Culture wars

I can answer many of your questions being a white middle aged man. I will try not to stray into too much politics , or upset anybody. My political views are very mixed , right wing on immigration and net zero and left on economey and the rich. 

Basically change is the biggest issue. I grew up in the 70's and 80's in a 95% white society on a council estate. Back then everybody worked, being on benefits was shameful, Christianity was the norm(I am agnostic BTW) and people were basically all the same. If you were non white British you fitted in with everybody else. That situation really still existed into the laste 90's being slowley eroded. I have been to places in London that were 80% immigrant, thats not my country, but it has been allowed to happen all over the western world.

One of the tings that really annoys people like me is we are not supposed to have any prejudice and we are not supposed to have any opinions that are now main stream. To those on the left I am considered racist because I see color, its how my brain is wired, it wont change. I dont activley do anything related to that persons color but I notice it and may have stereo typical feelings about them. Millions of us are the same. Its like with the Trans stuff , you can identify as a chicken as far as I care, but you are still either a man or a woman. 

I have a big mistrust of relegion, I was baptised and went to a standard non religious school where we sang hyms and prayed. I believe in nothing, its just not for me. I am all for relegious freedom, but also the right to critizise relegion. This is why Islam is very much disliked by people like me. They are stuck in the 7th century, treat women and 'gays' apallingly and take no critisim.

Before Christmas we relocated 200 miles to a rural area. Its like stepping back 30 years. The only non white faces you see run the post office, and indian and Chinese restuarants. I think the last census showed about 4% ethnics out of 4000. Thats how it used to be, no mosques, no GP surgery translators like where I came from, its a reall community and I love it. 

I hope I have not upset anybody but the OP did ask the question. Sorry about any bad spelling too, not my strong point!

Rob

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.

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 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. 

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.