That is a promising trend in UK society - in some ethnic groups there has been a tremendous acceptance and fusion with UK tradition and culture and this is the dynamic the makes the UK a great cosmopolitan place. The 'New Britain' is multi-coloured with lots of 'flavours'...people get on. Also theres a great tradition of settled immigrant communities that retain the traditions and practice of their native culture e.g. chinatown, Indian communities, Polish people.
The problem lies in seperatism and a rejection of UK culture if it doesn't conform to the ideology of some native cultures. Last year over £100 million uk pounds was spent on translation services while UK ethnics are dying for lack of medicines and hospital beds, schools are in disrepair, etc.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6174303.stm
Doesn't the majority of Scottish and English people now want separation from each other?
As for your celebrated diversity...
http://www.majorityrights.com/
http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/tired_and_liberal_in_peckham/
Tired and liberal in Peckham
"Guns plague Peckham despite investment” complains the headline from an article on the BBC website written in the aftermath of a mini-catalogue of black violence in SE London.
The dilapidated flats might be gone, but the criminals who lurked have not - they just got younger.
Seven years after the death of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor in a stairwell in the North Peckham estate in south-east London, violence still plagues the area.
Replacing rows of rundown high-rise flats and maisonettes are 2,000 new homes, a new sports centre, a new leisure centre and award-winning library, thanks to a £290m regeneration investment.
Peckham, which has tried much to shake off its mean streets image in the last decade, has once again hit the headlines because of acts of violence.
The acts of violence have involved two fatal shootings and a stabbing, all performed with the tell-tale heedlessness of the black gang-killer. The familiar press references to the Met’s Operation Trident complete the picture.
That BBC headline has about it the melancholy of inevitability. For the Establishment hand-wringers, the investment-mongers, the blank-slate idealists this is bad, bad news. An awful suspicion hangs in the air. Can nothing break the black attachment to mayhem? I mean, if building them an award-winning new library and even filling the Bellendon area with posh street art by Zandra Rhodes and Anthony Gormley doesn’t transform them all into model citizens, what more will it take?
And beneath it all lurks the still darker, indeed unbearably dark and depressing possibility that the racist bastards were right all along: blacks are irredeemable, and all those enthusiastically right-on genuflections to the gods of diversity ...
If you’re looking for a real multi-cultural experience and a slice of authentic South London life, Camberwell and Peckham will be right up your street. Here you’ll discover multi-faith, multi-ethnic London at its rich, colourful best — charged with the energy of regeneration, investment and economic uplift.
... that seemed such a gas at the time will come back to haunt and humiliate everyone.
Everyone but the racists, obviously.
Well, maybe not quite everyone because here’s a brave article by Leo McKinstry, a former aid to Peckham’s MP, Harriet Harman. He, at least, can hold his head high.
He wrote the piece five long years ago. Obviously, it achieved absolutely nothing at the time. Now, it reads like one long-reminder that there are no new lessons in matters of human nature.
In Peckham, there is no such thing as society
THE word “community” is one of the most over-used in modern Britain. Yet it can never have been more badly misplaced than in the hand-wringing debate over the death of Damilola Taylor.
Since the end of the trial last week, there have been continual references to the “community” on the North Peckham estate where the 10-year-old boy died. But community implies solidarity, shared identity, mutual concern. Such values have been entirely absent from North Peckham, where social breakdown, fear and aggression predominate.
It was this lack of any true community spirit, not police incompetence, that denied Damilola justice. By remaining silent, local people ruined the chances of an effective prosecution. That is why it is so grotesque to attack the police. “The whole community knows who did it. The police did not do a good job,” says the local “community leader” Gary Barnett, failing to explain why residents failed to share this knowledge with the authorities.
I have seen for myself how the absence of any communal feelings has destroyed the social fabric of this south London estate.
... The place certainly lived down to its dismal reputation. Throughout this concrete warren of despair, there were burnt-out flats, broken lifts, piles of rubbish, abandoned cars, used needles, and smashed windows. Vandalism and drug-taking seemed the two most popular activities on the estate. Because of the roaming gangs, the sense of fear was almost palpable.
... Many locals say that this intervention has achieved little. “You still have the same things going on, the stabbings, the stealing,” says Uanu Seshmi from one local project for “excluded children”. Indeed, despite the lavish spending, crime has worsened. The grim reality of Peckham is that you can change the buildings, but that will not change the people. All the high quality housing and shiny new computers will do nothing to break the cycle of fecklessness, irresponsibility and thuggery.
... There is an even more disturbing truth about Peckham which is rarely voiced. For decades, the political establishment has enthused about the “rich multi-cultural diversity” of modern Britain, but in north Peckham, where more than 70 per cent of the population is from ethnic minorities, the picture looks very different. In contrast to the propaganda spouted by liberal ideologues living in all-white neighbourhoods, Peckham exposes the darker side of mass immigration: gang violence, drug-dealing, muggings, shootings, and disruption in school.
It is time we stopped pretending multi-culturalism has been an unqualified benefit to society. In areas like Peckham, there is nothing “rich” about diversity.
In those five years that 70% immigrant figure will have increased substantially. The white natives have gone, and their, of course, so shamefully racist attitudes with them. Liberal guilt and Jewish self-interest have won in Peckham. But now there are no more excuses left for all those little things blacks get up to. What’s a hand-wringer to do? Carry on ignoring McInstry’s warning - “The grim reality of Peckham is that you can change the buildings, but that will not change the people” - and spend another £290 million? And another, like a high-roller on a losing streak?
My feeling is that the managerial Establishment will look for an answer in its own self-interest. It will try to produce some response that maintains its status, perhaps finding justifications for more thaumaturgy, more expenditure in new and hitherto undreamt of formulations of social concern (white responsibility for the absent black father?) and new definitions of deprivation (white responsibility for the paucity of black male role models?). It will certainly not give up now. It will require a righteous English hand to do the decent thing one day, and decapitate it.
Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, February 8, 2007 at 12:30 AM in Immigration