"stopping skilled/semi-skilled immigration. This is completely and astonishingly backwards."

britain was an emigration nation for almost 500 years, immigration had nothing to do with Britain acquiring wealth, you have this part backwards.

There's a growing longing in people's hearts - a pull - toward authoritarian and religious control. People are chasing Moby Dick's white whale and are filling their hearts with that craving and emotional desire to follow a goal.

It can be really disruptive to a culture that depends on satisfying wants, giving results to clear needs and obtaining what's lacking.

Britian needs a clearer, beautiful relationship to it's future and maybe we can move past nostalgia for the 1800s.

The rest of the world has to try weaning itself off oil. Imagine how hard it is for the UK to be weaning itself off the resources of the entire world.

British people, despite now all being born after the collapse of this empire, still seem to believe they are special and entitled. Certainly they live among evidence of a great culture.

But what does the UK do now? First they let their manufacturing go overseas, because who needs manufacturing when you have great science. But the manufacturing paid for the science and universities. Then they had the "brain drain" as all the scientists moved to the USA (me included). Well that's ok, because we have a great service economy. Oh, wait, no that's gone abroad too. Well finance? We got finance? Uh, Brexit.

The UK is now basically a tax haven, or rather the City of London (which has different laws than the rest of the UK). It also has a side business selling weapons to dictators, and another in olde worlde pageantry, though whether Charles can keep the tourism dollars flowing is another matter.

Now small islands in the carribean make good tax havens. Not a lot of people to support. But the UK thinks it can afford things like the NHS, schools and universities, when it is nothing more than a third world country surrounding the City of London.

If it wasn't for modern communications, the UK would privately be having a dark ages, like what followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. Nobody would know, because nobody would go there. Instead, we get to see the shit-show, live.

The UK is a failed state with nuclear weapons.

As an American, I love watching Top Gear and feeling their nostalgia for great British cars, and for cars made in someone's shed with panels pounded by hand over wooden molds... are there any actual British car companies left from those days? Jaguar and Land Rover are owned by the Indians, Mini is owned by the Germans, MG is owned by the Chinese.

Is this what Great Britain is now? Just the bottom half of a tiny island in the North Sea? And people are content with this? I understand empires rise and fall but it's still kind of sad to watch. A nation that once owned the entire world, now they're closing their borders because they're afraid of the big scary world outside.

Glad to see Scotland isn't putting up with it.

I am perhaps a good case study of the shift in thinking that so-called "Winners" need to take. The facts of Britain's (and the rest of the Western World's) history are plain to see. Say in Wikipedia for example, for sure there's bias, but African slavery, Native American decimation, the Opium Wars, the Bengali Famine, the theft of "Commonwealth", to name but a few, are all there. It's that there's simply no impetus to feel any of this, nobody has the power to force us to truly contemplate what we've done, because Britain and its ilk are at the top of the power pyramid.

But travelling suddenly makes all of this personal. "Made in China" takes such a more deeper meaning when you literally made friends with them in their own land. I just can't get so angry about Indian email scammers when I've probably met them or their family and learnt that our Queen wears their precious jewels in her crown like an evil, unfeeling, global bully.

I made these shifts relatively easily, because like most Western people, I have a heart and perhaps ironically I was taught in school to make judgements based on facts. But I needed to be unrooted from my native context, that is just not going to happen on a large enough scale. What if the actual more fundamental problem raised by the Climate Emergency is this large-scale switch in context? What if we put our energy into that instead of reducing C02? Of course that'll never happen, it's chicken and egg, the motivation doesn't come until you understand the bigger picture. What's more the climate serves as a convenient foil for avoiding the existential sea-change by giving us an all too logistical problem to face instead.

I'm glad to see this article on the front page. There is some progress. There are indeed significant seams of Western society which accept such self criticism. Even though most of us did not knowingly cause the damage, we are the only people that can meaningfully take responsibility. It's not fair, but that's the path ahead.

Too many government decisions are made in order to procure glory and gratification for those at the helm. Britain has a lot to offer the world, and it has been stifled by its vain and inward-looking leadership for far too long.

They may have done it mainly for the benefit of their own heirs and successors, but now that it's done, it's done. All those improvements multiply, and Brits get more because it takes less individual effort to produce the same amount in the heavily-improved UK than in a country where improvements are more easily destroyed or converted. So anyone willing to obey British law, participate in the British economy (accept and spend pounds), respect British infrastructure, and assimilate into British culture should get more than the rest of the world, because those are the practices that allow Britain to be more productive than the world median.

A hedgerow along a country lane does not grow that way naturally. It takes an effort to force it. But once established, it just needs a regular trim and an occasional re-laying to keep the livestock out of the road. You just don't need to pull a new barbed wire fence in front of a blackthorn hedge, so why would anyone complain that no one is doing it?

The resources of the country are preferentially distributed to its own citizens because one country lacks the sovereign authority to force any other country to change its culture and institutions to be more productive. If those other countries wanted to be as prosperous as Britain, they could fork the British system, or selectively merge changes from it into their own repositories. See also: USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

So those people aren't exactly thoughtlessly doing nothing. They are being British, as hard as they possibly can. And that allows the UK to have nice things like the NHS. In contrast, Americans, in being as American as possible, can only manage a hybrid public-private healthcare monstrosity that no one can examine too closely or for too long, because most of our psychiatric hospitals are cleverly disguised as prisons.

In light of that, there's really only one essential element that needs to go along with open borders. Assimilate the immigrants.

There’s a reason that the UK is slowly losing its 1st world nation status. Self inflicted wounds due to among other things a people who want a nany state. Reap what you sow.

That combined with an island mentality and a fear mongering, sensationalist press.

Case in point, my mother complaining of immigration, although she lives in an out of the way town where they had never seen a brown person (apart from at the hospital in the next town) until probably the late 90s.

Now she insists there are too many eastern Europeans, however she swears blind she would never get an Englishman builder / plumber because the Polish ones (catchall, means any Eastern euro) are cheaper, more reliable and just better.

But she wants to make Britain "great" again, "like it used to be". Pressing her when, she cannot answer. Asked if we should invade a "brown" country and get rich of plundering their resources and ruling via the military like we used to do, "no no no we shouldn't do that". "err mother you do realise why we used to be great and rich don't you"

and she voted remain!