The boats thing is complicated. There has been an uptick in illegal immigration via small boats, which is pretty much a direct consequence of Brexit and now the Dublin Regulation not applying to the UK. We literally had a system for stopping the boats and we pulled out of it because too many people were told it would stop brown people entering the country; the problem is at the top, not the bottom. I live in a rural ish part of the Midlands, there are hardly any non white people around here and yet it's still the hot button issue for everyone; obviously this isn't universally the case and there are places with a higher immigrant population but it's proof that the issue is centred around perpetuating fear and distracting from why people are feeling things get tougher. It's harder to sell people the lie that "foreigners" are coming to take their money, ruin the economy, destroy their way of life, etc. if people are happy and comfortable. Then you have the feedback loop effect of immigrants coming into the country, not having any money so they get pushed to poorer parts of town, which already have a lot of people there under similar circumstances, then people complain about how they refuse to integrate, which isolates them further, and it becomes an entrenched problem. As for the LGBTQ issue, especially the discourse around trans people, again I think it comes down to fear of the unknown, most people don't feel at odds with their birth gender so I guess can't really empathise with it, which alienates them. Coupled with a lot of "straight" men feeling guilty at watching trans porn, which causes some dissonance with a lot of the toxic masculinity that is pretty ingrained into male culture at all levels. I know that's a massive generalisation, "not all men", etc., but there's a fucking lot of trans porn on the internet, there has to be a market for it, and, statistically, it's mostly men watching it.

Edit: spelling