Britain is at a breaking point. There are existential questions to be asked:
Is Britain British without British Bourgeoisie that have lived there for thousands of years with new arrivals that have no commmon culture or connection to the land?
Can Japan be called Japan without Japanese that have lived there for thousands of years and their homogeneous identity?
Why is it okay for one but not the other? Where does this double standard come from ?
The fact is the loudest voice in the room so far has never been representative of the answer to the above questions.
Britain had an empire that lasted hundreds of years, and whose greatest legacy is linguistic and temporal system dominance. Having spent centuries proclaiming itself to be the literal center of civilization to most of the world, is it really surprising that ambitious individuals gravitate toward it? This is the common culture that Britain set out to impose on its possessions.
It's especially ironic (though not especially surprising) that immigration from former territories went way up after Britain forcibly detached itself from the EU. Perhaps the Brexiteers wil offer to secede from the world next - build a national space program and launch Britain into orbit as a second satellite that can service its markets while orbiting the planet from a distance.
Yes, you're right. But colonial culture sucked! Britain didn't spend centuries socializing India in the principles behind the Magna Carta, individual rights, due process of law, etc. The colonies got the pointy end of the stick. Why wouldn't Britons be upset at that being turned on them?
"Mass immigration is your punishment for the British Empire" has a certain ideological appeal. But if you're a British person, you don't care about that. What matters is whether you'd rather live in London as it was in 2000 or London today. And I think the answer to that is obvious if your judgment isn't compromised. My parents went to visit London a year or two ago, and my mom was shocked by the decline in public order and standards, the ghettos, etc. This is a woman who lived in Bangladesh most of her life, and she came back telling me about the decline of London.
actually Britain still see these arrivals. Brexit restored immigration from people with more walks of life and with a more worldwide origins. There is no fast track for any nationality, like when EU citizens didn't need a visa, so companies are blind to origin.
You only got rid of the maudzits français / stronzo francese who liked the queen way too much and feel at home everywhere. The Québécois, the Swiss, the Dutch and a part of Europe look at Britain as an example for that : it's so funny to see them struggle with the UK ETA app while they no longer have Tyrrells crisps, as they keep complaining about british food and were mean about the tapestry anyway.
But was this show worth the losses that Britain had ?
It's never too late to apply again, Britain hasn't deviated from its course of rule of law and democracy
Pretty sure a Japanese person could say the same thing about the U.K.
https://radiolab.org/podcast/americanish-2306
It's also fun to watch people's heads explode over the hypocracy pointed out by this episode. Short version: If Samoa has to follow non-racial discrimination rules than Samoa as a place of Samoans will cease to exist. Without taking a side, the same is true of Israel.
https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/newsroom/27-young-...
This is clearly not sustainable.
Britain overnight cannot have a fresh start from its past, even the royals have ties to other nations. The England that was always English never existed and its history will always be rooted in the British empire (where the sun never set).
> Can Japan be called Japan without Japanese that have lived there for thousands of years and their homogeneous identity?
> Why is it okay for one but not the other? Where does this double standard come from ?
Disingenuous question; even people who like Japan and Japanese culture tend to dislike how xenophobic and racist it is.
This idea that for some reason other human beings cannot embrace, be a part of, and contribute to existing culture simply because they were born in a different country is flagrantly absurd. It’s also how people who are born somewhere, but don’t “look the part” have to fight an uphill battle to prove they are.
So yeah, Japan could be called Japan if people who live there are culturally Japanese, participate in shared culture, and contribute to it. I am also absolutely aware that isn’t possible by any reasonable means currently, but it doesn’t change the fact it should be.
Not all immigrants are good. Many cost society more than they contribute. The right kind of immigrants are good.
Migration is not just a choice between an open door and a closed door, but a spectrum. There are a variety of levels between those two extremes.
Mixing of cultures always lead to adding up their different solutions to all kinds of problems, improving the fitness of the result among other groups of humans.
It's gathering all the positive ideas or traditions of several groups, and the less useful or negative aspects tend to just fade naturally.
And its "homogeneous identity" is mostly a construction, dating back from the Meiji era.
And Heian period Japan had a completely different set of values, not less nor more valid than Meiji era Japan, just different.
So the identity of a nation is not something eternal nor absolute.
Heck, there is even proof Japan has been a mosaic of at least three sets of human populations in prehistoric times, arrived at different times on the land.
So here you are: yes Japan was, long time ago, a land of immigration.
Unrestricted immigration destroys democratic high trust societies.
There is a balance to be found, as in all things. It isn’t simply diversity always good or always bad.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/revoke-artic...
This is a common trope but is simply not true. The polls were really tight[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_United...
Sadly this now cuts the other way and the EU is highly unlikely to enter into anything with us without serious guarantees.
I'm all up for defence spending in Europe, but if you had anything to do with British state education or healthcare, you know what a desperate move this is.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-07/uk-plans-...
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/07/02/broken-bri...
"The British GDP has been reduced by 6–8%, business investment has been reduced by 12%, and trade volume has been reduced by 15%, compared to what it could have been if the U.K. had remained in the EU."
https://now.tufts.edu/2026/06/08/10-years-after-brexit-vote-...
The UK is doing fine, especially relative to other EU countries. None of the things the anti-Brexit side claimed would happen have happened.
I think a lot of the Brexit vote was just people being fed up and voting for something different. In my experience few Brexit voters are happy with what arrived.
- UK would rejoin EU,
- and then, later on, Reform would reach power and undermine EU just like Orban did.
So maybe it would be better to refuse UK its reentry into EU...
However such a referendum is basically taboo in the British public discourse.
Edit: Easy to see the Russian bots are out in force tonight!
We went from making two million cars a year to just 750 thousand. Investment plummeted.
Note that even the sole prominent Brexit economist predicted this.
The UK is not the empire it was once, they need ties with mainland Europe, their closest trading partners, to be economically viable. So this doesn't entirely come as a surprise to me.
Of course this was painted as "project fear", and Michael Gove famously said that people had had enough of experts.
They used lies. Literal fabrications out of whole cloth.
They said that the UK was spending hundreds of millions of pounds on the EU, and if they pulled out they could use that money on like the NHS or something.
Lies.
The average person doesn't care about any of that.
If ~99% of those gains go to ~0.1% of people, the average person does not care.
What they do care about is, did MY expenses go up higher than MY wages. Did MY opportunities get better or worse...
In the UK example, the result is potentially even worse - but I would guess the response to COVID & global wars are likely to have a bigger impact on that than Brexit.
States are sovreign, the federal body doesn't have direct powers of taxation and the money it does get is what the states tell it it's getting, foreign policy only happens to extent individual states say it does, lacks a fully unified financial system, more about interstate commerce than anything else.
But yes, if you hate that and want to spend 6-8% GDP not having it, this is absolutely within the rights of the people to decide that.
Of course, if they didn't want that and just plain didn't believe the people who accurately explained the cost, that's an argument for undoing it. Lying politicians isn't at all unique here, and unfortunately politicians saying the decision is permanent and irreversable is also not at all unique, but it is anti-democratic.
Of course, any economic gains weren't guaranteed and were predicated on competent national government and we saw what happened there.
However, net-net, I'd rather have one shite layer of government, rather than two.
To make a parallel that might work for California or NY. In Europe however there is no single country that is so much better than the others at making money, in the same way as those two. Even countries that didn't enter the EU (Switzerland, Norway) accepted most of the EU regulations because they need some of them.
The UK in that respect already had the sweetest deal of all EU members; and, unlike Switzerland or Norway, actually had a say on the regulations that it had to follow. Plus, they had and have a messy situation due to (non-EU-related and therefore unaffected by Brexit) agreements that the border with Ireland cannot be a customs union, so the only thing a competent national government could do was to tell people they had been duped and promised something impossible. The result would have been a Switzerland- or Norway-like non-membership, with small benefits and less power in the EU.
Quite distinct groups of humans mixed in ancient Japan, as different and distant at that time as the groups that are mixed in modern times in Peru or India.
Some groups were related to Autronesians, others to Yakuts, yet other groups to Hans, etc.
If I remember correctly, at least three distinct groups are proven to have cohabited and arrived at different times.
Don't repeat the mistakes made by Norway, Sweden, Germany, etc.
It should be a HIGH bar to get in and a LOW bar to get yeeted out again.
("unrelated" is too strong, but I think they're weak correlations)
> The United Kingdom consulted its citizens directly only after joining the European Communities: following the British general election of October 1974, the Labour government of Harold Wilson held a referendum to fulfill one of its campaign promises. The non-binding referendum was held on 5 June 1975, some two and half years after the UK's accession. It was the first ever national referendum to be held in the UK, and the "yes" vote won by a landslide 67.23% on a 65% turnout with 66 out of the 68 local counting areas returning majority "yes" votes.
I'm inclined to count that.
OF course people would rather live in a period when things were simpler and easier, who wouldn't? The lie sold by the self-styled reformists (and doubled down upon by the emerging Restore Britain) is that all these unwanted outcomes were done to Britain by Other People instead of being the product of repeated bad decisions - Brexit being the most recent one. Someone else in the thread observed that about 27 immigrants are offered jobs for every native Briton entering the workforce. But this notion of prioritizing market forces at the expense of all other considerations is exactly the legacy of Thatcherite conservatism that has dominated Britain for nearly a half-century and of which the Brexit/Reform/Restor movements are the ost recent iterations.
As John Bagot Glubb pointed out ~50 years ago (and many others have pointed out before him), the root causes of decline are complacency, greed, and individualism (vs the notion of social duty). I put it to you that modern finance capitalism selects for these negative traits because they maximize short-term gain and because the accumulation of money allows the holders of it to be indifferent to the long-term structural problems. The primary reason I do not identify as a political conservative is that they sell tradition to the electorate but conserve wealth and power for themselves.
But British people today aren't doomed to allowing historical forces to play out. Or are you suggesting futility--that the British government lacks the state capacity to prevent what's happening?
The point though - it's irrelevant. Even those cases, and even straight up cases where people come here and just go on the dole, don't change the fact that as a whole immigrants are a net positive to the country(financially), and that's based on the OFR findings not my imagination.
Myself I have spent almost two decades in Britain, paid my taxes (at the highest rate at that), and decided to leave when I saw that the immigration talk had turned everybody into racist lunatics, and even people like me, from the same continent, were made to feel unwelcome by this rhetoric. For all I care, it's a failed state, yet it has not yet seen the bottom until it progresses its descent into decay, the same that has infected the US and elected Trump.
You will get your Reform government and it'll be Brexit times 10. Only then, maybe, the British people will stop falling for far-right propaganda paid for the Russians.
