I hope I’m wrong

You are not an undesirable. We have had our differences and I have my struggles lately but we have kind of known each other on different politics forums for a long time now and I am fond of you. You also debate intelligently and reasonably (I know I sometimes fail in the latter which I need to work on). 

It is a bit late in the day, but mass movement of people is having a politically destabilising effect across Europe for sure. But how much of that is directly caused by the movement of people and how much is simply the result of racists exploiting this to make hay is difficult to differentiate. Maybe the two are so intertwined that it doesn't actually matter. 

I think there is a lot of cultural fear in the west. We in the west have nurtured secular values of liberalism, sexual freedom, gender equality, and live and let live, made possible by the decline in the power of the Christian churches in most of our lives. But we see others flooding in from Islamic countries, bringing with them a religiously based intolerance to varying degrees and too many of them do not actually accept what we have come to regard as western values.

Of course, some Muslim immigrant nutter going on a murderous rampage in Germany shouting Allah u Akbar just serves to massively reinforce such fears, and is an absolute gift to the racists. Though the fact that many Muslims have integrated well into western societies does tend to be overlooked all too often.

How justified are the fears versus how exaggerated are they?

The far right are on the march throughout Europe but I do not think the pressures they are exploiting are anything new. There has always been the scope for far right movements but for many years such thinking was regarded by most people as beyond the pale. The horrors of WW2 and the terrible result of the far right in power made generations who lived through those times highly averse to any form of hard right ever rising again. But as WW2 recedes into history and the last of those who were there pass away, this aversion to the far right is diminishing which is why it needs to be challenged with legitimate concerns acknowledged and addressed.

Germany actually is an interesting case, since the experience of it's people after the war was very different in east and west. The west was quickly rehabilitated, not least economically, and most people were far better off than they ever had been under Hitler. And as the culpable generations became supplanted by younger ones growing up untainted by any personal complicity, rejection of Germany's Nazi past became widespread and heartfelt. In the east however for four decades the Germans there lived under an oppressive regime that most would have experienced as much more oppressive than the Nazis had been and it lasted far longer. That regime of course condemned the Nazis with at least as much, and for the first couple of decades far more, vigour than the rulers in the west did. But it would have been far easier for Germans in the east to view this as communist propaganda and to look back upon the Nazi years with nostalgia. And since reunification the east has continued to be more economically deprived than the west.

In view of these two separate sets of experiences, the east was always going to be far more fertile ground than the west for a far right resurgence, and so it is proving. Far right support is growing in the west too but it is far stronger in the east.

Good post and partly where I was trying to go that the fears do have foundation and yes they are being exploited by people like Yaxley Lennon but you cannot escape that moderate people have real concerns and the sweeping far right tag encompasses them too.

There are people genuinely troubled that what they post may come back to bite them when they really shouldn’t be troubled because freedom of speech matters and as with any freedoms there comes a responsibility but that responsibility too lies on the executive and  justice system.

You know my views on Blair and his part in where we and many of the people who have moved are and his mark on both.

Well as you know I am no fan of Blair. We in the west - certainly the UK under Blair especially and the USA  - have often gone into countries, totally fucked them up and screwed them over....then buggered off again. And the refugees from many of our fuck ups then flood into Europe. And some come here.

Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan are where a great many are coming from. Others come from Syria which we resisted the temptation to go into this time, so the Russian did it instead. Blair of course also opened our borders to Eastern Europe, though most of these at least were comfortable with western values. 

Maybe you ought to pay Blair a back handed compliment. Brexit might never have happened were it not for him, lol

in my opinion a lot of the problems can be just put down to population growth. The feeling that things are changing too fast, not just culturally but in other ways. 
As population density increases so you need every more rules and controls to keep people safe. Lower and more frequent speed limits would be a classic example. 

Traffic controls one might have only expected in big cities slowly spread out with that growing population density and make life feel less relaxed.

(I use traffic control as an example, but there are many other areas of public life that change as population gets denser)

Does this feeling of change make cause people to look at immigrants as the cause, 

You make a valid point Mr Benn (as you so often do). Actually not sure the driver of uncomfortableness is cultural difference (human beings are actually pretty similar - they want to be safe, they want to look after their kids) but difference itself - colour of skin, language, clothes, food in local shops - and fear of the unknown from difference. That isn’t racist - well actually strictly speaking it probably is but not in the current prejudice and hatred that has become a part of the meaning of that word but more a natural human reaction to change and being taken out of comfort zones.

You are again confusing asylum with immigration Wapentake. The two are only tangentially related with asylum representing only somewhere between 5% and 10% of total immigrant numbers each year.

You would be right to say we have dealt with asylum claimants poorly allowing backlogs to build up and previously used accommodation to lapse. All part of the previous governments policy of pandering to tabloids rather than finding practical solutions to issues. Hotels are emotive and often misleading. Facilities previously existing in hotels (restaurants, bars, possibly gyms and swimming pools ) will all have been closed, beds and room service long gone and replaced with basic no choice food menus and strangers sharing rooms. I agree though it would be better to process claims quicker and hence not need to take over buildings previously used as hotels. I agree too that we treat homeless people very poorly in this country.

I agree too that people concerned about immigration and asylum are not NECESSARILY racist or far right indeed as we have spoken about before, many such ordinary decent people have simply been lied to by those seeking power through press and social media lies.

It seems you do want to focus on the relatively small number of asylum seekers rather than the wider issue of immigration. OK that is fine.

As we saw earlier in this thread, you have quoted a series of assertion which are simply factually wrong. When asked to justify them you failed to do so. And you are doing the same here. All of those factually inaccurate assertions have presumably been taken on board from a very sophisticated campaign of lies and distortions by politicians, aspects of the media and social media, aimed at driving people whose natural political positions lie in broad sympathy with those politicians into silos where their loyalty can be assured. That absolutely doesn’t make you an “idiot”.

You state as fact that many seeking asylum are not fleeing repression but again the facts simply do not support you. When each individual case is rigorously assessed, between 70-80% are found to have been fleeing repression and entitled to asylum. I would agree with you that the remaining 20%-30% , once they have had the right to appeal once, mistakes do happen, should be removed. Again the last government was dreadful at that - prioritising media gimmicks like the Bibby Stockholm over taking glamorous un-media friendly but productive practical steps to solve problems.