I blinked again… and another eight months had passed.
It’s been an interesting time…!
Unexpectedly, the UK threw its toys out of the pram and decided to leave the EU, citing ‘immigration’ as one of the principal (and principle?) gripes. All I can say is that, since we’re ALL immigrants at some time in our genealogical past, then if we threw out all the immigrants, Britain would be a hell of a lot better place for the wildlife: there wouldn’t be any people, for a start!
But no: of course people mean ‘recent immigrants’. My comment here is: if we didn’t have all these foreigners coming here and taking our jobs, things would be a lot different. There’s be hardly any delivery men, for instance, or waiters; or farm workers; or factory workers. The Brits (the ‘real’ brits, that is) don’t want to do these jobs: they’re ‘menial’ and poorly paid, and we all want to lounge about in the lap of luxury – preferably at the ‘taxpayer’s’ expense. Those same foreign taxpayers who, generally, contribute far more than they consume of our state funding. The Raj is not dead: it’s simply moved back to Blighty…
True: the schools are overcrowded, but this is much more a result of underfunding and poor planning than immigration. True: ‘they’ clutter up our doctor’s surgeries with their squalling brats and strange clothes and stop all us native geriatrics from getting the instant service we demand, but the cause of this is mostly the same as the above. True: we get irritated with their funny foreign ways and their chattering away in languages we can’t understand: after all, when in Rome, you should speak Latin. Just like we do when we’re abroad: visited any Costas recently? You hear more English on the streets there than you do in, say, Leicester.
But hold your prejudices in check for a moment and learn the lesson of history: Huge numbers of foreign immigrants have always come to Britain (huge, that is, in proportion to the resident population). Occasionally they came as invaders, such as the relatively small numbers of Normans who took over in 1066, but mostly they were peaceful migrants, often fleeing persecution in their own countries (such as Huguenots, Flemish weavers and Jews) and mostly they merged almost invisibly into the locals – eventually. These things take a while: normally at least two generations. The immigrants themselves often live apart from the locals in little clusters (ghettos!) but their children tend to merge in much more, although they often retain links with their parents’ culture out of respect. The grandchildren, however, tend to regard themselves as British and often lose touch with their original culture. This has even happened in my own lifetime with the immigrants from the West Indies and the Subcontinent. Things were harder for them, as they are visibly different from the majority of the ‘locals’, but even so, most of the immigrants’ grandchildren think of themselves as British first and say, Jamaican second. It still finds out my deep, hidden prejudices when I find it odd to hear a black or asian person speak in a regional British accent: in my youth I was used to them talking funny! Some of them still do, of course, but that’s more of a lifestyle choice nowadays. While it’s good to remember your roots, it seems pointless to labour them to the extent of causing yourself problems in the here-and-now. After all, that’s where you live!
Until very recently, part of the problem was the ‘visible differences’. After all, a black skin is rather difficult to hide, even if you wanted to. So there is a kind of compensation which cuts in: if you can’t hide it, flaunt it. Grow dreadlocks, for instance. Adopt strange ways and odd accents: all fine and dandy – we all need some diversity – but just remember: in human society, as in nature, the odd and eccentric draws opprobrium: its well known that crows, for instance, will attack another crow which has white feathers. It’s different, so it will be driven out. Children, for instance, are merciless towards anyone who’s different. Adults are, generally, merely better at hiding their prejudices…
The elements of the most recent ‘wave’ (a rather prejudicial term beloved of the media who want us to see this as a ‘problem’) of arrivals fall into one of two main categories: (Eastern) Europeans who, mostly, look just the same as ‘us’ but who behave differently and gabble away in strange, incomprehensible tongues and Middle-easterners – mostly Muslims – who, although, in western dress probably wouldn’t even be noticed, foolishly insist on donning strange, outlandish garb (as well as espousing strange, outlandish ideas and morals). So we have a double whammy: people who look like ‘us’ but aren’t, and others who look strange, have strange customs and a small minority of whom want to impose their religion/culture/ideas on us. The very idea! After all, we’re British. We have the religion, culture and ideas and have, traditionally, imposed them on them: Johnnie Foreigner…
And to top it all, we have the modern nemesis: uncontrolled, universally accessible media wherein any kook or weirdo can scream his prejudices from the rooftops (and believe me: kooks and weirdos we have aplenty) and our kids can ‘read all about it’ without, as they say, let or hindrance.
No wonder we wanted to leave. Re-dig the moat; flood the Chunnel; Rebuild Hadrian’s wall (a bit further north, mind you) and Offa’s Dyke; pull up the drawbridge, lower the portcullis and repel all these alien invaders who appear to be such a threat to our essential Britishness – whatever that is. My comment is: Calm down, guys. Come back in a couple of generations and all those outlandish, alien ideas will have been assimilated, masticated and regurgitated and will have become part of that essential Britishness we all crave. Unless, of course, our Sceptered Isle has sunk beneath the waves under the load of humanity pouring in across our borders…