For many years I lived in North and East London. All my post teenage years, and up until about 5 years ago (when I got thrown out of London for being annoying) when I re-settled in Liverpool, I was a Londoner. Unconsciously I recall that all the different areas I lived in within North and East London have always been ‘multicultural’ in some form or the other.
I seem to recall being part of the major or ‘dominant’ ethnic group, but nearly always surrounded by a large collection of ethnic groups that were different to my own. This was the case at school, the places where I lived, and where I worked.
Gradually, I did start to notice that the proportions were changing. There were slowly becoming less people like me around me. In one place I lived it was an influx of Greek and Turkish Cypriots instead of the West Indian or Afro-Caribbeans and my type. In another it was an influx of Eastern Europeans. And latterly more and more people wearing full Islamic coverings.
Despite statistics suggesting that I was living in places where the indigenous population still grossly outweighed the new or immigrant population, I was seeing less of me and my type. On buses I was the only white person, or the only person who could speak English. This was almost all the time.
Overall this wasn’t a problem. It was all I knew.
Indeed, in my latter years of working in London I was working very specifically with Afghans and then Iraqis. And finally I had a team that had an old English lady, a Korean lady, a Pakistani lady, a Black gentleman, a Portuguese gentleman, an Irish lady, a mysterious Eastern European gentleman who might have even been some kind of ex-KGB Russian gentleman, another Irish/English hybrid, and me, an English gentleman. Indeed, I recall somebody congratulating me on my team, saying what a good mix they were.
Naively, I instantly assumed they meant the skill-sets. Indeed, the team was perfectly made up of creatives alongside chroniclers and all the other types the mumbo jumbo says you need in a team. I really was ‘colour-blind’ compared to this old conservative white English lady who saw not the skills but the skin colours and politically correct quotas.
For many months after her annoying statement I felt troubled and angry. My team was a skill-set team, not an example of some middle class idea of multi-culturism.
When I moved north to Liverpool, the first thing I noticed was the abundance of people who were the same ethnicity as me. Yes, there are pockets of areas dominated by other cultures, but in the context of London, these are seriously tiny. Most areas are full of white people. White people from generations of white people who were here before them. Ok, some might have roots in Ireland, or other areas, but the majority seem to be from families who were Liverpudlian and all their heritage knew was Liverpool. They are blissfully ignorant of other cultures, and where once they were divided only by religion (Catholics -v- Protestants), they are now joined together in fear of the invisible enemy. Currently the enemy are the Polish because, in their eyes, they take their jobs, and ‘Muslims‘ because, in their eyes, they want to change things and the way of life.
Despite the battle lines being drawn and the enemy having been defined, the overwhelming majority of people in Liverpool have no experience of true multi-culturism. However, it will come, and they won’t like it.
I’m not sure if it is right that they should be subjected to the coming multi-culturism. I’ve never known anything else, but I can see it is frightening.
I mean, here’s a scenario. It’s probably happened many times over in different parts of the UK. Imagine a young girl born just after World War II. Let’s call her Betty. She’d be raised in a street surrounded by children of ‘her own kind’. She’d know nothing else. She’d go to school with ‘her own kind’, where one religion, one language, one heritage, one set of values, was taught. Being, well, English, is all she’d know.
She’d grow up, leave school, find a man of her dreams, also from her own culture because there’s only her own culture available, and find a house a few streets from the house she was born in. Here she’d raise her own family, who’d grow up, leave to do their things as adults, and as she herself got older and older, she’d retire with her husband, who, typically, would be the first to die, leaving her alone in her house, the house that they’d lived in for 60 years.
Around her house, the streets, the shops, the libraries, the parks, were her world. They were all she had ever known. They’d always been reflective of her own culture, her own ethnicity, because that’s all their ever was.
But, here’s the thing. Immigration works by people from an ethnic group or country of origin coming to a new country and huddling together into what is best described as a ghetto. A ghetto forms when every time somebody from the indigenous population moves out, and only the new population moves in, until there is next to nobody remaining from the indigenous population in the area. Very soon, there is no need for shops or signs in the old language. In the case of a very traditionalist Islamic population, there is nobody wearing familiar clothes, and since they can’t speak English (there’s no need), there’s no communication with anybody outside of the new or ‘invading’ culture.
A new culture can swarm into an area and completely dominate it within a decade. So, what of poor Betty? This little old lady who has only ever known ‘her own kind’, and for all her life, was able to walk down the street and stop for a chat with neighbours, pop into shops that sold things she understood, with signs and writing in English, and everything around her being the way it had been for generations, is now faced with something completely alien. It’s something that does not and cannot include her. She is now the outsider. The environment appears hostile and confusing. All that’s left for her is to cower behind closed doors whilst the nightmare carries on in the streets around her.
There are thousands of Bettys. They are frightened and alone. They are the true victims of out of control immigration. They did nothing, but suddenly became strangers in their own land.
This is very wrong.
England's England 