kryten:
Sounds like London, UK where I currently reside with three children...
Does your experience of life in London in recent years (since around late nineties) reflect that of this writer? I think this is one of the few writers (on the topic) I've found balanced and non-alarmist. That's the reason I've used her piece to moot a point that has been posited by many others in a more judgmental and accusative tone. So I ask, is this what London increasingly feels like for secular, middle-income families and individuals?
"Of the 8.17 million people in London, one million are Muslim,
with the majority of them young families. That is
not, in reality, a great number. But because so many Muslims
increasingly insist on emphasising their separateness,
it feels as if they have taken over; my female neighbours
flap past in full niqab, some so heavily veiled that I can’t
see their eyes. I’ve made an effort to communicate by smiling
deliberately at the ones I thought I was seeing out and about
regularly, but this didn’t lead to conversation because they
never look me in the face.
I recently went to the plainly named “Curtain Shop” and asked
if they would put some up for me. Inside were a lot of
elderly Muslim men. I was told that they don’t do that kind
of work, and was back on the pavement within a few moments.
I felt sure I had suffered discrimination and was bewildered
as I had been there previously when the Muslim owners had
been very friendly. Things have changed. I am living in a
place where I am a stranger.
I was brought up in a village in Staffordshire, and although
I have been in London for a quarter of a century I have kept
the habit of chatting to shopkeepers and neighbours, despite
it not being the done thing in metropolitan life. Nowadays,
though, most of the tills in my local shops are manned by
young Muslim men who mutter into their mobiles as they are
serving. They have no interest in talking to me and rarely
meet my gaze. I find this situation dismal. I miss banter,
the hail fellow, well met chat about the weather, or what
was on TV last night."
"In the Nineties, when I arrived, this part of Acton was a
traditional working-class area. Now there is no trace of
any kind of community – that word so cherished by the Left.
Instead it has been transformed into a giant transit camp
and is home to no one. The scale of immigration over recent
years has created communities throughout London that never
need to – or want to – interact with outsiders.
It wasn’t always the case: since the 1890s thousands of
Jewish, Irish, Afro-Caribbean, Asian and Chinese workers,
among others, have arrived in the capital, often displacing
the indigenous population. Yes, there was hateful overt
racism and discrimination, I’m not denying that. But,
over time, I believe we settled down into a happy mix of
incorporation and shared aspiration, with disparate
peoples walking the same pavements but returning to
very different homes – something the Americans call
“sundown segregation”.
But now, despite the wishful thinking of multiculturalists,
wilful segregation by immigrants is increasingly echoed by
the white population – the rate of white flight from our
cities is soaring. According to the Office for National
Statistics, 600,000 white Britons have left London in the
past 10 years. The latest census data shows the breakdown
in telling detail: some London boroughs have lost a quarter
of their population of white, British people. The number in
Redbridge, north London, for example, has fallen by 40,844
(to 96,253) in this period, while the total population has
risen by more than 40,335 to 278,970. It isn’t only London
boroughs. The market town of Wokingham in Berkshire has
lost nearly 5 per cent of its white British population.
I suspect that many white people in London and the Home
Counties now move house on the basis of ethnicity,
especially if they have children. Estate agents don’t
advertise this self-segregation, of course. Instead there
are polite codes for that kind of thing, such as the mention
of “a good school”, which I believe is code for “mainly
white English”. Not surprising when you learn that nearly
one million pupils do not have English as a first language.
I, too, have decided to leave my area, following in the
footsteps of so many of my neighbours. I don’t really want
to go. I worked long and hard to get to London, to find a
good job and buy a home and I’d like to stay here. But I’m
a stranger on these streets and all the “good” areas, with
safe streets, nice housing and pleasant cafés, are beyond
my reach. I see London turning into a place almost
exclusively for poor immigrants and the very rich.
It’s sad that I am moving not for a positive reason, but to
escape something. I wonder whether I’ll tell the truth, if
I’m asked. I can’t pretend that I’m worried about local
schools, so perhaps I’ll say it’s for the chance of a
conversation over the garden fence. But really I no longer
need an excuse: mass immigration is making reluctant
racists of us all."
Source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/9831912/I...
Edit: Cleanup