The UK's Real Immigration Crisis

 Glenn Reynolds often discusses the impact of "preference cascades." Although there are different definitions you might come across, Reynolds uses the term to describe a situation where the greater number of people come to realize that a privately held belief, which they believed to be a minority position, is actually widely held. That is, they realize "I'm not the only one". This can result in sudden changes in political power (such as revolution) or a sudden shift in the "Overton Window". 

    Which brings us to a recent column by Glenn Reynolds, published in the New York Post, entitled "The dam is breaking on Britain’s illegal immigration crisis — and the results could be ugly." Reynolds begins:

     Britain’s Labour government is in trouble: Its program of massive third-world immigration from places like Pakistan and Somalia is wildly, overwhelmingly unpopular.

    But that’s not the real problem. 

    The real problem is that despite the best efforts of Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his leftist captive media, Britons themselves have discovered just how unpopular it is.  

 The problem is not just that there is a preference cascade, but that successive UK governments have tried to dam up any changes to public opinion through censorship, intimidation, and cover ups. Reynolds writes:

    For years, Britain has stifled reports of immigrant rape gangs in places like Rotherham and has persecuted those who have called attention to them, even jailing some. 

    And as the government gives light sentences to child rapists, it’s imprisoning moms for tweets on grounds of “inciting race hatred.”

    It’s all to construct and maintain something known as “preference falsification,” a move usually practiced by authoritarian regimes. 

    The trick is, you make citizens pretend that they believe what the government says, and fake their approval of what it does.

    You promote marches and demonstrations and speech in favor of the government’s preferred positions, and you severely punish marches and demonstrations and speech that oppose the government’s favored positions. 

    You give excuses, like “stopping counterrevolutionary activity” or “fighting hate speech,” for shutting down any opposition. 

    You may even have informers to ferret out wrongthink and report it to the authorities, or to employers, or to third parties who will engage in extralegal (but government-supported) harassment.

    If you do it right, you can have upward of 90% of your population hating you and your policies, but doing and saying nothing about them — because everyone in that 90% thinks they’re part of a tiny minority. 

    Resistance will seem to be futile. 

But, as he explains, this works until suddenly it doesn't--a preference cascade. And where will this preference cascade end? The British PM,  Keir Starmer, being replaced? Britain suddenly changing its immigration policy? Violence--real violence--in the streets?

    At the least, Starmer's political career may be in jeopardy. And for the Labour Party, the potential loss of power is the real immigration crisis.