Every day, British people are subjected to a firehose of advertising and propaganda. But when you survey everyone’s attitude, you always find something interesting.
While some corners of the media make an effort to humanize migrants, given the saturation and viciousness of anti-immigrant rhetoric, especially among politicians, I’m surprised only four out of ten people believe that immigrants don’t integrate and that our “culture” is “undermined” by them.
On the flipside, we’re always being told how utterly unworkable or unfair it is to introduce public ownership of various parts of the economy, how evil our welfare state is for supporting people who might be screbs when there are hard working families out there. Neoliberalism exists in part to keep stuffing markets into every aspect of our lives and its agents try their best to convince people of its inevitability. But when you poll people’s ideas, shorn of context, keeping profit out of our daily lives is overwhelmingly popular.
I’m not saying propaganda has no effect, but I think there’s a large chunk of people whose innate attitude is to resist the influence of the packs of ghoulish billionaire propagandists and future Rwanda-hate-radio DJs. It’s not like we don’t have work to do, but there’s little signs of hope.