Sampson

That’s why I said 33%+. I know people at the place I worked at the time who were not unintelligent people and who followed the news who just said they were voting leave because “we give them too much money” and didn’t understand what the basics of freedom of movement for goods, services and people even was or meant or the reasons why their passports didn’t get stamped or why they could buy alcohol and cigarettes or expensive clothes or their holiday in the algarve and no one at customs checked it

I don’t really see what reducing partner visas for international post-grad students does apart from drive away international talent though. They already couldn’t apply for bachelors students so these are masters and doctorate students which means highly specialised people that very likely aren’t taking any jobs away from your average Joe in the street. Closing out routes for visas for partners and children I guess are the easiest way to get numbers down but also the most inconsequential or retroactive type of immigration to go after. The whole point of those visas is they live with their partner/parent and they have to show they have adequate housing and resources to support them and they can’t claim benefits. So when people complain about immigration taking up housing or benefits getting these visas down are inconsequential. I think this is a big problem with the migration debate. It’s obsessed with numbers and so much of the media tries to equate all migrants with people claiming asylum rather than talking about the different categories of immigration based on the reason people come to live in the uk (I.e. work, studies, asylum, love, family reasons etc.)

What gets me is we left the EU, it’s clearly been a failure, all polls show the vast majority of British people think it’s clearly been a failure, but they still fall for the same thing just with the scapegoat being shifted onto another supra-national organisation. The depressing thing is, is the only reason Cameron called the referendum is because it was a pretty minor party level split at the time he thought would sort out, but it only tore his party and the country way wider apart: And despite all the rigmarole, Reform still got around the same voting percentage in 2024 as UKIP did in 2015 so it didn’t even help on the thing he hoped it would do of crushing the Farage vote. Yet Tories again trying to take on Farage with Jenrik and Badanoch, the 2 most populist and furthest right of the candidates in their leadership race. You’d have thought by now that they’d have learnt you can’t out-Farage Farage, he will always go one step further and will always try to create one bogeyman more that needs to be taken on to solve all our problems. After the EU it was the ECHR, after that it will be the world economic forum or the WHO or NATO or the UN or whatever else works as a handy scapegoat.

Said it before and I’ll say it again - I’d gamble good money that 33%+ of the people voting in the referendum didn’t actually know what the EU even was and what being in it actually meant to the UK.

Nah. It’s like 15-20% of the electorate but they have an enormously big voice in the media and are not particularly shy about their views so it seems like it’s more.

Quite normal? She’s Farage without the charisma who just tries to say immigration and identity politics are to blame for everything and offers easy answers. Remember in the last leadership election she was quoting Truss herself with the endless repetitions of “the zero sum game of identity politics” being her favourite catch phrase.

From the bbc: “In her Telegraph article, Badenoch sets out what she calls a "hard-nosed" policy on immigration. She calls for a complete overhaul of the system to ensure every public servant makes it a priority - not just the Home Office - and does not rule out leaving the European Convention on Human Rights.” This whipping of immigration as being the cause of all societies problems and trying to make it front and centre as a scapegoat for every single part of how society is run as if it’s the final boss of modern 21st century society is so depressing.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj04j2mnr6qo 10 years today since the Scottish independence referendum. How time flies.

Are we allowed to even mention the B-word given the 2 major parties seem to be pretending it doesn’t exist? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd988p00z1no Brexit deal impact in UK is worsening, warn economists

What? That was years ago

I wouldn’t bet on that. Guy will try everything in his power to change the law in his favour in that regard.

The way Starmer back peddled on a lot of things made me also think populism wins in the end through all these cycles. Think of the most populist ideas the post-2019 Tory government did - giving yhe home sec the total power to shut down any protests the government doesn’t like, making certain people into literal second class citizens and giving the government powers to revoke citizenship in the borders and nationality bill, making it much harder for British citizens to bring their foreign partners over, needlessly brutal hard Brexit - all the things the moderates hated and planned to reverse but as soon as they got in power and things you’d expect Starmer would never support. But things Starmer ended up talking himself out of and won’t change back because he got too scared of Sunak’s attacks during the election.

I think the opposite. I think it’s out of fear of the actual chaos which governs humanity and our lives. The reason conspiracy theories are popular if they give meaning and purpose and intelligence behind humanity. I remember a Dan Carlin podcast a few years back using the example of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory - is it not actually less reassuring and gives less security and less faith in humanity to believe one random pissed off man could just change history like that over that it was the planning of highly intelligent secret services at the top of world governments full of highly educated people with endless amounts of background information on everything going on? Is the fact that we are actually governed by the kind of careerist politicians your average person votes for actually less reassuring than there’s intelligent people at the top puppet mastering the whole thing? I think a lot of conspiracy theories are actually comforting to people because they give a sense of reassuring order to what is actually a cruel and chaotic world filled with world changing decisions by hideously underqualified people.

I knew it was happening during the election campaign tbh. Starmer had abandoned all his principles on the EU, voting reform and green energy. Problem is all Starmer did was spend the entire election campaign saying what he wouldn’t do and has painted himself in a corner when he’s ruled out basically everything out of fear of Tory attacks. It’s early days but it definitely feels considerably further to the right than Blair and Brown so far and Starmer continues to sell short term pain and zero future optimism. It’d be a lot more palatable if we were sold what yet another period of austerity is for and what we’ll get on the other side of it

It’s an interesting and somewhat frightening topic for sure, although I’d argue that the demographics seems to change from western nation to western nation, demographics shows in the uk the popularity of the hard right is largely amongst voters aged 50-70 and the right of centre vote has collapsed amongst those under 40 overwhelmingly (doesn’t mean an authoritarian populist left party can’t capture that in the future). My understanding in Germany that it’s very much an east/west split and that the authoritarian and populist parties are far more popular in East Germany where many still feel left behind and feel the optimism and promise of reunification hasn’t really been fulfilled much as many of the most economically active East Germans just went westwards in search of the better paying jobs and left many struggling ghost towns in the east. In France it’s definitely more of a movement amongst younger people, not sure about Spain. Maybe it’s more amongst younger people because as you said, the Franco days don’t feel relevant to their generation

I guess the counter argument would be why should residents be more entitled to certain areas of climate or areas of natural beauty than people not resident there, just because they were in the right place at the right time to live there previously? And that given that we only live once no one is going to want to stay in the same piece of land their whole life and not see other parts of the world I’m almost certain those complaining about tourism are tourists themselves during the year elsewhere and a lot of it is nimbyism and comes from a place of “do as I say not as I do” Going round shooting water pistols at tourists having a meal at restaurant is pretty pathetic tbh

I feel you. I understand why people try and offer platitudes like “try to be grateful/mindful” or “try not to focus on things you can’t control” but when I feel low or anxious I find it’s some of the worst things people can say to me. Fact is things out of our control and the overwhelming amount of things that affect how ourselves and our loved ones live our lives that I just find it a gratingly unreasonable suggestion.

I’m not sure if it’s what you’re looking for but there is a recorded version Con te partirò by Bocelli on Apple Music. I haven’t checked if it’s the same song but I think that’s the original Italian title.

But it’s not banning smoking outdoors. All it means in Sweden where these laws exist is people go out the front of the pub to smoke and so those sitting in pub gardens don’t have to smell the smoke and yes you absolutely can come home with clothes stinking of smoke as a non-smoker in a pub garden, most are tight high-walled areas with plastic awning over, hardly open space. It doesn’t really change smokers habits, it just means they go out the front and those enjoying the pub garden don’t have to have someone smoking on the table next to them. I hardly think walking in a different direction to smoke outside is going to decimate the hospitality industry.

The law anlready exists in a few other European countries, its only a good thing in my eyes. Don’t think it’s that hard to sell, very few under 40s smoke nowadays anyway. It’s not difficult to enforce, same reason as smoking in pubs isn’t, as you just make it the pubs” responsibility and say you can revoke their alcohol licence if they don’t enforce it. The illiberal arguments are the same ones people made about the original smoking ban in the 00s. After about 6 months most people just got on with their lives and nowadays few would go back

I’m pretty sure you get the bail back when you appear in court. Took me years to realise this. I always assumed it was just a one off payment but it’s more of an insurance deposit to the state.

There’s an awful lot of truth in what you say. No surprise birth rates are on the floor and no one wants to bring children into this world anymore either. Of course we have better medicine etc. now and live longer but I do often wonder if humans were actually happier back in hunter gatherer times.

For the record - I’m not bashing Starmer at all. I said pre-election that I would love him to just admit to voters taxes need to go up if you want to fix the country’s broken public services. The biggest problem I had with Starmer’s campaign that he was constantly ruling things out in order to placate Sunak’s attacks. And that meant that he boxed himself in so much and has given himself way too few levers to pull.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c0rw9edy00zt#player Live now. As many predicted pre-election he’s going to pull the same thing as George Osbourne in 2010 and after promising no tax rises say “we looked at the finances and we need tax rises”

I think a bit problem is that you can’t really express how you feel in language so discussing it can feel insufficient or anti-climactic. I’m not saying people shouldn’t talk and get help btw. Just that really, we try and think, rationalise and speak aloud how and why we feel certain ways in the English language (or the language you primarily speak) and this in reality is quite bad at being able to explain the way our neurons fire and even our thought processes or how our thoughts work (and the voice in our head we think of as our thoughts speaks already in an artificial man-made language to begin with) Like I often have slumps and have brief periods of anxiety and I’ll rationalise in hindsight its because of xyz because we have to tell a story to explain it to others, but if I actually admit it it’s because my mind unconsciously had a thought about x for some unknown reason which unconsciously triggered a thought about y which unconsciously made me think about z, sometimes if I think about it the change in my brain chemistry comes from something I ate or a song I heard in the background of a cafe or something else. Sometimes I have no idea where it comes from. If I try to explain to someone I’m feeling anxious and how that feels like and why it just feels like a garbled mess and I’ll often pin some tangible reason to it in my head in order to rationalise it when that probably has nothing to do with why my neurons decided to fire that way today.