Brexit; Poverty in Britain ;the North-South Divide; race relations etc.

[Walkie]

Every now and then I have a go at explaining British demographics , and some of the above inter-related issues to people here. I usually don't get far, cos I'm way too slow at composing such posts, and all-too-often illness intervenenes before I'm ready to hit "send". Then i get lost in my own  disjointed  thoughts , and lose faith in my typo-ridden, insufficient   bit of an explanation. I think you actually have to be living in the old industrial cities in the North and the Midlands of England before you actually see how things are work (or failing to work) here.  Most people's perceptions of Britain are filtered through the lens of the "booming" South of England, and  skewed by a failure to grasp how small an island this is, and to really appreciate the effects of excessive population density.

The poor in Britain dream of living the lifestyle of "trailer trash" in America , we really do.  I just remarked on  that on the phone to Teddybear  today, and he readily agreed. Absolutely.  Yet that doesn't occur to Americans for a moment. They see us living in our cold, damp , rented Victorian houses and think we're better-off than they are, because they can't afford inner-city rents, like we can.   Well, neither can we, truth to tell (as the alarming  numbers living on the streets very clearly attest)  but that's as cheap as it gets in England. The further out you get from the misbegotten tenenments clustered round the centre  of some sprawling conurbation , the higher the rents get. London is an exception to that rule , not the norm. (And most of us really don't think of London as part of Britain any more. Really)  That's pretty much the reverse of the American pattern , i hear.  Besides, the poorest of us can't afford to run cars, and can;'t afford to use public transport  very much , either, so we'd  better live pretty damned close to the shops, Jobcentres   and things.

That empty wish for  a more natural  lifestyle is  not exactl;y an issue (no use making an issue of it)  but that kind of mismatch and misconception does help to  distort the picture, and thus  contributes to   bigger, nastier misconceptions. So it looks like we really need to get down to basics, before people start hearing what we're actually  trying to say about the bigger issues

I hope Teddybear will have more to say about these issues on this board. I hope that a few people will chip in.

But first , please forgive me for recycluing a couple of recent posts of mine, in my effort to get my best efforts thus far into a single thread , under an appropriate title. Just a mo, I'll go find 'em.

[Walkie]

Bits of recent conversation with Pyraxis:

Also, I hope you don't mind me repeating it here, but a previous conversation we had regarding Brexit and immigration.

"Conservative" is way too much of a generalization, but the type of conflicts you've talked about, like poor British renters vs wealthy immigrant landlords, remind me of the POV of small town USA people who are inherently suspicious of the cities and the wealthy people there. A big subset of Trump's supporters come from that background, which in the USA is called conservative. But there's a lot more to it than that, ie the assumed racism, bigotry, religious values etc. that I know you don't share.

Ah, I begin to see what you mean. And I've been trying way too hard to construct a reply, It's insanely difficult to pin down and extract all spurious assumptions that come in, both potentially and actually, that basically arise from living in different countries, under different circumstances. I don't mean between you and I , specifically, but across the freakiing board; and even within England, which has effectively split into two very  different countries . And  I don't mean  by Brexit. Brexit only went to demonstrate how extreme our traditional North-South divide has become, That division  dates back to Industrial Revelotion (and probably beyond?)and is more of a demographic division than a geographical one. The "Satanic Mills" and their  labour force being very much concentrated in the North, with the South left free to focus on farming and more genteel pursuits; which is not to say that there was no such thing as a working-class southerner ofc, but in the past that would have been largely comprised of farm labourers and servants, who would be more inclined than the city-dwelling Northerners to share the conservertive view of their masters. Thus the North-South divide  represents a corresponding Socialist-conservative division, which has only deepenened, in recent decades, in tandem with  with the dismantling  of British Industry, and ever- increasing austerity. 
I should point out that land here is at such a premium that the concept of "poor farmer " is laughable. Not even the  poor farm labourer can be seriously said to exist anymore, because it just isn't possible to lsubsist on the highly erratic , low wage of a farm labourer, especially not in the South, where none of the low-paid workers can pay the high rents, not   without help on the form of top-up benefits, and especially not in the villages , ( most  which have  largely turned into dormerville for middle class commuters long ago, even up here in the Midlands. You also have to remenber that England is a very small country, and therefore much of England is in easy commuting distance of London..for those who can afford to commute. And that a cottage in the countryside is a much-sought after thing.  A luxury item, however humble it might look. Thus the original villagers have mostly been priced out of the vilages ). Farm labouring is simply "casual work" which people do,,when they get can it, in addition to bar work, shop work and whatever else they can get, But there are not many places left  in England where the laborours live near enough to the farms to make farm work a  realistic option. 

Back in the eighties, the farmers round here had a scam going of picking up unemployed labour by the truckload from the City Cenre  and paying them  "piece rates"  which worked out way below minimum wage,    (I know, I've actually been in those trucks) . Though that was no sort of living wage,  it was just about acceptable  for the workers insmuch as it enabled them to top up their enemployment benefits to the point where they might realistically buy the kids new shoes and.or begin to pay off some of their debts; That  wouldn't work at all if they declared such earnings  (the government would let you keep  £5 per week, after taking so long to review your entitlement that you'd have big problems surving the interim. That £5 barely paid for the extra food you need when doing hard manual work)).  The DWp screwed that one by their vigouous puirsuit of the evil "Benefits Frauds" who were accepting  such work (they actually sent investigating officers out into the fields , and mounted a poster campaign to covince people that failing to declare a bit of casual work was just as real and just serious as the more dramatic forms of benefit fraud. Not that any of the locals were convinced. We tended to feel that the farmers were the real criminals.    A man who's working hard for a fraction of the money he made before being made redundant ,in a desperate effort to keep the bailliffs from his door, isn't anyone's idea of a benefit fraudster, really. But the posters were scary anyway. of course) The farmers never found any other  good  solutions to the labour  problem , AFAIK, short of  building dormitories for migrant wortjker.s on their land, and actually paying them a legal wage,  They've  been  bitterly grumblimg about the "work shy" native Brits  ever since .

Also since then, the myth of "work shy" Brits has only gatherered momentum and now amounts to odffficial government propaganda, used to jusify a really punising series of "Welfare reforms", which make welfare ever harder to get, unreliable (it gets withdrawn  at the drop of the pin, on various pdretexts) and ever-lower. in real terms.  To the Government's embarassment, many such reforms affect the low-paid just as much as the unemployed. They've had that rubbed in their face to such a degree that they've had to make steps to address that, but the rhetoric of being on the side of "hard working families" cuts very little ice in the North. When we do the maths , we still  don;'t find anybody getting better off other than the weathy The disparity in income  between rich and poor in this countryjust  continues to grow and grow.  And now, after  something like 40 years of being  promised "jam tomorrow" if we only take our punishment and allow the Ecomnnomy to recover. we're pretty sure we know what a "healthy Economy " looks like, and who actually benefits from that.

Yeah, it's taken 40-odd  years of ever worsening conditions in the Midlands and North for the working class people to really rebel. Untuil Brexit , we were basically becoming increasingly hopeless and depressed.The two major political parties had both become so right-wing that we didn't even feel as if we actually had a vote worth the paper it was written on. And given that the North serves as a receptacle for anyone who can't afford the housing down South, including most of the original Londoners , as well as the migrants and immigrants, we feel we get a much better view of the real purposes behind  mass immigration .  The self-righteous bleeding-heart messages from southern liberals to the effect we ought to be willing to sharing our "privileged lifestyle " come across as either hopelessly naive at best, or just taking the piss.

Anti-immigration feling isn't remotely based upomn racism, but rather on ever-increasing poverty, overpopulation, homelessness etc. and the sense that the South either don't have a clue what's going on, or else  don't give a flying fuck. Those kind of conditions can breed racism of course, but they mostly don't. However, Anti -Islam feeling is something else again , with an entirely different basis. And when ant-immigation is concatenated with Anti-muslim feeling , and condemned on the same (mostly spurious ) grounds, we tend to despair of ever being understood .

One problem is that the Political right in britain managed to speahead both the Remain and the Brexit campaign. You can perhaps appreciate what a brilliant propaganda coup that turned out to be, for the Tories?

Both Brexit and Anti-immigration  stem largely from left -wing Northerners, but the lack of left-wing leadership at the time makes that statement highly unconvincing  to any kind of outsider. We'd  been dismissing the Labour Party as a bunch of "junior Tories" for decasdes, and , somehow, no serious alternative was emerging, Splinter groups like the Socialist Party (formed by people that Labour had thrown out for being too left wing)were campaigning for Brexit, but they weren't very salient nexct to the right -wing-clowns that are now taking credit for Brexit . In the opinion ofyour average Northerner  those clowns actually  undermined Brexit more than they helped it. And in the opinion of your average Northererner, the genuinely left wing Labour leader, Corbyn, had reluctantly  been pressured into supporting remain by  the hostile , unruly right-wing Blairites who still predominate in his party.  . Be that as it may, it certainly presented  a completely false picture., and left the average Northerners a little bit conflicted in his  attitude to Corbyn.  It was not the best of starts, as regards getting Labour back on track. There were fears that he just isn;'t strong enough to swing it.

I've had to start saying England rather  than Britain, in many contexts ,  by the way, because it's coming home to me how radically different, again, the Scottish experience is.  Where England is overcrowded, with a very real housing crisis, Scotland has a falling porukation , and housing to spare.  Scotland is traditionally left-wing for the same readon that the Notrth of England is,. It's population is larhely comprised of working class peoplem=, struggling on the verge of destitution. But there the similarity ends, because working class people struggling on the verge of destitution really don't want to live in Scotland, by and l;arge, where unemployment figures are higher still, heating bills are higher, and your chances of survival if you do become destitute considerably lower. There's a longstanidng tradition of down-and-out scots moving South into England(my paternal grandfather was one suich)  and movement in the other direction is almost uneard of. A lot of Scots stil buy the logic that mass migration  might actually ficx their economic problems, so they swallow that longic along wuth theaccompanying  bleeding heart political rhetoric. Atv least, that's the best explanation I've heard for the striking difference in attitudes. And if we have to wait for Scotland to become overcrowded before they rethink...

Well anyways , I think that background probably irons out a few apparent paradoxes?  And I haven't even started on the Islamn thing. The English experience of Islam is also unique in it;'s way, and it pisses us off mightily when people try to tell us what we think about Islam, and why we think it , rather than listening .  But hey! I've really struggled to explain this much. already. I really have!

Hmm, actually Pyraxis, given the somewhat awkward example you quoted (no , i don't mind, but this one happens to be awkward, taken out-of-context) , i fell I have to try and explain the complex role that Muslims have in the British Economy, a little bit. It's complex because there is no single definitive "muslim " population here, and you can't certainly put them down, wholsale  as an economic underclass.  My example was intended to illustrate that . And to illustrate how a genuine memberiof the economic underclass might well feel that his position has been completely misconstued and pissed upon, by the "liberal "pro-immigration  rhetoric .

The "poor v rich" antagonism  can easily extend to some groups of Muslims .  In a country where there's a genuine and serious housing crisis, Landlords are not popular figures, ofc. They may not all be "rich " exactly, but they're clearly gaining an  econnomic advantage from said economic crisis, and often exploit that advantage pretty ruthlessly. Given that something like 75% of   Brits can't afford to buy their own home, and are never likely to, we do , quite naturally, think of Landlors as way above us, in the economic pyramid. The Muslim Landlord is a particularly common figure, largely because of the Way Muslim banking works. Islam is against "usury", so Muslims to ften  "make their money work for them " by investing in property, rather than by buying shares.  Hence, a sucessful Muslim is all-too-likely to be a Landlord, much more so than members of other religions. Just that fact alone is enough to make any representation of Muslims as an underclass seem pretty laughable in general.

Such landlords wil as likely be milking poor Muslimns as milking poor non-muslims, I should add, if that matters. I might also add that the Muslim Landlords in the North mostly hail from long-established British Muslim communities (mostlty hailing from Pakistan and Bangladesh) , The stinking rich Middle-eastern Musslims who buy up properties in The South are another kettle of fish, but they don't help improve the Northerner's image of Muslims. They are disliked all the more, on account of speculations that they are the reason why the Muslims , as a whole, appear to have undue powrr and infuence in Britain.

We do have a lot of sympathy with poor Muslims fleeing  Syra, but that'smixed with  A) genuine fears regarding the spread of Islam (which i'll sabe for another post)  B) genuine fears about increasing population pressure, and inxcreasing numbers of people actually living on the streets C) recognition of the fact that that migrants, of all race and creed,  are being exploited as much as possible , then pushed  into the human dustbin in the North once it's clear that they can't hack it in the South any better than the rest of us  can.  We;re not inclined to regard that as genuine "kindness". We seeing them become as anxious , depressed, disillusioned and  and desperate as the rest of us. Britain doesn't meet their expectations any better than Britain meets ours, as it happens. Indeed they're often  shockedand apalled  in a way we jaded natives have ceased to be shocked and apalled.

I could give more reasons, but that's prolly enough?

[odeon]

The way I read this is that your Muslim problem is actually more of a class problem, used to the extent possible by people with agendas.

[Walkie]

The way I read this is that your Muslim problem is actually more of a class problem, used to the extent possible by people with agendas.

That would be a logical reading. On the other hand, i haven't yet got around to seriously attempting to define our issues with Islam, as such. Those observations were very peripheral.

We do have a "class" problem, and we do have a Muslim problem. There's not that much overlap. You can't explain the thing in those terms.  I was really trying to explain why it doesn't really wash when Muslims are presented as some kind of  oppressed underclass.  That is, I want to sweep aside some of the more offensive common assumtions , if i can, and explain why we find those assumptions offensive.

I don't mean to be mysterious here, I've actually tried to explain the real Islam issues 3-4 times already, but somehow never succeeded in finishing and posting! So now I'm taking it as it comes ...and getting a litle bit superstitious about throwing myself into that particular subject  again  . (I like that I'm beginning to feel well again, since l;ast abandonened attempt)

[Walkie]

Oh! In the meantime, a report from my original home town , Southall (in West London) , is intersting, being basically  about tesions betweeni Muslims and Sikhs.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/fear-and-loathing-in-southall-1585187.html

I must say (to avoid confusing people) that the problems described are a whole  lot worse, in the Midlands and North. (It's curious that the people interviewed seem totally unaware of that),  Unemployment, in particular,  is clearly a very recent development  in Southall, according to that article, wheras it's been an an ever-worsening issue here since...well, about 2-3  years after my family moved here in 1971. However, when my family decided to moved to the Midlands, it was actually getting  hard for the native whites in Southall, employment-wise, but like the article says, that clearly wasn't a problem for anybody else.  I'm pretty convinced that was because of a deliberate thrust on the part of some asians in the town to force the white families out.  Im pretty  sceptical of stories like that, normally , but  I've heard, for example, that  Asian women were taunting some of the white women to that effect, including my Mum who has zero motivation to make up such stories. I've no idea which asians were doing that. The white people, back then couldn't tell a Muslim from a Sikh, from a Hindu; it was all too novel, and we had all three coming in.

I didn't notice any inter-racial tensions myself, so they couldn't have been very bad (I was autistic, mind  ), but another factor was  that a gang of Pakistani lads ( it was said) were making death threats against my teenage  brother; a lot of white people were pretty fed up (understandably) by the local shops selling indian food, instead of the stuff they were used to, by circles of Sikhs holding council on the parkland where the kids were used to playeing football, etc. The place really wasn't the same. And then, to add the finally push (or rather pull)  , there was an " industrial boom" in the Midlands, there was plenty of work  in car industry, and housing was dirt cheap , compared with what we were used to. Oh! and my Mum had her roots and relatives up here.  So up we came, like quite a lot of other Londoners. The exodus of working-class families from London was beginning, in a gent;e way (We didn't feel like we really had no choice, at that point in time, just that we were a whole lot  better-off moving north)

[actually, just noticed the report is about 20 years old! that doesn't really affect my points though. Rather it highlights another point I wanted to make, which is that anti-Islam feeling in Britain is nothing new; it's just been  fast coming to a head, in recent years )

[Walkie]

Actually.  there certainly have been  genuine, widespread, pretty nasty inter-racial tensions, at times . I wouldn't want to swep that under the carpet.  There were actual "race riots" in Southall , in 1979 , apparently incited by the National Front: 


There was a whole spate of similar riots in other towns, at around the same time. Things were pretty damned turbulent back then, in all sorts of ways, with the Economy crashing, Industry failing, and and Thatcherism getting its nasty iron grip  on the country.

But the British issues with Islam have bugger-all to do with race, as my other Southall  link shows.  Sikhs and Hindus (who belong to the exact same ethnic group as our older, established Muslim communities) feel the same way about Islam as the whites do. And not just in Southall.  We have a lot of Siks and Hindus in the Midlands too, and  I talk with them quite regularly. And I read about other places.

[Pyraxis]

The poor in Britain dream of living the lifestyle of "trailer trash" in America , we really do.

I haven't been able to read through all of this yet, so I'm going to come back to it, but what is it about trailer park life that is really appealing from the Brit perspective?

[Gopher Gary]

The poor in Britain dream of living the lifestyle of "trailer trash" in America , we really do.

I haven't been able to read through all of this yet, so I'm going to come back to it, but what is it about trailer park life that is really appealing from the Brit perspective?

I'm going to guess it's the cool vinyl wallpaper. 

[Walkie]

The poor in Britain dream of living the lifestyle of "trailer trash" in America , we really do.

I haven't been able to read through all of this yet, so I'm going to come back to it, but what is it about trailer park life that is really appealing from the Brit perspective?

ummmm. I decided to read some articles about Americam trailer park life, just to check that my image of it is close enough to the reality not to make my answer laughable  in yoUr eyeS.  Actuially my image does sem to match the reality, but, what's totally gobsmacked me was some stuff about WHY americans live in trailer parks but Brits don't . I mean, you  guys do seemto think we have a choice, and prefer for various reasons to live in inner city tenements instead . Whereas it mostly comes down to: there's no space in England to spread out the housing like it is a trailer park, so that's never gonna be a cheap option unless you park them in a place where local employment is virtually zero. Which is mostly the case, in deed The trailerr parks we have mostly serve as retirement villages, or holiday camps; and they're not near as cheap as the American counterparts.

I just read " limited housing options in the US for low income people. The threshold at which they're eligible for subsidised housing is much higher than in European countries so people that might live in a council house in the UK don't have that opportunity here" Actually, unless we're very lucky, we don't have that opportunity in the UK either, not any more.  The local councils have long-since been constrained (by Tory Government rulings) to sell off their houusing stock, at a discount, to tenants  on demand. That's led to nearly all the really habitable stock findinfg it's way into private hands (often unscupulous mortgage brokers; also  used by some as a cheap enrty  into the buy-to-rent market; on occasion it even leads to the tenant actually owning the place they live in) . Of course "right to buy" is a huge disincentive to building more social housing, hence the really huge shortfall in Social housing nowadays; and what's left is mostly rrally grim; the kind places nobody would want to buy, nor even live in, not  for one second longer than they had to: : damp concrete tenements with excrement and piss in the stairwells, and such. Most of us are living in private rentals (scatterered through what ince used to be a council estate) nowadays and have no security of tenure.   Including myself, I've ben on the council lwaiting listss since my 27-year-old son was six, re-activated my application every time we had to move on, and never, ever  got odfferered anything half-way acceptable. My description, above is of one the places they offerered me. Noways, you might get offerered somnething like that on a take-it-or leave it basis if your situation is extremely desperate (meaning getting evicted tomorrow, along with young children, but only if you provably haven't " deliberately made yourself homeless" eg by failing to pay all due rent ) ; otherwise , they'l;ll most likely have nothing at all for you.

Meantime , tyhe "welfare reforms" are all-too-likely to leave benefits claimants (most of whom are actually working) with a shorfall intheir  rent money. As a consequence most of the private landlord won;t even consider a tenant on welfare, nowadays, so your chances of finding half-way acceptable private housing is even slimmer. and it won;t be genuinely affordable, not  even if it;'s appalling . Those "specialist" landlords  know you don't have any other choic except the street  , so they ask for maximuium they possibly can.

Soyou can probably see one big attraction of the trailer park, if that were an option? (And yiou can see why i put up with my mad landlady?This house is really good comparec with the alternatives. I have looked at the alternatives)

Paradoxically you have a lot more security and stabilty  in those "mobile" homes, and the chance to buikld a sense of community. Working-class nglish communities barely  exist, anymore; too many people get moved about too much , and your neighbours are constantly changing. I don't  just because of tenants falling behind with the rent. In my area, Landlords often get rid of families to convert a place  to the more-profitable student accomadation. There are all sorts of reasons why you might have to go.

Anither attraction is the rural or semi-rural lovcation of the parks, away all from the crime, the noise and the antisocial behaviour you get in inner-city areas; amnd closer to the countryside.

That website also stated being close to workplace as the reason why we "choose" to live in houses instead. Hmmm, Well I meantioned being close to the jobcentre as an attraction didn't i? But inasdmuch as industry still exists round here, it's mostly located at , or beyond  the outskirts of cities and nigh-on-inaccessible by public transport,,If youdon't hace private transport, , there's not much you can do excvept hope for the best, That's one area where the big shift towards agency work has really screwed people like myself (non-drivers).  You've no chance of making a regular car-sharing arrangements when neither you nor your co-workers here on a releglar , predictable basis, You might catch a lift, or manage to share a taxi, you might not. You might have to walk all the way home at 3am, as I did on a few occasiobns). But there's definitely no living near your workp[lace, not when that workplace is apt to chop and change .

I'd find America even tougher, personally, given that I just can't drive, but one other enviable thing about America from our perspective is that motoring is obviously cheaper, and even the poorest people drive, usually.

Public transport here is kaput, since it was privatised. It makes no actual attempt to meet people's actual needs, and just runs the profitable services, at the profuitable tines, at increasingly  mindblowing prices.

It#s not so much a case of having limited options here, but of scratching around for possibilities, and constantly wondering if youy've finally come down to having no options left at all, yet? A trailer park in America is close enough to absolute rock  bottom to feel relatively secure, methinks, without coming right down to street level
 

[Walkie]

The poor in Britain dream of living the lifestyle of "trailer trash" in America , we really do.

I haven't been able to read through all of this yet, so I'm going to come back to it, but what is it about trailer park life that is really appealing from the Brit perspective?

I'm going to guess it's the cool vinyl wallpaper. 

Oh nooo. So, vinyl wallpaper, of all things , manages to cross the cutural divide?      We're trapped! trapped! traaaapped! No escape, not even in the Land of the Free.

[renaeden]

Just want to say, Walkie, thank you for writing posts I want to read, about a subject that usually goes over my head.

[Lord of the Ales]

Good thread. I'll add a few observations of my own if I may, as someone acutely familiar with the racial dynamics in post-industrial Northern England.

As some of you know I hail from Bradford, which could fairly be described as the Daddy of economically fucked former mill towns. Other towns with similar social and economic issues are clustered through Yorkshire and Lancashire, and have a number of common characteristics; they all suffered the severe decline of traditional heavy industry, primarily textile spinning and manufacture - the area received a high number of immigrant workers in the 1960s to work in the mills, these mostly came from rural Pakistan and Bangladesh and were predominantly Sunni muslims. Due to racist attitudes from some locals and a preference for living in close extended families - even now it is common for a street to have many families from the same village in Mirpur - a degree of self-segregation became apparent in some areas, accompanied by 'white flight' from neighbourhoods as the demographic balance shifted in areas where the newcomers settled.

During the deindustrialisation that followed in the 1980s the tensions between this group of culturally separate incomers who were now second generation, and the host communities became starker and more apparent as both white and asian workers were thrown on the scrapheap. The resulting divide can be viewed as having both a class and Islam-specific dimension - it really is an issue about culture and not race. Bradford differs from many typical mill towns in that as a large city with a long history of absorbing waves of migrants it tends to be more open to newcomers and does have a wider diversity than smaller towns such as Oldham, Burnley or Dewsbury. Bradford has an established West Indian community and eastern european (mainly Polish, Hungarian and Ukrainian, though in latter years heavily augmented by more Poles and Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians and Latvians) communities dating back to the end of WWII as well as Sikhs and Hindus in large numbers, all of which groups are reasonably well integrated. Arguably the 130,000 strong Muslim community in the district is not, as is also the case in most other Northern mill towns.

In Bradford and a number of other places in the area there have been repeated outbreaks of unrest or rioting, the last wave leading to a report by Lord Ouseley which concluded that part of the problem is the degree of separation between the British Asian muslim community and the rest of society - this 'othering' has become more apparent since 9/11 and the War on Terror - the degree of mutual suspicion and distrust between folk who increasingly don't go to school together, socialise together, or live in the same areas has a parallel with the situation in Northern Ireland. There is a strong them and us undercurrent. On a class level negative attitudes are more strongly held by those on lower incomes and with less education, who may be less likely to work alongside folk from the other side of the divide as is the case in many office environments - those of us who do work with people from all the city's communities form work friendships and often gain an insight into other cultures, so are less inclined to consider all whites or muslims as all the same and not like us. Despite this the majority of folk here both Muslim and everyone else just want to get along but the barriers to integration are large and will need some efforts to get past. If people don't get to know each other and discuss the things in each other's way of life they either misunderstand or disapprove of we'll not improve.

Back to you Walkie. 

[Walkie]

Good thread. I'll add a few observations of my own if I may, as someone acutely familiar with the racial dynamics in post-industrial Northern England... 

Absolutely! I was very much hoping that you would.  Must add that your observations all very much apply to the post-industrial Midlands too.  for that, and do feel absolutely free to add more.  I see no benefit  in  hugging these  issues to myself 

  This "othering" of Muslims , as you put it, is a core factor , as pointed out  out by Trevor Phillips in that documentary. Much kudos to the guy. I think only Trevor Phillips could have gotten away with saying all that. No way could you paint him as a racist 

One thing that never seems to get a mention, in this context,  is that we Brits have a healthy distrust for Religious Extremism. And whilst not all Muslims are religious extremists, it's  fair to say that most religious extremists in Britain are Muslim, and they are scarcely any different from other religious  extremists , except in seeming to have an highly  disconcerting degree of power and influence, both within and without their comminities,  and in being even more backward than most of the rest. They bang on about their horribly conservative values, not only promising hellfire, but even issuing death threats to apostates, homosexuals,  loose women etc; and demanding a return to kind of laws that Britain has slowly , painfully and resolutely left behind in favour of liberal, huminitarian, egalitarian  values   .

Whether the views espoused by these people qualify as  genuinely Islamic is actually pretty damned academic, in most people's eyes.   Most people don't want a theological debate about it any more than we want a theological debate with the Jehovah's witness on our doorstep; we don't see it being fixed by theological debate. That "not a true Muslim" is used to justify (so-called) Muslim outrages againsdst other (so-called) Muslims as often as it's used by others to dissociaciate  themseves from those outrages .  And we non-Muslim people are really in no position to judge.  If the (so-called) Muslims clerics  are deeply divided on such questions, what the hell makes us think our opinion can ever be  worth squat? 

I happen to believe that the Cusaders were not real Christaians, but i surely wouldn't have expected a Muslim of the time to take my word for it , nor to take any comfort from the fact, in any case. We Europeans were the rampaging  barbarians back then , and we all identified as Christians, thus imprinting "Christianity" as a dirty word in the mind of your average Middle Eastern person.  Nowadays the boot is on the other hoof, and people are still people. We see outrages committed in the namne of Islam, and so Islam itself becomes a dirty word. That's not to actually tar all Muslims with the same broad brush, but to accept that faith plays some part in driving these people, just exactly as they claim.( I very much question such claims, personally speaking , but again my opinion on that  is irrelevant. )

This big issue of screening out the terrorists which currently rivets Amnerica just pales into insignificance in British minds, as we find ourselves faced with the clearly impossible task of screening out the raving bigots from the refugees.  We don't actually have a great deal of fear of terrorism here in Britain. We got bombed to hell by Nazi Germany, after all, then bombed some more by the IRA in the seventies. What we're looking at here is a much more menacing and intimate than  mere bombing ; something that employs  the language of "human rights" to systematically subvert human rights.

This British dislikefor traditional "Muslim" customs and values is nothing new. We've always ben concerned about the alarming frequency of forced marriage in Britain ever since the Muslims started arriving. But then,  at the same time,  we tended to fel that the the worst attrocities were happening "over there" and that Britain really was providing some sort of refuge, as well as a -hopefully- moderating influence.   

However  it all seems to be getting worse, instead. That Britain should have actually turned into a place where genital mutilation of children occurs on an industrial scale is sickening , and scary as fuck.   We are clearly not in control of this thing, and neither is the liberal sector of Muslim community in control of this thing; but rather, it's gaining increasing control over us , and turning our own liberal rhetoric against us. "Freedom of religion" is turning into a value that overrides every other freedom ... just so long as the religion is Islam. (I've seen video footage of Muslim clerics , in Britain, denouncing Muslim apostates as "worse than Christians and Jews" . Those people have a significant following.  Apostates live in fear of being physically attacked; and that actually does happen to some)

There's still one heckova lot of sympathy for Muslims who find themselves oppressed by their own community, but importing more and more Muslims is clearly not the solution.

When Political Correctnesss coins a new word "Islamophobia" to describe our reaction to such horrors, and sets out to silence us with slurs of "racisms", we quite natutrally feel increasinfgly alienated from the PC brigade.   We tend feel that they, and we,  are being taken for a ride. And not just any old ride, but a very scary ride in a clapped-out-old rollercoaster headiing for oblivion. All the world seem to have learned from European  history is that bigotry has a white face;

Of course, there are and will always be racistand  bigots amongst us. However, the The English working class are every bit as alert to racism and bigotry as we  ever were, and we don;'t believe that it always wears a white face. Hence that weird paradox of the liberal English suddenly turning into bigots, in the eyes of the rest of the world. We haven't changed at all,in that respect  we've  just identified a much bigger threat to our cherished  values than the various strutting little English national parties have ever been; and I'm sure that most of us sincerely hope that we're wrong.

[Pyraxis]

The poor in Britain dream of living the lifestyle of "trailer trash" in America , we really do.

I haven't been able to read through all of this yet, so I'm going to come back to it, but what is it about trailer park life that is really appealing from the Brit perspective?

ummmm. I decided to read some articles about Americam trailer park life, just to check that my image of it is close enough to the reality not to make my answer laughable  in yoUr eyeS.

Unfortunately it's having the side effect of me falling even further behind on coming up with cogent responses to all this. 

Actuially my image does sem to match the reality, but, what's totally gobsmacked me was some stuff about WHY americans live in trailer parks but Brits don't . I mean, you  guys do seemto think we have a choice, and prefer for various reasons to live in inner city tenements instead . Whereas it mostly comes down to: there's no space in England to spread out the housing like it is a trailer park, so that's never gonna be a cheap option unless you park them in a place where local employment is virtually zero. Which is mostly the case, in deed The trailerr parks we have mostly serve as retirement villages, or holiday camps; and they're not near as cheap as the American counterparts.

Uh, I hope you don't include me in "you guys", because then you'd be putting words in my mouth.  But the space answer makes sense.

[Pyraxis]

Walkie, after reading your last post about Islam, it sounds like the density of Muslim population in Britain is significantly higher than in the USA. It's a whole different set of issues - though I think you're being disingenuous to call it "only bombing" vs "more menacing" cultural mixing. According to a brief Google search, Muslims are 0.9% of the US population vs 4.5% of the British population.