Culture wars

TheCatWoman said:

I don't know that people were happier when people allegedly held more "christian values"

That's an interesting question. The society we lived in was built on Christian values. Most Western societies used the Bible and Gospels in particular as a starting point for the laws and values that were instituted. Almost all of our societies can trace our laws and values back to this. 

For me, true Christian values will always show compassion to everyone. This doesn't mean validating everyone's actions and beliefs but it does mean meeting them where they are and showing love to them. Anything else isn't true to the message of Jesus. 

Iain I certainly agree about the police not being bothered to enforce the law, that even if they have enough staff to get someone out to you. We're a low crime area, but when a young person was seen dropping rocks from a dual carriageway bridge onto on comming traffic, several people called 999 and were told that no one was available and to take photo's on thier phones and send them in. I wonder what would have happened if there'd had been a major accident?

I too remember football holigans terrorising people, I remember places that were no go areas that were predominantly white English. I've had loads of men shout at me in the street about what I'm wearing, what I'm doing, even one who, when I was walking into town with my 16 year old daughter, said 'put her down you old ***' to me, obviously we gave him laldy for it.

Women are dying of domestic violence at a rate of two a week at a minimum, the police don't enforce restraining orders, women have been killed after repeated phone calls to the police. I guess dead women are more interesting to investigate than live scared ones?

Girls who have been the victims of grooming gangs are ignored by multiple agencies, I don't believe for a minute it's about cultural sensitivites, more like can't be bothered and the fact that many of the victims are in care or come from chaotic backgrounds. Nobody seems to want to sort out the real problems here, which are social attitudes, if many police think it's just 'a domestic' and refuse to get involved at all, let alone keep the victims safe, what are the guys who do this sort of thing supposed to think, they know they'll get away with it. I remember the fight to get womens refuges funded, allowed to operate and DV seen as a real problem and to see the effects it has across generations. This was in the 70's and 80's, long before we had the levels of immigration there is now.

Billy I'm not trying to dismiss your experiences, we all tend to blame the people who make us walk in fear, and why not, but its not all about migration, these things are embedded in our white, christian western culture and needs challenging whatever religion, skin colour or class they're from.

I don't know that people were happier when people allegedly held more "christian values", happiness is a very subjective thing and means different things to different people. All the problems we have like child abuse, grooming gangs, domestic violence, robbery, muggings etc were all there years ago, our memories of them might fade or we might choose to believe they didn't exist, maybe because there weren't laws against them, but they did.

Are those christian values homophobia, acceptance of violence against women and children, no chance of a divorce? Everyone tells me they're not, but I see little of the positive in how these alleged values have manifested in our society.

We do need free speach, but that isn't an excuse to be nasty, cruel or thoughtless in our words, words have consequenses for real people int he real world.

Billy87 said:

the magistrates and courts always let them off so it got to the point where the police felt powerless and stopped even trying to enforce the law.

and

Billy87 said:

I think the police are unable to enforce the law in many areas because their hands are tied.

So you agree - the law enforcement services are failing to do their job. This is because their bosses are not empowering them to do so. The politicians are the ones driving this.

Billy87 said:

I don't think this point is true. I said in my earlier post that I am not just speaking about my own experiences but that there are many areas like this across the country and it is a genuine concern. 

There are so many other area to also worry about that are more damaging. How about county line gangs who are trapping vulnerable people into being their drug mules / distribution centers and casing so much damage amongst the young and vulnerable.

How about politicians cutting the vulnerable off from benefits.

How about employers exploiting workers (delivery drivers, warehouse workers etc) with harsh working conditions, zero hours contacts, unrealistic targets etc).

How about the massive growth in kiddy fiddlers that the police are always talking about chasing down as an excuse to get access to everyones data.

How about the massive amount of tax abuse by big companies.

etc etc

My point is that you have experienced one issue and it becomes like an echo chamber where you look for more instances in the news and by coincidence see them - it becomes almost self fulfilling that the problem snowballs when you go down that rabbit hole.

It is a natural human exerience when we seek validation of our fears that we see more of that particualr bogey man wherever we look.

My point is that the real problem lies in the lack of enforcement of the law. If it were applied would the bad guys get away with what they currently do?

I respectfully disagree with you on this. Firstly, the police told us on numerous occasions that they had arrested these young men several times but that the magistrates and courts always let them off so it got to the point where the police felt powerless and stopped even trying to enforce the law. 

Iain said:

because you see one group then you naturally develop an opinion that they are the most important ones who need to be stopped.

Secondly, I don't think this point is true. I said in my earlier post that I am not just speaking about my own experiences but that there are many areas like this across the country and it is a genuine concern. 

I think the police are unable to enforce the law in many areas because their hands are tied. The point you make about football hooligans and how that was dealt with is certainly interesting and thought provoking though. I used to work with some former police officers from the 1980's and 90's who told me similar stories 

Billy87 said:

We had migrant gangs target our flat and neighbouring flats to the point where we were calling the police almost every night

I think you will find this is a failure of the law and order organisations to enforce the law rather than it being inherently an immigration issue.

Any group allowed to flaunt the law with impunity will end up with this sort of over-reach.

I recall groups of foodball hooligans in my home town growing up were like this, harrassing people they didn't like and turning the area into a lawless zone until the night the police arrived en mass and beat the snot out of them - some ended up with prison terms and others never had the guts to do it again.

I can't condone the violence used (even if it gave outstanding results for the specific group in question) it does highlight that it is now the enforcement of the law which is failing.

Responsibility for that lies firmly at the feet of whoever is in power in government.

Stop blaming those who are exploring the boundaries of what they can get away with and start blaming those who are not enforcing the laws designed to prevent it.

All criminal groups are doing the same thing, but because you see one group then you naturally develop an opinion that they are the most important ones who need to be stopped.

I have read through all the comments on here with interest. All sides have made some very thoughtful, well considered points. Having taken some time to consider it I would like to add my own thoughts 

First of all, I don't believe we are a Christian country anymore although I also believe that is a bad thing. Being a Christian country doesn't mean everyone is a Christian and goes to church, what it means is that the basic structure of society and it's moral values are based on the teachings of Jesus. These teachings are basically love God, love everyone else, put other's needs above your own, care for your family and those who can't care for themselves, be loyal and faithful, don't seek revenge, don't lie, cheat, steal or murder. When I look out at the broken society in front of me I don't see those values represented anymore.

Modern society is individualistic, it is all about "what do I want?", "What makes me feel fulfilled?" "What's best for me?" whereas true Christianity has always been about what is best for others and putting them above yourself. 

What I would ask as a genuine question is are we now happier in our individualistic society than we were in the days when society followed these values? I honestly don't think we are

On to the issue of "culture wars" and "woke", I think it is an oversimplification to say that the opposition to these things is based on a dislike of minorities or a desire to preserve perceived privilege. I think the key issue is that any society that wishes to function cohesively needs a framework on which to operate. Once anybody can be anything they want and anybody can do anything they want as long as it makes them happy then we lose the ability to function. To put it another way if everyone has their own truth then there is no truth. 

The trans issue is one I don't intend to get into here as it is a minefield on this site but I will say this, I don't believe that all opposition to gender identity issues is motivated by simple prejudice in the way many of the Trans Ally community seek to frame it. As a former school teacher, I could speak for hours on the damage done to young children by teaching them about things like the Genderbread Person in Year 8 and below. Many young people have been caused great emotional damage by some of these lessons and then pushed down a path to transition by organisations such as Stonewall without proper time to consider whether this irreversible path was truly what they wanted. I have so much evidence of this. 

I think freedom of speech is also a key issue. If we truly believe in an inclusive society then that must include people with a variety of opinions. If someone believes they identify as a different gender and that is their right, then it is also the right of another person to believe there are only 2 genders. Freedom of opinion must be for everyone or it is for no one, that is something that I think has been forgotten. 

Peter said:

If somebody elses feelings deprives me of the liberty to be myself and forces me to wear a mask then to me that's oppresion. If I have to walk on eggshels for fear of being expelled from X, Y, Z if I say the wrong thing I'm living with a metaphorical gun against my head. I hate no one, no race, no gender, no sexuality. But people who are over sensative, who try to tell me what I can or can't find funny or what topics I can or can't express opinions on, well these people fill me with rage. This is especially true when it happens in spaces created spicificly for weirdos like me to be ourselves.

I think Peter sums this up perfectly, I couldn't have put this better myself 

I think immigration is a tricky issue. I grew up in a multicultural area with friends of many different races and nationalities. I didn't even see colour, maybe that was just me, but it never occurred to me whether my mates were black or white, Polish or English, they were just my mates. All I really noticed is that Caribbean mums did the best cooking! 

However, in recent years immigration is a hard thing to ignore. I think this is because the demographics have changed, more and more immigration now is from cultures not only different to ours but violently opposed to ours on almost every level, which creates fractures in society. One only has to look at the state of Germany, previously the model of social cohesion, since Merkel's decision to allow 1 million undocumented migrants into the country in 2016 to see the effect this can have on a society. I know areas of my previous home town that white people are now afraid to go in, that's not racism it's a fact. My wife was verbally abused in the street for being a "white woman" in one of these areas. We had migrant gangs target our flat and neighbouring flats to the point where we were calling the police almost every night and had to move in with my parents for safety, again these sort of things don't get reported much in the media but they are regular occurrences in many British towns. Calling everyone who is concerned about these things "racist" as some do does no one any favours. 

Summing up, I think the worst thing we can hear in society is "You can't say that". The stifling of free debate and indeed, as Peter alludes, of humour as well has been one of the worst things of the past 10 years. Only by discussing our differing views and perspectives openly can we truly move forward and find some common ground. Even if we can't then at least we can say to each other "I may disagree with what you say but I will always defend your right to say it"

I feel left behind too and I agree with Iain that it's age related more than anything else. Every generation has its own idea of some golden age, when things were different and better than now, forgetting that things like child abuse, DV and crime still happened.

I don't understand tech, QR codes,smart phones, streaming services, it all goes way over my head, people speak in abbreviations from texts, it takes me ages to translate what the hell they're talking about.

Education has changed so much from when I was at school, when I did an access course 25 years ago, our first maths lesson and they had numbers in brackets, I'd never seen them before and apparently thats normal GCSE stuff. People talk about doing things in Base whatever and I think what the hells that? They talk of integers, what are they? I know now what they are, but I still ask myself why?

The only constant in life is change, I know as autistics many fiind this hard, but once you accept it, it's quite liberating, you open up to new experiences and thoughts, ways of being.

My gr, gr Aunty lost her husband in WW1, he went down with his ship at Galipolli, we don't even have proper records for his death, she became one of the surplus women, women with no husbands and no real chance of remarriage, unless to a much older man who needed a nurse. So she stayed single, brought up my Nan and her brother after thier mother died, adopted another baby over the wall from neighbours, held down a job as a seemstress. She did all this at a time when women had to have a male guarantor for anything legal like a rental agreement. All our families have known hardship, it's not a badge of honor, we can celebrate people like my Aunty, without wishing to go back to a time to live as they did.

I study history, especially the Early Anglo-Saxons, I find them fascinating, but I wouldn't want to live there, I'm happy living in the here and now, with mod cons like washing machines, central heating.

If I had to eat the diet of the times when I grew up I'd probably be able to eat very little. I've been told by men of my generation that I'm undateable because I don't conform to thier cultural norms, I don't drink alcohol, I'm vegetarian, I read books and broad sheet newspapers, I don't have thier cultural prejudices, I love my mixed and multi-cultural family and most of all I won't do as I'm told! Why on earth would I want to preserve those sorts of prejudices?

I Sperg said:

I have come to trust the evidence of my own eyes more than I trust Government statistics. 

If your eyes can only take in a tiny fraction of the country / people / events then basing your opinion off this statistically insignificant value seems an odd stance to take.

This is based on what you can see first hand of course.

If you rely on any form of media then you already need to accept that there will be bias, ineptitude, sometimes malice and often just lazy reporting to factor into the trustworthiness of the data.

Any government is also of dubious intent but they at least run the risk of being caught out and taken to task by the law over it in principle at least.

I have come to realise there is no way to find the "truth" but only guess at an approximation of it.

I have come to trust the evidence of my own eyes more than I trust Government statistics. 

When they stop lying about the really important stuff, I might start finding them more credible.

I'm sorry I'm like this, it places a gulf between me and a lot of people on many subjects. 

That and the Autism...

The term cultural Christian can be defined loosely as a person who perhaps goes to church regularly but is an atheist. The person might feel peer pressure from family or friends to attend church, or perhaps they think it looks good on their CV, or perhaps going to church has a darker purpose as a way to wiggle into youth groups to sexually abuse children. The term can also apply to those who don’t go to church, say they are Christian yet are atheistic. 

Great video - thanks for sharing, Iain.

NAS65321 said:

To those on the left I am considered racist because I see color, its how my brain is wired, it wont change.

You see colour, as do most of the population in the UK and the world, and yes, in simplistic terminology, it’s how most of our brains are wired, autistic or non autistic. That does not prevent a person from treating others with the respect and dignity that every human being deserves.

Life might have been easier in terms of jobs and housing, but it was our government who decided to sell off council housing and not let councils build more homes, just as it was our government who decided to run down manufacturing and have a service economy, where jobs were replaced with careers, there was no place left for those of low education and/or ability, the creation of an underclass was on purpose, to make those of us just scraping by fear that non-compliance would condemn us and our families to the sorts of poverty that ar eonly to common now. The British people voted for tax cuts and the selling off of our national assets, water, power, railways etc.

People have always been ghettoised and have ghettoised themselves for fear of hostility from the dominant population, it probably is human instinct to seek people like us, but it's also human nature to seek out the new and the novel. 

I don't understand how we can have to many immigrants and yet have '..failed to sell this country to many immigrants.' What is this failure of which you speak?

I agree that corporate greed has been responsible for allowing a lot of cheap labour, it's one of the reasons why comparitively speaking so many of us are so badly off. But a big part of that was done with the permission of the British electorate, who wanted cheap goods and voted for people who would provide it. Don't forget we had an international banking and finacial crisis that gave the Tory's an excuse to impose austerity and hack or public sector to the bone, whilst demonising those who work in it, people like health care workers, social worker's, teachers, schools and the buildings we need to provide those services. Successive governments have allowed tax evasion on an almost industrial scale, forcing HMRC to settle for a tax take millions lower than those companies should be paying, whilst all the while allowing almost limitless renumeration packages for those at the top of businesses whilst the workers are paid a pittance.

Little of this is anyones fault but our own, for allowing ourselves to be persauded that all our problems were down to others, the EU or migrants, or the sick, we voted for a government who's prime minister told us that there was no such thing as society and we all had to look after ourselves, You can look around you and see the results of that policy.

A very interesting analysis Iain.

Thanks for that.

I thought this might be useful.

Ethnicity stats for the UK (rather than personal perceptions).

https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/

"their day was only their first and lasting impressions of a place that will always be in constant flux."

This is the crux of it. Things will never go back to how you want them to, they will always change and then change again.

For what it's worth, I disagree with a lot of what you have said, but, I think that we are where we are now because democratic Western governments have ignored the concerns of many people about immigration. I don't agree with the vast majority of those concerns but in a democracy, you can't just ignore what a large number of people think. That's why we have ended up with crooks like Farage in this country, Trump in the US and others across Europe being able to exploit such concerns for their own end. These are dangerous times and it feels like we're on the precipice of some pretty awful times ahead.

NAS65321 said:

That is just an example of me being left behind.

This is just a side effect of you getting old I'm afraid.

I believe all generations get the the stage where they are saying "it was better in my day" when in fact it was just that their day was only their first and lasting impressions of a place that will always be in constant flux.

Everything changes and we tend towards being conservative (with a small C) as we age and long to go back to the safety of what we first knew. It wasn't better or worse in real terms, only in your perception.

Libraries are a dying feature and Islam is a growning religion in the UK so it is only natural that the space left by one is taken up by the other.

Food tastes also change so the (probably) unhealthy food from that restaurant has been replaced by (questionably) healther food that people now are demanding. Supply and demand.

You are becoming part of an obsolete age group so expect this to happen more and more - it is the life cycle of society and came to all those who came before you.

I have plenty of knowledge of London, and British history. My dad was bombed out of London in 1940 and I still have family there. I must admit I do not like big cities anyway, too overwhelming Most western large cities are like London, doesn't mean we have to like it and he happy about it.

You are going back too far in time. Where I live now my grandparents, who would now be around 120yo, would recognise this place. That is not true of multicutral Britian. Cities always had Jewish parts, there were refugees from Europe and the like but they were always people that fitted in. I have no problem with people who come here from western civilized societies, no matter what color they are. I do have a issue with those from non western countries who do not share our values of relegious tolerance, are not 'civilized', and who treat women poorley. The west as a whole has not tackled this.

Finally as an example I reciently went to my former home town. The library that my mum joined in the 40's, I joied in the 70's and was an iconic community asset is now a muslim cultral center,. The library has gone to the community center. Also my favourite chip shop that ahd been run by the same Chinese family since the 70's is now a vegan take away. That is just an example of me being left behind.

I agree with much of what you have said. I am very liberal when it comes to what people want to do with their lives, and expect that from other people. I too went to a awful seconday school in the 80's and nobody from my year went to uni, very few ever did. There was a lot wrong back then that I could not see at the time. However life was much easier in terms of getting a basic job, housing etc. 

I would never want the UK to be the country it was in the 'no black, no irish etc' era. However IMHO we have gone far too far the other way and failed to sell this country to many immigrants. Anybody can see that immigrants band together, its human nature, and the world in general has not tackled this. Corporate greed is based around important cheap labour to the west. 

I was brought up in a multi-cultural area that became more so as time went on, I liked it, I loved the variety of food, of music, the different colours of clothing, people experiences. The schools I went to were mostly white working class, council estate living pupils and I do remember the resentment towards imigrants, towards gay people and the cruelty towards anyone different. I also remember the outrage from male teachers in secondary school when equal pay and rights for women came in, of being told there was no point in educating us because we were girls and would work for a couple of years before getting married and having babies. It became a sort of self fufilling prophesy, we weren't educated enough to do much other that work in shops, the proverbial selling spuds in woollies, and as many of our age group and class did we had children young. I think what you describe and my experiences growing and the divides are as much about class as anything else, as working class people we weren't expected to get educated to more than a basic degree, leave school as soon as possible and go to work, to not rise above our allotted station in life. Did you know that when we had the 11 plus, it was skewed in favour of boy's and boys scores were bumped up and those of girls marked down to maintain the illusion of make superiority? Our post war governments chose to fill the post war labour shortages with migrants from the empire, rather than allow women to work? Women were removed from the workforce even though they'd gained the skill in things like welding and engineering during the war that we needed. The government actually paid for a study by psychlogist RIchard Bowlby to try and justify women staying at home with thier children, calling it The Attachment Theory.

Here in Wales we have translators for some medical staff, we are in an area where Welsh is the first language for many, especially older people, they have a poor understanding English, and need everything explained to them in Welsh.

If our governments hadn't been so short sighted we may have many more home grown doctors and other staff, but they consistently refused to increase places in medcal schools depite them being way over subscribed.

Iains right, some of our most beloved things like fish and chips arrived with Jewish immigrants after pogroms in Russia. Ice cream parlours, came with Italian migrants. Migration has for centuries enriched our economy and culture, the only real differece is that for the most of them were European. But, there's a long history of multi-culturalism in Britain going back centuries, especially in port cities, like Liverpool, Cardiff and Bristol.

I never want to see a return to times when landlords could legitimately put signs up saying 'No dogs, No Black, No Irish', not do I ever want to be bannished to the back room of pubs, or labeled a slag for exercising my right to choose who I express my sexuality with. I do not wish to see a return to times when being gay was a crime.

One of the odd things about gender, is I'm not actually sure we really know for sure how many genders there are, the more we can reach into our chromosome and our genome, the more it seem that a simple X and Y are not the whole picture. A minority are biologically of mixed gender, we see it more often in elite sport, but not so much in the general population, probably because its not looked for. If you look back into classical history there are a number of mentions of hermaphrodies, Emporer Tiberious was famaous for having them, whether these were true hermaphrodites or women with an unusually large and protuberant clitoris, or men with a lot of oestrogen we don't know and probably never will?

I do think biological women need women only spaces, unfortunately many women have been so badly abused by men that they will never trust any biological male again, even one who's fully transitioned to female. When we talk about trans people we only ever seem to talk about male to female, rarely about female to male, is this because of a fear of feminisation of men, whereas a woman wanting to be a man is seen as more natural or worthy?

Personally I don't care about people's sexual orrientation unless I want to have sex with them. When I engage a professional to do a job, I don't care about anything other than thier ability to do that job, race, religion, gender, sexual orrientation or even species don't matter as long as they can do the job properly.