Seizing back control: The ILX lol brexit is how we're all gonna die thread.

I don't think anyone here isn't aware that there are many, many countries far worse off than the UK. This is small comfort for people living in poverty tho.

fwiw my initial use of dystopian in this convo was already an acknowledgement that the precarity and cuelty of the UK job market is seen as business-as-usual or even a step up for lots of people coming here

xpost

When you are trapped in a system of poverty wages, the random evil of UC, foodbank assistance - how the fuck are you supposed to get the scratch together to go to Finland or wherever?

I hear you, but why is it the Eastern Europeans are saying 'fuck it, I'm out' and not the Brits?

it's an Island nation which was for centuries insulated from mainland European wars and doesn't have that tradition of mass flight prevalent all over Europe ..perhaps? just a thought.

my parents emigrated here.. my brother emigrated to Dubai .. but I'm stuck in this shithole!

It's because the risk/reward ratio is so much higher, wages are higher in the UK than Romania so if you don't mind where you live you can save enough to send money home or have a lump sum to take back at some point in the future. There isn't an equivalent wage jump if you emigrate from the UK, unless you work in a sector where there are especially lucrative jobs in the Middle East or wherever.

Romanian millennials grew up with fond views of Englishmen such as Phil Neville

lol!

Maybe he'll switch them on to vegetarianism. That would be a sight!

it's an Island nation which was for centuries insulated from mainland European wars and doesn't have that tradition of mass flight prevalent all over Europe ..perhaps? just a thought.

― calzino, Tuesday, 28 May 2019 11:08 (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

interesting tack, and an interesting question/discussion imo

xp lol

Isolated island nation is a factor sure but Matt DC's answer is really all there is to it in 2019, you don't see poor people in Germany, France, etc. immigrating much either because really there's no place to go that would make financial sense.

Skilled migrants absolutely are leaving in pretty large volumes. There are currently crises brewing in nursing and teaching as people emigrate to UAE, KSA, Canada, Australia, etc. The only reason the NHS is still going is that we're replacing the emigrating nurse and doctors with new migrants. More people would leave if the barriers to access, in terms of marketable skills, weren't generally so high.

is there a good analysis of yr standard quality-of-life factors across even the eu states broken down by income brackets ?

yeah sv im pretty much asking you there tbh

Emigrating from the UK is a Herculean task only for the bravest of the brave. Like David Moyes and Shteve McLaren.

several things which at different times seems salient to me here

1: prior to 1960 you went to work in the colonies (where admin wd be in english and you were not arriving on the bottom rung)
2: or else the dominions (canada, australia, new zealand) where similar applies and the cut-off has been much less abrupt
3: from the mid-50s one much-hyped alternative for "escape into the brighter world for the visionary and the pushy" was the arts! music and TV especially*
4: i don't even slightly know the comparative numbers in re other nations here but in 1980ish about 1 in 7 18-21-yr-olds went to university; by 2000 it's 1 in 2
5: internal flight to e.g. london (or some big city) also an alternative without precise equivalent elsewhere**
6: english as global lingua franca very much shapes our habits of mind as to where we will be better off (and why we shd think abt learning other tongues)

*the buried thesis of my book just published is that the reason ROCK mattered so much and struck so hard from the mid-50s onwards is that it offered an alternative route to an exotic bright other for the boomers when the end of empire closed earlier routes
**london is absurdly out-of-scale as a desirable space within the UK (and out of proportion populationwise in contrast to most capital cities and their hinterlands) -- meaning that even if in theory this doesn;t make much rational sense, in practice it's where people were moving to in the 70s, 80s and 90s… with the grotesque turnaround cost-wise only really emerging in the late 90s

(this is how i break down to some extent the changing nature of the UK ladder out of deprivation between c.1950 and now, such as it is)

Italy possibly even more hostile to Romanians than the UK as well, tbf.

chrisht we'd have no poethry at all at all if we didnt pack the childer off musha'andtis

You forgot that other great genre of Irish poetry, mooning over some wan who doesn’t love you back!

thats universal

one contributing theory to the phenom of left-behind brexit rage incidentally *is* the internal migration issue: "my kids moved away! from shropshire to bristol! "

since apparently there is a visible correlation between the "kids move to the big city leaving the retired and the very poor" figures and areas that went very brexit (no links, this is something i read on twitter lol)

we really really fucked up our post-colonial detoxification (this is also i guess a buried thesis of my book, or at least of my trying to puzzle through brexit at the same time as writing it, when the impulses that shaped the world of the book seem so counter to the impulses that shape brexit, and yet both are basically boomer phenoms)

our genre is what the brits done on us, subgenres

- the land and what it means to us after what the brits done on us
- leaving mary after what the brits done on us
- the dhrink after what the brits done on us
- mary leaving after what i done on the dhrink after what the brits done on us
- what we done with the land and to mary after she left us after i dhrank for the ninety years after the brits left after doing what they done on us
- killing each other because of the above

what mark s says about children moving away and leaving very old and poor is also visible in Ireland - see results of gay marriage ref (Roscommon voting no) and abortion ref (Donegal voted no).

yes

but to what extent is "rural skews conservative, cities is vibrant young things" new for our times i suppose?

It’s not but the centralisation of capital cities in Irl/UK and the decline of agricultural work is very important

dont worry broadband wil-

Worth noting that WEF article Matt linked ends with the study finding British empathy for refugees being the lowest of any EU or English speaking country. But then the study apparently deals in cuntspeak like 'unskilled labourers' and the beyond bogus concept of 'nationally beneficial' re people.

Former Downing Street communications director Alastair Campbell says he has been expelled from the Labour Party

— Sky News Breaking (@SkyNewsBreak) May 28, 2019

about fucking time

I also note that David Aaronovitch was replying to S Hedges, once you’re in you’re in...

Small brain

Yet Kate Hoey sails on down the river with Farage - shameful!

— Kzaz #FBPE #WeAreSodem #IamEuropean 🇪🇺 (@kiasazand) May 28, 2019

This really is the point, isn’t it - why is she untouchable -

— Baloolah (@BaloolahBunting) May 28, 2019

Because she's the nearest thing Corbyn has to Sinn Fein support in the House of Commons

— Stuart Macintosh (@stueymaco) May 28, 2019

Back in pre minimum wage early 90's agricultural work had a then quite princely min wage of 3.83 ph. But they sure struggled to recruit Englishers to toil in the fields.

And has the gall to bring up the EHRC antisemitism investigation after being the architect of a dogwhistle campaign against Michael Howard in 2005, which first brought Luciana Berger to prominence as an internal critic of Labour antisemitism.

Lol misread that as Maconie for a sec
Xp

Omg Campbell :)

Omomomg that Hoey tweet :D :D

Omomomfg Darragh's guide to the literature of Erin XD

britain has never really been properly conscious of or reckoned with its history of internal migration, whether it is the rapid industrial urbanisation of the C19th or the road-building suburbanisation of the C20th. it's been arguably the main driver of class, political, social and cultural change for the past 250 years and imo it's at the core of the social decay, anomie & general malaise that much of the country suffers from

^^^this except i think you do also have to adjust for the existence of empire up till around the 1950s (is this internal or external?)

Guys we're in Spoons and there's no pizza available, i think the Brexpocalypse has begun

How does this differ from similar phenomena in France, Germany, Italy, etc.?

2xp

Instructive to see England standing in for the UK in the immigration discussion itt. Talking for the Scottish diaspora, get it up ye, Campbell and stick yer bagpipes where the sun don't shine.

Pizza sounds like foreign muck, you should be ordering something British like spag bol.

Italy is surely different as there are Italian immigrants all over the planet.

There's dozens of Italians where I work, I've worked with one German and no French at all.

it's not that my explanation applies nowhere else, it's contributory to an answer to yr question to why the brits aren't saying "fuck it let's move"

(also i think my original six-part post does actually include scotland etc, the next response possibly less so)

what are the figures on german, italian and french saying "fuck it let's move", pom? (genuine question as i have zero idea, except that much of semi-rural france is semi-empty)

pomenitul other than the imperial context I'd say certain geographic factors - a country essentially in the corner of a continent yet has considered itself centre of the world...with its dense capital also in a corner, the one closest to the centre of that same continent (no other countries in Europe are affected by these dynamics to the same degree...is my shoddy claim)

also re germany's and italy's empires --this was tried and worked out badly iirc

i mean they all worked out badly

Simon Hedges, first responder

Expelled, just for having an opinion.

— Simon Hedges (@Orwell_Fan) May 28, 2019

My dad used to talk about emigrating to Canada, seriously too, unlike most of the nonsense he came out with. Thank fuck, that never happened.

:( What's wrong with emigrating to Canada?

Anyway, thanks, all, for your thoughtful responses to my questions. I appreciate it.

i'd emigrate to canada given half a chance tbh