Training module
It’s not clear what county council this is (possibly Hampshire), but whatever council it is, it’s interesting in more than one way. Or maybe it’s just variations on one way. It’s interesting but highly irritating that any council or anyone else is trying to train anyone via childish cartoons.
If you play it you will see how insultingly crude and infantile it is, and you will wonder what the hell is the point. Who in charge thinks it’s effective to treat the public like a concert hall full of toddlers? Full of potentially racist/anti-immigrant toddlers? What’s the deal with the slow drawing of a line through a day on the calendar over and over?
More substantively though there is the ubiquitous mashing together of “anti-immigrant” with resistance to a particular monotheistic religion. Islam is the worst of the monotheisms (they’re all bad), and it has to be resisted. Islam teaches that all non-marital sex is the fault of women and that therefore women have to be ferociously hidden and controlled and deprived. Dopy patronizing cartoons don’t change that.
Anti-semitic and far right not mentioned until 2:40.
There were a million immigrants to the UK in 2023. That is about ten times more than in the entire thousand year period ending at 1960. Similar is ocurring in many Western European countries. The majority of these migrants are from the Middle East and Africa (Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Somalia, etc), with a high fraction of Muslims.
This matters because, while the evidence is that migration from other European and other First World countries is beneficial to the economy, and that those migrants cost the taxpayer less than they contribute in taxes, for migrants from the Middle East and Africa it’s the reverse: such migrants on average cost the taxpayer more than they contribute. The best data on this is from Denmark, showing that MENA migrants are a net cost to the taxpayer, while the Netherlands and Sweden have released similar data. Recently the UK’s Office of Budget Responsibility estimated an overall net cost of £150,000 per migrant over their working life (and more once they’ve retired). That’s in addition to the £7 billion/yr immediate costs of accommodation, money, food, health care, etc, for recently arrived migrants.
The data show that Middle East and African migrants have lower education and lower skills, and are more likely to be in low-wage jobs or unemployed and on benefits. Further, the evidence is that the same is then true of their children, the second-generation migrants.
If you ask politicians (and the BBC, Guardian etc) about mass migration they will respond that it boosts GDP. And it does (more people, more money changing hands, higher GDP). But it reduces GDP per capita, which is surely what matters. I’ve never seen politicians or the BBC have an honest talk about the effect of migration on GDP/capita.
The whole reason that people migrate from Africa and the Middle East is that those countries are poorer and more socially dysfunctional than Europe; and yet no consideration is given to whether mass importation of such populations just imports the cultural attitudes that lead to those outcomes.
Further, migration at rates of hundreds of thousands a year makes a big contribution to rising house prices, which are going through the roof in the UK. If you have to spend a higher fraction of your income on housing, then disposable income (disposable GDP/capita) is further reduced. Hence the effective standard of living is markedly reduced.
In addition, the evidence is that nations with a clear single ethnic identity tend to be high-trust, low-crime societies (e.g. Japan) where voters are willing to fund a generous welfare state. But the more the nation has no actual national identity, but is just a “flag of convenience” for multiple cultures, the more it becomes a lower-trust society, with people less civically minded. There is evidence for this in the UK, with markedly rising rates of benefit fraud. People tend to be more in it for themselves, thinking things like (however rightly or wrongly) “migrants get X, Y, Z, so why shouldn’t I?”. E.g. (Times article): “More than a quarter of adults now think there is little wrong in making a false benefit claim, up from 16 per cent five years ago. In a Portsmouth University study of honesty, a fifth of Britons have low integrity, a rate that has tripled in just over a decade.”. This isn’t helped by incessant denigration of white British culture by the media, and the lauding of everything else.
All of the above is made worse by Islam, since their culture often holds that half of them (the women) are not even supposed to be economically active (so employment rates are much lower, and living-on-benefits rates higher). In addition, their children often grow up disaffacted, often identifying more with their own community and religion than with the host country. More young British Muslims went to join ISIS than are currently serving in the British Army. This is partly because, such is the level of migration, that they live in predominantly-Muslim enclaves.
(As an illustration, many Parliamentary constituencies are now majority Muslim, and there the Labour Party nearly always fields a candidate who is a Muslim. In the recent election, in five constituencies, the Muslim Labour-party candidate lost to an independent Islamist because the Labour party is not sufficiently hostile to Israel for their liking; that is, the majority in those constituencies were single-issue voters, voting on their hatred of Jews. In UK politics, independents winning Parliamentary seats is rare; for Labour to lose five seats like this in the middle of an overall Labour landslide is unheard of.)
British women are increasingly reporting that they cannot walk around their own cities wearing typical Western clothing, because if they do they are repeatedly pestered for sex by non-European men. In Sweden, over half of the rapes nowadays are committed by men born outside Sweden.
Of course the BBC and most of the mainstream media are reluctant to talk about any of this, refusing to consider any criticism of Islam, and shutting down conversations by calling them “racist” and “Islamophobic”. The governing Labour party (not wanting to lose any more seats as above) is proposing to make “Islamophobia” a crime.
All of that is the background to this training video. And yet the video suggests that anyone who is opposed to mass immigration, which is currently changing the country’s demographics at a rate of 2% a year (that’s 40% in 20 years), must have been “radicalised” and should be reported to “counter-terrorism”.
Also notable is that the people featured in the video are highly “diverse” — this is ubiquitous on the BBC and in adverts nowadays — in that about 40% are depicted as ethnically non-Europeans (whereas in 1960 the UK population was only about 1% non-European); and yet, again, anyone disliking such rapid cultural change is a “radical” on the path to being a terrorist.
That’s the level of the “debate” on this in the UK. None of the stuff I’ve said here features. When Tory-leadership candidate Suella Braverman recently said that “not all cultures are equal” this was considered sufficiently outré as to be news and half of UK Twitter fainted in horror. Unless you esteem the Taliban equally with British culture you’re a “racist”.
I admit, I’m a USian, and thus not really aware of the situation on the ground in the UK. But it does sound to me that a key part of the problem is similar to one that affects Mexican and Central American immigrants to the US–namely, that the latest waves of immigrants aren’t being integrated into the society they are arriving in. It partly comes down to the fact that yes, a lot of people who complain about the legitimate issues arising from immigration are actually just racist asshats who are using those issues as cover. In our bifurcated society, this makes it almost impossible to then make those legitimate arguments. (This is also an issue when discussing trans issues, I’ll note.)
Fixing these issues requires a more direct approach, one that allows immigration but not the abandonment of multiculturalism (in that Islam, as practiced by many of these communities, is utterly opposed to any and all other cultures). There is no sin in requiring refugees, in particular, to attend courses on the values and ideals which the countries they’ve arrived in seek to uphold. Make it clear that, as part of the bargain in which they are allowed to come to some part of the world that is not being rent asunder by violence, they have to accept that their women will have equal rights, and their children may choose to not follow their religion.