[anigbrowl]

It's not a matter of ideology, or of punishment. It's simply the dynamics of the system playing out. It's alienating for people inside of it because they're experiencing the effects of historical forces which operate on a scale longer than human life.

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.

https://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

[rayiner]

> It's not a matter of ideology, or of punishment. It's simply the dynamics of the system playing out. It's alienating for people inside of it because they're experiencing the effects of historical forces which operate on a scale longer than human life.

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?

[djhn]

If the government had the capacity to prevent this, they would have. It appears, therefore, that they indeed do not.

[anigbrowl]

Yes, they largely do lack the capacity, short of drastic restructuring of state institutions. What are they going to do? North Korea type isolation? Ethnic cleansing? The latter is essentially the program of the Restore Britain party, though I'm not sure if that's an actual party-in-waiting or a front group designed to make Reform or the Conservatives look more reasonable.