"native Britons are bloody stupid" and other shenanigans
Hey! Don't shoot the messenger. Don't shoot Lord Kerr either, since he's the one who said it.
The media is in a tizzy because Lord Kerr called native Britons stupid when defending immigration. I have some poorly organised thoughts about this.
Firstly, Lord Kerr was a diplomat before becoming a life peer. He knows exactly how much shit he's stirring up. Why he's doing this I don't know, but his comments are apparently so inflammatory to the right that Stormfront's cryfest (no links, fascists deserve to be deprived of oxygen) was one of the top results when I googled this. Maybe he's hoping that they get too distracted circlejerking over how racist he is to white people. That's the best-case scenario.
Secondly, I'm actually pretty upset about his comments. Of course I'm angry at xenophobic Brits. Of course I'm even more irritated when they're stupid into the bargain. But he punched down at a lot of the more marginalised people in British society, at a time when social mobility is decreasing massively. I can't defend that.
What I can do is laugh. Laugh at all native Britons? No. But as an immigrant, I have to face xenophobic bullshit more than I would care to - your standard bullshit about how I should go home, I don't integrate enough, I take away jobs from hard-working British people while simultaneously being lazy and claiming all of the benefits at once, my existence somehow ruins a total stranger's tightly-knit community, and so on. There is no polite way to talk about how some native British people have shown themselves up as utter hypocrites, simply because they hated me that much for not being born on "their" soil. So I don't bother trying to be polite. I don't go out of my way to be rude, either - it's a waste. So I laugh - it's frankly an absurd situation.
The media is in a tizzy because Lord Kerr called native Britons stupid when defending immigration. I have some poorly organised thoughts about this.
Firstly, Lord Kerr was a diplomat before becoming a life peer. He knows exactly how much shit he's stirring up. Why he's doing this I don't know, but his comments are apparently so inflammatory to the right that Stormfront's cryfest (no links, fascists deserve to be deprived of oxygen) was one of the top results when I googled this. Maybe he's hoping that they get too distracted circlejerking over how racist he is to white people. That's the best-case scenario.
Secondly, I'm actually pretty upset about his comments. Of course I'm angry at xenophobic Brits. Of course I'm even more irritated when they're stupid into the bargain. But he punched down at a lot of the more marginalised people in British society, at a time when social mobility is decreasing massively. I can't defend that.
What I can do is laugh. Laugh at all native Britons? No. But as an immigrant, I have to face xenophobic bullshit more than I would care to - your standard bullshit about how I should go home, I don't integrate enough, I take away jobs from hard-working British people while simultaneously being lazy and claiming all of the benefits at once, my existence somehow ruins a total stranger's tightly-knit community, and so on. There is no polite way to talk about how some native British people have shown themselves up as utter hypocrites, simply because they hated me that much for not being born on "their" soil. So I don't bother trying to be polite. I don't go out of my way to be rude, either - it's a waste. So I laugh - it's frankly an absurd situation.
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