to the net migration figures of 750,000 (largest on record and by a huge margin) and that also precludes the fact that of those migrants crossing on small boats may not be granted asylum (5,284 as of September '23 - 18%) were denied and sent away.
Not exactly an embarrassingly large number in the grand scheme of things, which makes it a bit of a boogeyman.
Even generous estimates put the number at 13,000 and we have laws and social systems to break this behaviour.
There's more victims of fraud in the UK, (21% of people have lost >£1,000 to fraud); which puts the number at 14,224,728 affected citizens.
Granted, human trafficking is a significantly worse problem, but it's not endemic.
Numbers are down, but I'd be interested to see what that is attributed to, once weather effects etc are taken into account.
You also say 5,284 people were "denied and sent away". Were they actually physically deported from the UK?
And I agree, Net Migration is out of control and needs to come down severely.
Your first claim is that it was RNLI (which is a charity btw) taxiing migrants, which has some decent counterfactual evidence citing first-party sources: https://theferret.scot/claim-nigel-farage-about-rnli-taxi-se...
The second claim is that it's the french escorting people across the channel, there was only one incident that invoked this which was the french navy chasing a small boat into english waters under low visibility, the ire was caught because the french naval vessel requested that a British ferry make way for the naval vessel which cleared a path for the dinghy full of migrants. - as usual, a sprinkle of truth and Farage will parrot it on GB news and the murdoch media will fan the flames as much as possible.
Hate peddlers the lot of them, and all in an attempt to make you scared, scared and fearful so you vote on emotion and not on information. And it's working.
You can literally go to ship tracking websites and see the RNLI boats travel into the channel, and see photographic evidence (despite the efforts of channel ports to block this) of the people (the vast majority of whom are young men from safe countries) being unloaded and put on coaches to accommodation.
You can also see the French warships making no effort to stop the boats and making sure they safely leave French waters.
Please stop gaslighting.
The ferret doesn’t have to be reputable since it’s referencing first party data sources directly and linking to them, something The Evening Standard and The Sun fail to do often. And certainly something Farage has never done.
So, you could not possibly be more wrong when disregarding it.
Stop the gaslighting.
e.g. there were 488k work visas and 632k study visas granted in 2022: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-...
It is interesting to compare them to Japan where the downtrend isn't anywhere near as marked and is potentially related to some change in energy policy related to 2011 [0].
It would be a lot easier to get people focused on stuff higher up on Maslow's hierarchy, like privacy, if they were warm, comfortable and could afford to manufacture stuff locally. Otherwise they'll probably need to buckle down for some internal strife, shrinking real pie could result in all sorts of weirdness. I'm not sure what the precedent is for a 25% drop in energy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan#Post-Fu...
> could afford to manufacture stuff locally
"UK manufacturing sector climbs to eighth in world rankings"
https://www.themanufacturer.com/articles/uk-manufacturing-se...
No, the surveillance stuff is pure elite politics and not driven by freezing pensioners.
If I was an elite in the UK, I'd want to be going totalitarian too. Someone should be getting hopping furious; these numbers are comparable to unravelling-of-social-fabric events. Although ironically the totalitarians seem to be outperforming the UK economy; China claims to have overtaken them on a per capita energy basis back in 2020.
But I agree that people are being squeezed. Energy and housing are becoming crippling costs. The social fabric is fraying. Attempts to blame it all on foreigners are running out of steam, but managing to promote violence along the way. Liz Truss finally broke something the middle class would notice: interest rates. We're due a Labour government which might start to address some of these things.
Not surveillance, though. New Labour were very keen on it too.
In the UK we see an economy with, y'know, substantial debt. A lot of their alleged assets at the national level are US treasuries which are unreliable stores of wealth [0]. Their ability to secure energy just cratered by ~25% from peak.
That is some pretty dire context. Then we have the elites - who are aware of these factors - pushing through extremely heavy surveillance laws. Now it might be that surveillance is cheap these days, but nevertheless the policy disaster that they've engineered needs to be considered as a factor. In their position I'd certainly be tempted by a rats on the sinking ship mentality and the lure of flirting with totalitarianism.
[0] With China apparently selling off their debt the UK is trending towards being the 2nd largest holder of US debt. Which is a bit risky given the US is likely to engage the printing presses in a big way.
The dollar holds its value better than the pound. US treasuries remain undefeated.
> pushing through extremely heavy surveillance laws
The thing is, none of this is new. We had extremely heavy surveillance in the 1980s (see Spycatcher, Zircon) and 1970s, back when British troops were murdering civilians on the streets of the UK. The UK surveillance industry always asks for more power. And it's consistently somewhat popular with the public.
(aren't you an American?)
We don't have an ID system but we have a lot of ID requirements.
It's quite laid back compared to some countries though. They usually only come after your assets. Very few people go to jail.
Some years ago I moved abroad for a while and then they'd kind of drop your records after three years out of the country. Now I'm not so sure.
So while people don’t carry ID cards, everyone of working age definitely has this ID unless they exclusively work undeclared, off-the-books jobs. So I’m not convinced that the lack of ID cards is some meaningful privacy protection.
So bottom 20% and top ~5% to 10% are golden, middle 20% to 60% are hoping (dreaming?) to make it up a few deciles, and 60% to 90% are hoping to make it to top 10%. And until they make it there, they have to dot their i’s and cross their t’s.
It's more recent that the pointless announcement has been made at many stations.
http://www.metadyne.co.uk/mind_the_gap.htm
I'm skeptical of their effectiveness, and while I hesitate to make broad statements based on just a few days in a country it seems to me to be indicative of a major cultural difference.
The news of ever increasing state surveillance, rising inequality, low salaries, privatisation leading to sewage filled waterways and the deliberate destruction of the NHS, revolving door cronyism and the weather contribute to feelings of dissatisfaction.
Maybe the grass isn't actually greener elsewhere(?)
We too are circling the neoliberal drain like UK but are perhaps a decade or so behind. And racism is rising rapidly. :(
I'm from a Nordic country but have lived in England. To be frank, in many areas it's a real shithole country, and I'd really not want to live there. Not as bad as USA but getting there fast.
Thanks to Trump, the term "shithole country" has now been termed as a dogwhistle for racists, so I'm genuinely curious as to what you mean when you're calling certain parts of England a shithole?
Pretty harsh descriptor, but I’m from the North and often have referred to my area as a shithole. It’s not the area’s fault, it’s 40 years of mismanagement and underfunding, but still not a good place.
Is it? I just asked a question completely in earnest and it seemed to ruffle a few feathers. I thought Trump was the world's problem the last time I checked, oh, every media outlet.
so if one says Britain (the US, or some other place that used to do very well) is turning into a s-hole country the message and accuse goes right back at them. In this case the (racist[1]) Brits who pushed for Brexit, and by doing so have transformed themselves into a s-hole country.
in that case it is still a dog-whistle for racists but the tune that is produced is 100% an insult against the people who deserve to hear it.
[1] ... "to be absolutely clear it wasn't just racists who voted for Brexit. C'nts did as well! -- Stewart Lee
What's actually racist (well, technically: "culturally imperialist") is to consider the provincial concerns of US internal politics as some kind of universally applicable yardsticks. People all over the world have used words to the same effect way before Trump and will do it way after Trump.
If anything, one could easily call parts of the US a "shithole country" regardless of their racial breakdown. In many parts of the word, locals will gladly admit it for the status of their own (whether racially homogeneous or not) country too.
Remember Trump wasn't world president so not everything exports across the Atlantic.
Why would you feel the need to say something like this
Britain's infrastructure is noticeably decaying — potholed roads, buildings in a poor state of repair (let alone well-insulated etc), litter, old buses and trains, homeless people sleeping on the street. There's more of this the further one travels from London.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shithole
What is the current PC way of describing Swansea or Blackpool in American English?
If you asked someone who lived here, it would be shithole.
Okay thanks for the advice!!
And of course it's really fucking cold and dark in the winter. But at least it's warm indoors, unlike in England.
Haha, that hit very hard after speaking to a home developer at how dire the building regulations are in the UK compared to the EU or even the US with the gov actively subverting better building efficiency regs.
Cronyism is rife in the UK, it's so open it stinks.
Once it gets below -20 it doesn't really matter. Also, saunas.
> hardly any sunlight
No need for blackout curtains. Don't see this as a minus.
> introvert culture
That has pluses and minuses.
> mandatory conscription
I think everyone should be forced to do some kind of service. Having a trained force is a good idea when faced with...
> looming threat of Russia doing something funni
I don't think they are going to invade Finland again anytime soon, and Russia can very easily be a threat to any country within ICBM distance.
> Don't see this as a minus.
You should try it sometime, getting only one half assed hour of sunlight a day would probably drive me to suicide personally.
> Russia can very easily be a threat to any country within ICBM distance
Well once those start flying it's all over so that's not really a consideration. Small things that don't make a NATO intervention worth it are the real problem. Wasn't it just on the news today or yesterday that they've been jamming GPS in the area? Nobody goes to war over one "accidental" stray missile that just happened to go off course during an "exercise" and blew up a few houses a few km over the border, like that one time in Poland. That kind of thing.
Saunas don't really offset the cold at all, although they are nice anyway. Cars not starting up due to the cold is really rare nowadays AFAIU. I haven't owned or need a car in 20 years, so no personal experience, but I don't hear any complaints about it.
And it's not something you need to really worry about e.g. in Helsinki. In UK for example a lot bigger problem is that the traffic goes into total halt when it snows.
In general I agree that the climate kind of sucks (although the summers are nice). But this is an annoyance, not life-or-death stuff.
> You should try it sometime, getting only one half assed hour of sunlight a day would probably drive me to suicide personally.
The lack of sunlight does suck a bit. And if you're really suspectible to SAD, living up north is probably not a good idea for you. But most just get used to it and it's more like people complaining about the rain in the UK.
And you definitely do need blackout curtains (or an eyemask) in the summer if your sleep is sensitive to light, so it's not really a pro. Most get used to it though.
> Well once those start flying it's all over so that's not really a consideration. Small things that don't make a NATO intervention worth it are the real problem.
Regarding the current situation, Finland is further from Ukraine than e.g. Turkey, so a stray missile from there is obviously just not gonna happen. And even if it did, a stray missile is almost certainly not gonna have much casualties in the bigger picture. Everyday risks are magnitudes larger than such.
There's been all sorts of jammings and airspace violations for decades. They probably mean very little. Joining NATO did slightly increase the miniscule risk of war for Finland in my calculus, as Finland became a geopolitical buffer zone for NATO. Those tend to get the worst horrors in major wars (see e.g. WW2). But anyway you're a lot more more likely to get hit by a car or something than being a casualty in a war.
The lack of sunlight in the winter comes of course with lots of sunlight in the summer (although that may have its downsides too if you're not used to it). I don't find the climate ideal but it's not that big a deal.
The conscription may suck a bit, but you can get out of it quite easily if you want, and it probably wont concern you as an immigrant anyway. And generally a conscription military is better for a country's stability than a professional one.
The threat of Russia is not a huge concern. And the overall everyday safety compared to most other countries vastly outweigh this minor risk.
I find the best part is that the wellfare state is still somewhat intact and things tend to just work. This really lowers the everyday stress compared to e.g. UK or USA.
Of course it's not for everybody but for many aspects it's a good place to live (although getting worse due to neoliberalism, like most places). This is probably reflected in that Finland is the happiest country in the world for six years straight now.
Received a masters degree in STEM from a Nordic country. This somehow rendered me less desirable in being hired?
Living on the streets is not what I envisioned while signing up for an university program.
Countries that have progressed rapidly in their digital transformation are also (generally speaking) further down in their transformation into a "control society".
So wherever you go (and unless you chose to start from scratch living on your own farm) it's impossible to escape for very long.
Another thing to take into account, is whether legislation has also transformed itself in favor of civil rights during the same time. But can only happen as a second step, and much slower (law when applied needs precedent). Odds that civil rights transform equally fast and fair immediately are nil (and in favor of more tech and more surveillance).
To "get out" (if there is such a thing) one would have to move to a place that is far behind in that regard (and even here YMMV because some poor countries transform into control societies ling before they are digitally transformed).
Inequality has been pretty stable over the last couple of decades:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/872472/gini-index-of-the...
Public services are significantly and noticeably better (my doctor once profusely apologised to me that because of resources my referral could not be the same day he made it but had to be the next morning), the tax rate is lower (because of the Tax Scheme for Researchers) the government isn't spending its days on some War on Woke bs and I'm generally much happier. After a year here I've already purchased a home and am planning to stay for the long term :)
I have dual UK-EU citizenship which helped.
This is so shockingly shortsighted it's almost funny. Do the people writing these bills not consult with any technical advisors? I mean they somehow took the concept of a backdoor (which in itself is already a very bad idea) and somehow made that concept even worse. At least with a backdoor, a tech company could preserve some semblance of security to a system outside of the parties that have this backdoor access. Keeping exploits in is just egging on bad actors to find the exploits that the spy agencies have already found. I'm honestly speechless.
"Unelected" -> Literally a monarchy with a sitting house of lords, which still includes some hereditary titles.
"Bureaucrats" -> One of the most paper/form heavy countries in the EU (Aside from Germany in some cases).
These industries have been decimated during the pandemic when the migrants (who mostly could still remain in the UK despite Brexit thanks to (pre?)settled status) decided that it was no longer worth to stay in a place that is not only hostile to them but now offers the same quality of life as their native country.
Cue the “nobody wants to work anymore” cries.
So, solely a UK decision again.
There was something about sending money to the EU for them to reinvest in cities in the UK which weren't London.
And more likely, the new AML laws that would have impacted our politicians and private companies ability to hide taxable income.