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Hello all, I don’t often post as I find this place quite hostile when I’ve asked questions (well from some) BUT there is often some good advice too. With all that is currently going on around the UK it may just be me but have people become happier to show their racist views. It certainly seems the case at my workplace, I was told that I was both narrow minded and part of the “problem” when stated that attacking asylum seekers and immigrant groups was wrong and that any grievance whether well founded or not should be directed at governments as they wield the power to change things. To say I was shocked was an understatement!. I can’t really put it together that I’m narrow minded, I didn’t even suggest that there were no immigration issues. I was shown the government website showing what you get as an asylum seeker and that was why the winter fuel payments have stopped as an example. I could do with some help with being able to shut down some of the nonsense around the likes of Elon and Tommy robinson ( one or two at work have them on twitter!). I don’t want to start a fight but I feel like a bit of a lone voice of moderate reason and could do with at least some direction to properly fact checked info on both the key agitators and the arguments that are used. I know that that comes across as bit lazy but it’s a minefield out there when you start to look and to honest I don’t want to give the nastier sites the traffic count. Any help would be appreciated.
**** em. And get on with your life.
Or leave and get a job where your not surrounded by ****s!
If you want to make the case against racism I would suggest listening to the 8 minute recording of Darren from Reading on LBC.
And if you are feeling lonely in a pro-far right riot environment remind yourself that according to a recent YouGov poll only 7% of the population sympathize with them. You are not alone
The Overton window has moved, at least a bit, at least in some circles. It's more accepted to say things people would previously be keeping to themselves for fear of being branded an idiot. Because other people are doing it unchallenged in some circles it becomes seen as ok, and different others are saying even more outlandish things so your thing doesn't seem so bad anymore.
Obviously depends on your workplace, but in the cosy world of woke, tofu eating, Guardian reading civil servants, I would report anyone expressing racist views as it breaches our internal rules.
I'm pretty sure who it might be who will cross the line first, sadly.
I work in Accrington - one of the now dead former Northern mill towns, surprisingly there doesn't seem to be any racism in the company but I think it's because it's an international group of companies and has a long standing workforce with a wide mix of nationalities including Uganda, Ghana, most of the East European countries etc.
Its a good mix with a lot of socialising outside of work and is the better for it.
Don't see it in my current job, as we're pretty wide spectrum and any sniff of something like this, and the perpetrator is out the door.
In previous jobs and circles, it's different, always found a difference between being an industrial and non-industrial quite weird for this, along with the other -ism's, you just have to have your work life, and your personal life, avoid idiots, they're all around us, and just waste your limited time on this planet, this guy summed it up perfectly.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NGJu6kViRG8
"Never wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it."
that was why the winter fuel payments have stopped
How much taxpayer money did the Tories waste on Rwanda plans? About £400 million. More than enough to cover the payments to the 130k affected. But that's pig wrestling.. No-one gets far arguing with people like that because it's not about reason, they're not going to change their minds?
I don’t want to leave for lots of reasons, I don’t think I can change them but I do think I can at least get them think a bit more about where they should be looking when it comes to these issues. For a lot of them they are simply never challenged on this kind thing and so they don’t open themselves to debate ( not trying to make it sound too grandiose!!). In their opinion they are correct and that’s it. It may be like reasoning with a flat earther but I can at least try to get them to consider that there is an opposing and valid point of view.
The problem with the winter fuel payment is that ALL pensioners got it, regardless of personal wealth, and even if they live on the south coast of Spain, so there is a huge waste of public money there.
Typically it sounds like it's gone too far the other way and only people on pension credits or other benefits will qualify, and those with full state pension contributions and a tiny/insignificant private pension will lose out.
No-one gets far arguing with people like that because it’s not about reason, they’re not going to change their minds?
100% correct, couple of lads I work with (1 of them went to a 'protest march' last weekend and loved every second) who've never bothered to try n hide their views have literally talked about nothing else all week, constant commentary of the latest Twitter/X posts and vids and getting properly sick of hearing it now. Basically EVERYTHING that's wrong in the UK these days is because of immigrants/foreigners and Tommy Robinson is the only one with the balls to stand up and tell the truth
Complete waste of time trying to argue or reason with them
Challenge it with love and humanity. I shut my christian dad up when he was talking about immigration with "but thats not what Jesus would do is it?"
So arguments along the lines of "they are just human beings, with families, trying to survive in world that has dealt them a bad deal" followed by "try and have some compassion and hold onto less hate" work a lot better than trying to debate facts or countering misinformation.
Then report them to HR and get them sacked.
I too don't see it in my current job (or of the past 30 years to be honest).
I've variously worked in a nationalised co (BR) and British owned, North American owned, and German owned companies. But maybe, as per other replies, in in a well educated professional company, working on multi-national projects, with customers and colleagues from many countries. Similarly you can be sure most if not all we're 'remain' voting for the same reasons of NOT being narrow minded / parochial / bigoted or just plain ****ing stupid.
What would I do ? I'd absolutely take them to task for being narrow minded racist ****s themselves. Because if nobody puts them straight, this racist bollox continues to grow. And I'd make it exceptionally clear that they are ****whits for listening to the self serving ****ers like Faridge or ****-face-not-really-Tom-at all (point out that those 2 'patriotic' ****ers actually have foreign passports and citizenship- they're aren't even properly British.)
(And clearly you think it's wrong by rhe fact you've raised it here).
Where I work diversity and inclusion are key company values, so that coupled with a global workforce, means you’d get called out pretty quickly espousing any right-wing views at work. Given the size of the company, and its diversity of employees however, I’m under no illusions that there will be a substantial number who hold racist, sexist, or some other ist views, but they keep them to themselves. We have good, anonymous mechanisms for reporting issues as well.
Mind you, I also subscribe to the principle that religion and politics shouldn’t be discussed at work so I stay out of conversations anyway.
I’m not agreeing with them, but-
“So arguments along the lines of “they are just human beings, with families”
The vast majority of illegal immigrants are single men.
If it was nearly all families, there may be more compassion.
I don’t think I can change them but I do think I can at least get them think a bit more about where they should be looking when it comes to these issues.
It will have taken them years to have reached their bigoted opinions so no they won't change their minds because of what some geezer at work says to them.
I definitely wouldn't engage in pointless conversation with them but I would make comments in response to individual claims they might make. Racists invariably make daft and highly contradictory claims, the whole concept of racism is daft after all.
I would just concentrate on that and not engage further. Making themselves look stupid is very easy for racists especially when there is a sensible person to help them. That is more likely to silence them than any deep discussion that you might have with them.
Years ago I hit a man with a frozen chicken for being racist. Made me feel better and him feel concussed and no longer Mr Billy Big Bollocks. Had to leave the job as a result. The manager didn’t want to sack me so I offered to leave and the dickhead got sacked. I wouldn’t recommend this approach in the modern working environment. I’d just chat to their line manager or HR. No point trying to reason with idiots unless there’s a frozen chicken in striking distance!
The vast majority of illegal immigrants are single men.
I am not sure that you are following recent events. The current rioting isn't about illegal immigrants. They now specifically targeting lawyers and government provided immigration and refugee centres, which by definition means that they are targeting the legal process.
Own him with a frozen halal chicken then?
They won’t understand this but still…
If you can find some way to produce it from a small dinghy before ****ting him, even better.
Would not work in my team. We span the globe with many people not in their country of birth. We have a Polish lawer living in Spain, an Indian manager living in the US, in fact thinking about it we actually don’t have more than a couple of people in any one country in a team of 26. Time zone wise it makes calls a nightmare but it’s a fantastic diverse team.
Not sure what I would do in the OPs situation, I like to think I would call it out but the reality is I don’t know if I would be brave enough.
Years ago I hit a man with a frozen chicken for being racist
I think we need more details here. Were you all out of frozen sausages/did they not have a lawn?
The vast majority of illegal immigrants are single men.
Which illegal immigrants are you referring to? Those who have overstayed their visas for example?
The vast majority of illegal immigrants are single men.
Which illegal immigrants are you referring to? Those who have overstayed their visas for example?
No idea, I’d presume the anger is directed toward the people who come on the boats to Dover, who are mostly single men.
I’m not agreeing with them, but
“So arguments along the lines of “they are just human beings, with families”
The vast majority of illegal immigrants are single men.
If it was nearly all families, there may be more compassion.
Quite apart from the inaccurate "illegal immigrant" label, the demographics changed post-Brexit when the ONLY way to get here was made as arduous and dangerous as possible - when you didn't have to cross the channel in a boat to get here, almost half of asylum seekers were women and children. It's now mostly men leaving their families to come here first on their own because we made it that way.
...stated that attacking asylum seekers and immigrant groups was wrong and that any grievance whether well founded or not should be directed at governments as they wield the power to change things
Wow, you get into some deep convos at work. What a waste of breath. We just talk about whether we've seen Deadpool & Wolverine, or whether someone rebooted a server last night.
Wow, you get into some deep convos at work.
And in some cases thats a good and a bad thing.
I used to work for one of the countries largest Building Engineering companies at their Head Office. Every single employee was white British. There was no open racism, or poor culture. Someone employed a young Asian girl, again no comments, but lots of staring lots of odd behaviour around her. She was there about a month before she left, I assume she left of her own accord as no one spoke to her and it was clearly she was ostracised.
I do however think it is good to talk about difference and culture in the work place, that way you all begin to understand each other, but I do completely avoid politics/ the politics of race. Racism in the work place is very difficult to deal with. If its a good company racists tend to not be there as they wont fit the culture. If racism is discussed a lot thats a warning sign for me to get out as its ingrained in the organisation and its culture
To respond to the OP's original request, just Google what they say and see what the responses are - key here is to understand the providence of the results.
A good rule of thumb is if it's from somewhere like The Guardian etc, you probably can trust the answer - but if unsure, look beyond the first few results.
Wikipedia while written by you & I has enough readers & responders to be pretty reliable - but again xref against other results.
Then challenge, with facts.
Report them.
who are mostly single men
Reason;
Either a war torn country, or one with a giant % of unemployment. In your family(not you or yours actually because i know you arent subscribing to this nonsense)
So in the family who is going to take the risks of moving abroad to better their position, or to escape war/turmoil etc.
Send your daughter ?
Send your grandmother ?
An ageing parent ?
Or your son, who is in his 20's(or a bit younger)
Mrs Pondo is currently on holiday so I’m temporarily on my own – that doesn’t make me a “single man”.
It could do, missed opportunity...
This is not a fight you're going to win. As someone married to an immigrant (albeit a white, English speaking one), and who has worked on construction sites, this sort of topic has come up a lot. I have told plant operators that they will have to leave the site if they make any more racist comments, but you're obviously not in that position of power.
You can present these people with facts, counter arguments and whatever else but you won't change their mind.
The best thing to do is make it clear what they're saying is unacceptable. The best way to do that would probably be to go to management and say "with all the riots and stuff that's going on at the moment, a few people have started making racist comments. Please can you make it clear this isn't acceptable in the workplace?" An all staff email, or signs up around the place, saying that discriminatory comments are not acceptable and anyone making them will be disciplined, will have more effect in at least showing them what they're saying isn't OK than you arguing with them.
No idea, I’d presume the anger is directed toward the people who come on the boats to Dover, who are mostly single men.
Which ones are illegal immigrants versus asylum seekers who are legally allowed to claim asylum (of which 70%+ are successful).
You would need to somehow be able to tell which people are going to claim asylum or not and more so which will be successful or not before making any determination on someone being illegally in the country.
Oddly I do feel for employers with this at the moment. Like it or not 14% of voters voted reform last month. And Farage no matter how much you loath the odious *er, he's a clever odious *er. He's found a linguistic way, a dog whistle way, to talk in the racist themes not far short of the EDL and the National Front that is not illegal and now being repeated by his 'sheeple' (always nice to repurpose a phrase). As an employer, even one with a good attitude to racism, it's going to be damn hard to define the line between spouting the rhetoric of a legitimate political party and outright racist speech that finds the offender out the door.
Fun times we live in.
You could suggest they watch the film The Swimmers, which does give an insight into why people chose to leave their original country for somewhere else - of course it may go over their heads. As a father to daughters I found it a difficult watch at times.
You could suggest they watch the film The Swimmers, which does give an insight into why people chose to leave their original country for somewhere else – of course it may go over their heads. As a father to daughters I found it a difficult watch at times.
Good call. Mrs C got her parents watching this whilst they were staying with us back in June. MiL's (who is savable) reaction was "I'd never really thought about it from that angle". FiL (who is not) sat through it in stony silence. And he's father to two daughters, one of whom was a high level swimmer. Empathy and decentering is just beyond some people.
Not sure where a lot of you guys work, but i'm not holding my hopes on his work colleagues taking time out to watch a motivational movie based around immigrants, from his wording i feel he may be on the outside looking in, so grassing them up probably isn't a suitable route either, if they even have a functioning HR department that is.
As previous, work life, actual life, that's the split, find another job if it's that bad, learn how to work with them and forget about them the minute you finish if you can't.
No-one gets far arguing with people like that because it’s not about reason, they’re not going to change their minds?
I think the thing thats worth considering what 'opinion' is and the role it plays in peoples lives.
People form opinions very easily - when we first encounter something, someone, somewhere, a situation we almost instantly form an opinion about it. We have opinions on almost everything we're aware of regardless of how much or little knowledge we have about those things.
It requires no effort to form an opinion, we literally do it without thinking, but once someone has formed 'an opinion' for whatever reason they'll often then work really quite had to defend, justify, and rationalise it.
We seem to treat opinions as if they have value, 'everyone has the right to an opinion' apparently, although I'm not sure where that right in enshrined. It's probably more correct to say 'everyone has the right to an informed option' and it's the right to information that we should be defending. But our opinions are pretty much something we're hostage to.
We should really treat opinions as our weaknesses. In situations where facts are critical we strive to try and factor opinions out, and often fail. Bias and expectation and tradition sneak in and sabotage all sorts of efforts to seek objective truth.
In the instance of arguing with a racist what you have to consider is that at some point that person has arrived at that opinion quite by accident - they've acquired a sense of suspicion, a fear, a distaste, an sense of superiority, an unease of a certain kind of other for no particular rational reason. I think racism and anti-immigration is often really not much more, deep down, than impostor syndrome. But once someone has those kinds of feelings about those kinds of others they'll grasp at anything that will rationalise and justify that feeling. That they are right to be scared, that they are right to feel threatened.
Whether those rationalising notions are true, or relevant, or proportional doesnt really matter because people don't rigorously, objectively vet information that flatters their opinion. It's too thrilling to hear. Nobody looks that kind of gift horse in the mouth.
But the 'facts' that people grasp on to are far less preciously held than the opinion that they help bolster. Truth is less important that truthiness. There isn't true and false in relation to the opinion you hold - things are true if you agree with them, if that same thing is shown to unfounded, then is simply becomes 'the sort of thing that would the true'. It may be factually wrong, but you were right to believe it. And in a short while people forget that it was a lie and it'll become one of their truths again.
What's import to consider is - absolutely nobody is immune from this. Some people recognise their subjectivity more readily than others but nobody can eradicate it. Some people have been happily coached treat their opinions as the essence of their being and actively shield them from the truth.
I don’t want to start a fight but I feel like a bit of a lone voice of moderate reason and could do with at least some direction to properly fact checked info on both the key agitators and the arguments that are used.
Adam Rutherford had a great little series on Radio 4 called 'How to argue with a racist', which is sadly no longer on BBC Sounds (seems never more pertinent really, they should put it back up) but a quick search suggests there are numerous podcasts with him talking on the subject as in interviewee (and theres a book by the same title). But... forget facts and fact checking. Its feelings. Facts (and falsehoods) are just decoration.
The best thing to do is make it clear what they’re saying is unacceptable. The best way to do that would probably be to go to management and say “with all the riots and stuff that’s going on at the moment, a few people have started making racist comments. Please can you make it clear this isn’t acceptable in the workplace?” An all staff email, or signs up around the place, saying that discriminatory comments are not acceptable and anyone making them will be disciplined, will have more effect in at least showing them what they’re saying isn’t OK than you arguing with them.
As if by magic, an email has just come round my work saying that we're not going to be effected by the disorder, and generally making it clear that it's not OK.
Like it or not 14% of voters voted reform last month.
Well they lost, shouldn't they "just get over it"?
Erm, winter fuel payments haven’t stopped. They’re means tested as they should have been in the first place. This first year could be difficult, but let’s see what Labour do in subsequent years about the boundaries of entitlement. At the moment around 1m of 13m are around the boundaries and it’s a sharp cutoff, but may be tapered in subsequent years.
Just remind them - correlation isn’t causation.
Labour are trying to unpick 14y of mismanagement and failed policies - did the Tories/UKIP/Brexit manage to do ANYTHING about immigration even with the fuel payment? No they just made us poorer and then tried to buy their way out of the mess they made in the first place. Had they not shafted the exchange rate for gas and oil imports, the WFP might not have been required by so many. Had they invested properly in energy, the Ukraine crisis might not have led to such sharp swings in domestic energy prices. Had they properly kept green energy prices detached from gas prices in contracts, perhaps energy prices wouldn’t have been so volatile.
Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. Good riddance to them and their 7% following.
Erm, winter fuel payments haven’t stopped. They’re means tested as they should have been in the first place.
Quite rightly - and I say that as a pensioner who won't be getting the payment this year.
As bigblackshed said.
It requires no effort to form an opinion, we literally do it without thinking, but once someone has formed ‘an opinion’ for whatever reason they’ll often then work really quite had to defend, justify, and rationalise it.
One thing I've caught myself doing in recent times is reading things and instinctively reacting with "no it isn't," the reason being that I read another opinion piece which said something different about two minutes ago. I'm trying really hard not to do this but it's alarmingly difficult.
Both mainstream media and social media knows this. You can plant an idea in someone's head and once it's there inertia takes hold even if you subsequently recant the statement.
How many cover versions are better than the original song? Why? Because you heard it first.