What Brits probably want more is to rejoin the EU, get back some leverage on the world scene and dig themselves our of the brexit hole
Your comment is unnecessary, unsubstantiated, doesn't add anything to the discussion and is just going to cause arguments in its current form.
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo... (figure 2)
I think the real problem people are having is that a large amount of those immigrants are now no longer from the EU. But you have Brexit to blame for that.
The problem is that the conservative and traditional right aren't too popular, so they need to go for the far-right. Those parties are in full MAGA-mode, focusing on things like immigration. It is so, so much easier to sway public opinion by blowing up incidents involving immigrants, than to convince the public that they should accept reduction or degradation of services due to tax cuts.
Far-right politicians discovered some time ago that they can straight up lie through their teeth, and face zero consequences. And those lies will propagate through social media, and people will accept them as facts.
It seems like critical thinking among huge parts of the population is considerably down. I've heard seemingly smart people I know regurgitate lies they've picked up on social media, which they could have fact checked in 30 seconds.
Social media seems to basically be a way of running A/B testing on the population until you find enough folks vulnerable to some sort of powerful misconception that serves your purpose.
For the SM network "purpose" means engagement, but it turns out that (to our disadvantage) it also serves the purposes of an army of grifters, opportunists and power mad sociopaths who are taking over the world. Once again (think the 1930s) it turns out mastery of new media technologies in the hands of bad people has consequences.
As techies, building productive rather than destructive media (and AI is the next "media" of consequence) really ought to be top of agenda.
Please when we're that far from normalcy and courteous discourse it's "far of center" politicians. Last week forget all the extreme climate nonsense (the world is still here and just getting worse not disappearing tomorrow) and anti nuclear nonsense that is finally being rolled back under plans to actually build green(er) infrastructure. Of course that's always matched by "organized immigrants are coming for your babies future jobs in macdonald's" or whatever is being spouted by the extreme right.
The UK's stance goes right against the values and goals these billionaires want and that's basically to do whatever they want without recourse. What better way to sow diversion than to stoke civil unrest and cause change to the systems that stand in their way.
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/12/30/how-the-take-ba... ( https://archive.ph/krvMU )
Meanwhile the government did not fix the housing issue, the cost of living disaster in London, the unemployment problem, ... and so on. And the central UK government forced small towns, cities and the like into bankruptcy. Now, in the UK, things like social support are financed by municipalities EXCEPT when it comes to immigrants. So, effectively, the government massively increased immigration, reduced social support and raised taxes on everybody except immigrants.
Then the government blamed very large youth services scandals, like the Rotherham scandal, on immigrants. This, despite the fact that these children had been taken from their homes by youth services and were under their custody AND despite the fact that youth services AND the police have been credibly accused of taking payoffs. Those people were definitely not immigrants, but they did not feature in the court proceedings "for some reason".
So government causes, to varying extents, large social problems. It ostensibly saves immigrants from these problems, and then the government itself blames immigrants for problems the government caused.
The problem here is not Twitter. I mean, they're not helping. But they're not the problem.
at the same time. two things can be true. everything you mentioned plays a large part in why we’re in a bit of a mess as a country.
this is being exacerbated by big tech firms, especially social media ones. the fact that a lie from some tech bro with a large soapbox can travel all the way around the world in less than a second makes it very hard to have a reasoned discussion or debate about the problem.
>Meanwhile the government did not fix the housing issue, the cost of living disaster in London, the unemployment problem, ... and so on.
These two things might be connected. It's almost like Brexit caused a series of large social problems.
That's not what any reasonable person would call "not delivered".
Here is the direct source: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-uks-points-ba...
(note: this was not loose enough for Johnson and with support from Rishi Sunak he loosened immigration policy even further. This was just the first shot)
The problems in the UK are actually focused around sticky blobbyness caused by a) lack of integration, b) left vs right flavor of the moment causing further segregation and c) long term socioeconomic factors leading to govt(councils) fixing the problem in the cheapest way possible which is unfortunately high profile in the British high street by the public.
A lot of British are moving out of the city centers themselves (or already have) and into suburbs which leaves the cities hollowed out. Lack of footfall means lack of investment means decay and cheap housing/buildings.
All of this is a predicable recipe for friction but very short term British politics combined with a "not my problem" attitude prevalent in the nhs and public sectors means people doubled down in short term solutions for over a generation.
That combined with more hardship causes people to look at the biggest broken problem which is our immigration system needed reforming over 20yr+ ago and unfortunately this was locked into place by EU laws and policy (such ironically we pushed for, for other political reasons).
It's less of a grand conspiracy and more of the dominoes we're set to fall this way after dragging us out of the 80s without fixing anything and then the post recession being used to fuel boom and growth vs fixing underlying issues at a national level.
In the archived version (linked elsewhere) there is a sea of negative comments within ~55 minutes of the article being posted, I seriously doubt a large percentage of them are legitimate (all of them doing the same routine, telling the exact same lines and stories).