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0 pointsirjoe1y ago0 comments

I'm not sure that's entirely true in the UK. The Polish plumber taking British jobs is a fairly common trope in far-right discourse. I believe this is prevalent across Western Europe in general.

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jkaplowitz1y ago

I’m not convinced that the adherents of the UK and Western European far-right count Polish people as white, despite the typical Polish skin color. This is like how Italian and Irish people were often not considered white in the late 19th and early 20th century in the US, and probably in the UK too although I’m less familiar with that.

zarzavat1y ago

English people are generally not racist like Americans and don’t perceive the world in terms of a set of racial divisions. We are Island xenophobes, like Japanese people. There is us and then there is everybody else. Western Europeans get a pass because they are rich.

graemep1y ago

British culture is very different from US with regard to race. It took me a long time to understand what the difference was.

In fact every culture I know (directly or am informed about) is different form the others. I wrote a blog post about this: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different

I do not think people in the UK care about where immigrants are from, they care about whether they compete with them for jobs. This is why some groups of people wanted less EU immigration (predominantly unskilled) and more skilled immigration, and professional people almost universally want EU immigration and oppose post Brexit policies that have allowed more highly skilled immigration.

tsimionescu1y ago

This doesn't mean anything. It's either about skin color or not. If they have another criteria by which they decided that us Eastern Europeans are subhuman, then they don't have a problem with brown people, they have a problem with us.

maccard1y ago

I think that was true 10 years ago, but now it seems to have evened off a bit. Generally speaking (in my circles and the circles I see around me with family etc) there’s an acceptance of the “polish plumber” as a hard working person getting by these days.

immibis1y ago

This happens to each race in turn. First they're brown people coming to steal our jobs, then they're hard workers and some other race is stealing our jobs, then they're white or white-equivalent.

short_sells_poo1y ago

It's likely down to the fact that once the proverbial Polish Plumbers left, a lot of people realized that there's nobody here who actually wants to do that work, no matter the price. So we have no nurses, we have no truck drivers, we have no electricians. And the list goes on.

And it's impossible to import these people anymore, because a) the wages in the UK are low - lower than in most of the EU and much lower than in the US, and b) many of these professions are not really classified as high skill, even if they take a lot of practice.

switch0071y ago

How I long for a Polish plumber. Hard workers, better skilled, better value.

bennyelv1y ago

Now you just can't get a plumber at all. I'm not sure they really were "taking British jobs" after all.

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