My understanding of false consciousness is that it's a false belief knowingly spread by others to achieve some aim

Hmm. Isn't that just a lie? What makes it false consciousness and not just a more ordinary concept like manipulation?

If you just see a lot of Romanians on the street and read lots of anti-immigration stories in your newspaper and conclude that the overcrowding is due to immigration then I'd consider that false consciousness because you are relying on a notion of "basic common sense"

Is the key issue here newspapers vs government sources or is it the inclusion of personal eyewitness observations? I'm not sure newspapers are really worse at spreading false beliefs than government sources are, but that would seem to be the only distinction based on who's speaking here. Indeed there'd seem to be less risk of false consciousness in this scenario because claims by third parties are being augmented with 'reality checks' against personal observations, whereas in the first scenario you seem to be relying almost entirely on government sources.

And in this particular example I think it's pretty clear that the government sought to deflect anger at austerity to immigrants.

Did they? The UK has had strongly pro-immigrant governments for decades. It only started getting serious about reducing immigration numbers recently and even then only in rhetorical terms: non-EU immigration has now hit record highs, and they could already control that. People want reduced immigration but they don't get it. As for austerity, the Tories blame Labour overspending/structural deficits and Labour blamed conservatism and the financial crisis. Only UKIP made an explicit link to immigrants, and UKIP collapsed after Farage left because they took a stronger anti-immigrant turn that got painted as racism.

So I'm not sure that telling matches my own recollections. I remarked on the Tory poster about immigrants and the NHS partly because it's remarkable: this is the first time I recall seeing Conservative campaigning that directly blames overloading of public services on immigration. It's a ... bold ... move? Given that it's pretty clear they've been supporting high levels of immigration for a long time and Boris is also a big supporter of it.

Either the official figures are all totally wrong and a person looking down their street can make a more accurate estimate than teams of statisticians measuring the entire country, or views are shaped by distorted reporting of these issues.

Are you sure the press is less reliable, or deliberately distorting things? If it contradicts elite sources like academic studies, or government statistical reports, many people assume the elite sources are true and the newspapers are false. Especially papers that the working classes tend to rely on like the Daily Mail.

OK, I think we agree that economists should be treated with some skepticism. What about statistical agencies?

The reason I keep hammering on the unreliability of supposedly neutral and informed elites is because there's so much evidence that they're hopelessly compromised, to the point that average man on the street can beat their reliability. Certainly they shouldn't be shamed for taking their own experience into account.

Here's another piece of evidence I encountered today in support of that view. Above, you're suggesting it's unlikely official statistics about immigration are wrong. I used to believe this too. Fine, academic analysis may be wonky, but surely basic numbers are free of political bias and being measured correctly?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/12/01/eu-membershi...

[Priti Patel] We don’t really know how many people are in the county either. Earlier this year, the Office for National Statistics downgraded its immigration statistics to “experimental.” In other words, they don’t know how many people are coming into the country or who they are.

So now the Home Secretary is admitting publicly the UK's immigration data is so wrong that "we don't really know". She's the most important consumer of the stats! If she doesn't believe them why should anyone else?

Seeing a Cabinet member admit this so unambiguously was surprising. The conclusion itself less so. I've been suspicious about UK population data for some years now, ever since learning they had stopped correlating with other stats like electricity and water usage in the way they always did historically. You don't read much about that because in fact, most newspapers are also pro-immigration.

My estimation of Patel has gone up for her unobfuscated and honest language. But that just makes the unvarnished truth even more horrible: the left/globalist consensus of "more immigration is always good" has saturated government and academia to such an extent that basically nothing from it on the topic can be trusted. The sort of people who completely ignored what economists, statisticians etc were telling them and just went by "is my hospital waiting room full of immigrants" had an equally accurate or quite possibly more accurate understanding of the impact on public services.

And yet they were so slated for it! So much scorn poured down on their heads, they were called ignorant and racist, and yet now we know the economic analysis was wrong, the stats were wrong, all the sources supposedly superior individuals were relying on for decision making were just completely wrong. We don't even know by how much!

It makes me so sad. I'm not even against immigration. I am myself an immigrant! But watching how deeply this issue has compromised every institution it touches makes me sad for the state of epistomology.

Because it's not just economists and statisticians. Every institution that claims to be neutral, informed and unbiased is shredding its credibility. Ofcom is supposed to enforce political neutrality on broadcasters but the people who work at major TV channels are constantly tweeting their political allegiances, with no consequences. The Speaker of Parliament claimed to be neutral whilst driving around with "Bollocks to Brexit" on his car, then admitted he wasn't the moment he retired. The Electoral Commission claims to be neutral and most of its board have expressed anti-Brexit views in public. The Civil Service ... well, you get the idea.

Not only are these people not neutral, they don't even pretend. Yet constantly they feign offence at any suggestion they might be anything but 100% trustworthy and neutral. It's obvious to the man on the street that nobody claiming to be politically neutral in public life actually is, that they're mostly in the bag for the EU and willing to systematically lie/distort to get their preferred outcomes. So why shouldn't the working classes ignore them and make up their own minds?

I don't know where all this goes, but you're completely right that over time I find my respect for ordinary common sense and 'street logic' going up. Not because it's getting better or more accurate: it's not. It's more that the alternatives presented as better keep getting revealed as being just 'common sense' and 'street logic' of different social classes.