Please elaborate, I'm interested to hear your views on these matters.
Well, starting with Labour. They might be a lot of things but they are VERY far from communist.
Calling the BBC brainwashed and a leftist mouthpiece has to be hyperbole, right? I would call it center left if I had to put it onto that annoying left-right spectrum. (I very much prefer two dimensions on the political spectrum. Much clearer).
Most of what they produce is exceptionally neutral and high quality compared to almost any other news source worldwide. Certainly better than all major German news sources except maybe the Deutschlandfunk and a handful others.
The left being a bigger threat than the right? I see it completely different. Yes, there are annoying or even dangerous idiots on the left as well. But especially in Europe and the USA it is the extreme right that is the far bigger threat to our democracies. BLM and even the riots by a few rafical members of the movement was a joke compared to MAGA and Jan 6th.
As for the statues: I don't support violence but understand the reasons. I'm fine with removing them. All of them, regardless of who the people were. Building statues of people is disgusting to me. You will not find any human who deserves one in my eyes. Put them in a museum if you must, but leave them out of the public. It is not people we should follow or believe in.
The EU is a great idea IMO despite having severe flaws, and it was a huge mistake for the UK to leave, a move that hurts both them and their allies. And mostly because of a disinformation campaign mostly run by what I consider far right lunatics.
I am not in the UK but here in Germany the far right keeps rambling on and on about how they are censored, claiming that you cannot say x or y, and yet they do so on every single public channel without any censorship. It is the right wing parties that push for censorship laws and try to build police states, all while lying to the very people they have sworn to protect and redirecting tax payers money into their pockets.
If there is any side the government is on it is the right side, not the left. In Germany it is a running joke that Police is "blind on the right eye".
Discrimination exists, and you can find it against every so-called "race" and also against genders, religions, age, and a whole lot of other things.
But a middle aged, high-income, western man with white-ish skin and no disabilities comes out on top almost everywhere.
That's literally the least discriminated-against group worldwide.
I know that it can feel like it isn't, because it is an important topic of our time and yes, some of the efforts to level the playing field are both ridiculous and unfair when taken to the extreme, but on the other hand right wing populists do their best to spread disinformation where they can, because (surprise) most of those belong to that exact category and are not interested in things being fair.
Saying that the British Empire if old had good and bad stuff is like saying "At least Hitler built the Autobahn". It was a force of evil in the world and historians have a very clear picture of it. Colonialism (not only by the British of course. Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Portugal, Italy and Spain were just as bad) was one of the worst things ever done by humans, and we are still fighting the damage that it caused. As you stated correctly China hugely profits from that.
African tribes did horrible things to each other, yes. But that doesn't make anything the Empire did any better. Instead of doing something against it, the colonial empires (again, not only the British, ALL of them) picked a convenient side and let them do their thing, selling them weapons, buying their slaves, and making money with that.
Often the power vacuums that led to those bloody wars were even caused by the colonial forces.
Funnily enough we are criticizing the very same things European empires did and do while China does them.
Now, you definitely won't see me defend China here, what they are doing is despicable, and it is a shame that the west does hardly anything to stop it. They could, but there are rich and influential people here who see their $€£¥ in danger.
But on the other hand: the fear mongering done by those exact people is also disgusting. The very people who profit most of deals with China and would have some power to change things are the ones who do it most incidentally.
We don't need to fight a war against China and they have as little interest in one as we do. There are so many more things we could do.
The main reason why this is pushed so much is to spread fear among the people. Fear of outside factors helps reining in everyone and concentrate at that instead of internal problems. Right wingers love to do that.
I like this thread because it helps shedding a light at what is going on in China. But it is only a part of the picture. The other part is going on in our countries. We might not be able to change things there directly, but we can change things here.
In Germany there are elections this year, and we will get a right wing government again very likely, probably mostly because old people are conservative and believe the lies told to them on TV. I hope that the Green party at least gets strong enough to be a mitigating factor in the government (CDU cannot govern alone thankfully) because the SPD (social democrats, a center-left party that is in the government now) failed to do so. We need change, and we have to start it in our own country.
As for being patriotic: again, no idea about the UK, but here in Germany we have made some experiences in the past which made us see through patriotism and how it can work.
I have no problems with it personally and most people don't. But there just isn't much to be proud of. The most patriotic people are usually the ones that either don't know their country or their country's history.
Being patriotic for the sake of being patriotic is not getting anyone anywhere.
Ok this was very quick (I am not at home and posting from mobile is a bit tedious), I hope I didn’t shorten my points too much. That's the rough version of it I guess.