[concordDance]

"Left" and "right" tend to decoher once you move outside a particular political space into another (e.g. one country to another). The UK right wing party introduced gay marriage, but even the most left wing part of the country (Scotland) isn't particularly progressive (e.g. majority disapproval of allowing gender self identification to 16).

Similarly, trying to judge the UK on racial issues by US standards gets quite confusing. The common British attitude towards Romani would make even the confederate flag wavers of Texas call them racists.

On the other hand, there's full support for plenty of state intervention and state support, e.g. pretty much no one says they want to abolish the NHS.

[antod]

> Similarly, trying to judge the UK on racial issues by US standards gets quite confusing. The common British attitude towards Romani would make even the confederate flag wavers of Texas call them racists.

Not directly related to Romani treatment in Britain (not familiar enough with that to judge), but sometimes I wonder if the english language needs better words to distinguish between race based bigotry and culture based bigotry.

eg often I notice for a person there will be a difference in how they treat/view "acclimatised" descendants of immigrants vs new immigrants due to being ostensibly the same race but different culturally. Of course racists will still have bigotry for both groups.

[concordDance]

> sometimes I wonder if the english language needs better words

Words like this are not bad by coincidence, they're bad because they're incredibly politically important words and thus have their meanings and connotations fought over intensely.

It doesn't matter what new word or words you try and put in place, if they relate to things people have different strong feelings on then the meanings will become messy over time.

[whatshisface]

The word I think you're searching for is, "xenophobia."

[fuzztester]

In this connection, the book Lavengro by George Borrow is interesting reading.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavengro

Excerpts from the Wikipedia article:

Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest (1851) is a work by George Borrow, falling somewhere between the genres of memoir and novel, which has long been considered a classic of 19th-century English literature.

Theodore Watts, in an introduction to the 1893 edition, declared that "There are passages in Lavengro which are unsurpassed in the prose literature of England".[9] This edition started a run of reprints which produced one or more almost every year for 60 years. Lavengro was included in the Oxford University Press World's Classics series in 1904, and in Everyman's Library in 1906.[10]

[lazyasciiart]

> The common British attitude towards Romani would make even the confederate flag wavers of Texas call them racists.

I think you are misjudging the confederate flag wavers, what makes you say this?