“Le persone sono arrabbiate”: dietro l’ondata di proteste dell’hotel asilo

People are angry and that is why they increasingly turn away from mainstream politicians and look to Nigel Farage or Jeremy Corbyn at the opposite end of the political spectrum, with actual extremists lurking in the wings.

Here is an idea for the government and all mainstream politicians: don’t get bogged down in statistical arguments about precisely who is shoplifting, nicking phones or grooming schoolgirls, or whether things were better or worse 30 years ago if you look at this crime survey rather than that other crime survey; it is your job simply to stop these bad things happening.

The linked article has a bar chart showing the number of asylum seekers in hotels has fallen (or fell then went up a bit, depending which party you support). Really that is to miss the point. The demonstrators don’t care whether there are 30,000 spread across the country, it is the 500 in their town that bother them.

The problems are real. Don’t tell people they imagined their phone was stolen, their son beaten up, and their daughter has no job prospects. Fix it.

The problem is people are angry at things that aren’t the cause of the issues they claim to care about.
Immigrants are not why the NHS is struggling. 14 years of Tory rule plus a huge pandemic is.
Housing asylum seekers isnt why councils are struggling. A combination of funding cuts from central government and increased costs for things like adult social care and SEN provision, general inflation and things like large pay lawsuits are.
We had large scale issues with sexual assault, grooming and the like long before what these people see as mass immigration.

And they are also often just plain wrong.
The way lots of these people talk they seem to think illegal immigrants and asylum seekers are the majority of immigrants when in reality that is far from the case.
They also seem to group anyone who isnt white British into the same bucket (hence them hassling someone who was delivering to one of the hotels).

And of course there’s the hypocrisy. Claiming to be worried about law and order but chanting the name of a career criminal in support of him.

TLDR – its the usual thing that happens when things are feeling and getting worse for a lot of people – they are angry about that but blame the wrong things and end up being attracted to extremist popularists who claim they will solve the problems without actually having any plan to do so.

social media algorithm feeding us all a constant diet of outrage probably isn’t helping

They should put drugs in the water supply.

If the anger is based on fabrication, we don’t need to act.