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Spangly A posted:Go read it again dickhead. The denial is in the paper you linked, and also what Ronya quoted. There are concerns found in certain areas, some of which are predominately South Asian; none of it has anything to do with muslims mass postal frauding. Its all the white people with South Asian names frauding in South Asian areas and getting sent down for it.
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May 24, 2014 14:57
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I would advise against taking sides in this particular argument too aggressively, as it's quite plausible that there is both a degree of electoral fraud and voter intimidation and an excessive perception of its magnitude and curiously disparate attitude in desired enforcement reactions voting is expressive to begin with, so particularly motivated activists being violent in order to obtain a ludicrously small number of votes is quite imaginable. it takes a degree of innovation for this to turn into systemic advantages, but such innovation would tend to leave a paper trail
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May 24, 2014 15:11
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Is there a reason other people haven't put A Sloth on Ignore yet?
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May 24, 2014 15:45
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kingturnip posted:Is there a reason other people haven't put A Sloth on Ignore yet? Because some people still think that when he gets called a fascist or racist its just typical lefty mudslinging, as opposed to actually being true.
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May 24, 2014 16:01
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One day after being elected, a UKIP councillor faces expulsion over racist and homophobic comments...The Guardian posted:Dave Small, who was elected to Redditch borough council on Friday, faces being kicked out of the party for referring to gay people as "perverts" and African immigrants as "scroungers".
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May 24, 2014 16:26
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Serotonin posted:Because some people still think that when he gets called a fascist or racist its just typical lefty mudslinging, as opposed to actually being true. I don't know where the ambiguity is when he's admitted as much. Either he's a real self-professed fascist or a really poor troll, not worth paying attention to regardless. Illuminti posted:What do I think Britishness is? Well it's societal not ethnic. While "ethnic" can contain allusions to race, outside of lovely dogwhistle language it basically means "culture", i.e. social identity. This is why on [good] diversity forms race and ethnicity are categorised separately. The only reason they still have any apparent relation to each other is that large scale international migration is a very recent thing, so any given person of a particular race (i.e. geographical/genetic heritage) is fairly likely to identify to some extent with the culture associated with the place where that race "originates" (read: has been the majority for the last couple of generations or so). tl;dr: the thing you described after the excerpt I quoted is exactly what is called "ethnicity", and is entirely independent of race.
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May 24, 2014 16:35
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Serotonin posted:Because some people still think that when he gets called a fascist or racist its just typical lefty mudslinging, as opposed to actually being true. Boy who cried wolf. 
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May 24, 2014 17:09
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As opposed to the boy who cried and cried about Muslims taking his jobs. Or was that the Poles?
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May 24, 2014 17:17
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Renaissance Robot posted:I don't know where the ambiguity is when he's admitted as much. Either he's a real self-professed fascist or a really poor troll, not worth paying attention to regardless. If I understand you correctly, ok. So I should have said it's ethnic not racial? I don't think someone can't become "British". Of course they can, but with mass migration into areas, what becomes british in those areas is not an evolution of what a lot of the old population would call British, it's a very different thing. lenoon posted:You should care about the genetics of the situation as it's very interesting. The article you liked is a series of two now horrendously out of date articles that bear little relevance to the current hypothesis. When I'm not phone posting I will tell you why, and how, everything in that article is wrong. I'm sure it is interesting, I don't care about it in regards to modern immigration. I would be interested to hear that, if you can keep the accusatory tone out of your writing, like I in some way deliberately posted that to mislead people. QuantumCrayons posted:A Scot's legal system, humour and culture is distinct from an Englishman's from the south of England, which is distinct from a Welshman' namesake posted:But what effect? You take it as given that all of these people have no interest in integrating, that because they were born somewhere else they won't adopt the traits of the area they move to Alecto posted:Your statistic doesn't take into account that unlike all previous immigration waves, a huge proportion of EU immigrants stay and work here for a while, but then go home. I am interested in what you all think off the large amounts of Brits living in large clusters in Spain. Do you think they are integrating well, do you think they have benefited the regions they are in, bringing much needed diversity and colour? Would Barcelona feel Spanish if half it's population was German and English?
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May 24, 2014 17:44
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Illuminti posted:
This is a ridiculous argument because Barcelona has never been and will never feel Spanish. Germany, however, has no problem with it's massive turk population. British expats are poo poo in Spain because they refuse to learn the language or make any attempt at living in anything but isolated enclaves. If this behaviour was mirrored exclusively in european migrants to Britain you might have an inkling of a point. But I'm pretty sure the vast majority of British expats tend to adopt well to new cultural surroundings, since Spain and Gibraltar represent a tiny portion of the very worst our society has to offer.
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May 24, 2014 17:50
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Why would you pick a country with a massive Islamic heritage it's pretty ok with anyway? Christ, Spain is not exactly a welcoming and multicultural nation but they care more about Gibraltar and Basques than they do Islamics. You couldn't have picked a more fragmented and broken "national identity" if you tried!
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May 24, 2014 17:52
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Good to see people literally making claims from the "Rivers of Blood" speech.
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May 24, 2014 17:56
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Illuminti posted:The differences are part of Britishness having evolved over 100s if not 1000s of years. If you think they are that distinct then I'm afraid I'll just have to disagree with you. They're not. "Britishness" has only existed as a thing since the early 1700s, because before that "Scottishness" and "Englishness" were the cultures (Ireland joined later, not sure how prominent the Welsh identity was at the time). Scotland has its own legal system which is very different from the English legal system. The countries were distinct before the Treaty of Union and didn't suddenly squash together into a big cultural lump afterwards, and many people living in Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England would define them as their own nationality, rather than British. If there's a difference in how they would identify, there's probably a difference in the way the culture is. Even if, as you claim, it took hundreds of years for these concepts of Britishness to merge into one whole, why are you not offering the new immigrants to London the same timescale to do so? Illuminti posted:I am interested in what you all think off the large amounts of Brits living in large clusters in Spain. Do you think they are integrating well, do you think they have benefited the regions they are in, bringing much needed diversity and colour? Would Barcelona feel Spanish if half it's population was German and English? QuantumCrayons fucked around with this message at 18:02 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 17:58
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Spangly A posted:Germany, however, has no problem with it's massive turk population. Not really, no. Merkel even pulled the "multiculturalism is failed" thing a few years back. German-Turkish integration is a good case study on how importing a bunch of workers and expecting them to drop their old cultural mores for new ones fails.
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May 24, 2014 17:59
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Malcolm XML posted:Not really, no. Merkel even pulled the "multiculturalism is failed" thing a few years back. German-Turkish integration is a good case study on how importing a bunch of workers and expecting them to drop their old cultural mores for new ones fails. I think "multiculturalism has failed" is a slightly better pandering reaction than "all romanians are roma are thieves" but I suppose it could be the same feelings hiding behind intellectualist crap. I didn't say the Turks integrated. Nor do I personally give a poo poo. But they're hardly pushing for race riots or fascism. If you were doing a case study on rejection of multiculturalism I'd pick Italy first up.
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May 24, 2014 18:05
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Illuminti posted:So even less likely to adopt and merge into British society then? Well yes, but it doesn't matter because they don't stay. Your figures are misleading because in the past, immigrants moved here and added to the long term population. A significant amount of European immigrants are staying for a while and then going home, they're not starting families, not establishing communities like 'normal' immigrants. Why should someone who's just going to work here for a few years properly integrate? Illuminti posted:I am interested in what you all think off the large amounts of Brits living in large clusters in Spain. Do you think they are integrating well, do you think they have benefited the regions they are in, bringing much needed diversity and colour? Would Barcelona feel Spanish if half it's population was German and English? The difference in the British migration to Spain is that it's not economic migration. Spain's economy is far worse than ours, there's very little reason for someone looking for a job to go to Spain. As such, Brits moving there are almost entirely elderly, or at least late middle-aged, people not in need of a job. Integration takes generations. But, because of their age, the British immigrants to Spain don't establish any more generations after them, they simply live there then die. They have no children who would have to learn Spanish to attend school, who would have Spanish friends and become slowly more immersed in Spanish culture, and in turn expose their parents to more Spanish culture. This is not the same kind of immigration we experience. Alecto fucked around with this message at 18:11 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 18:07
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Spangly A posted:I think "multiculturalism has failed" is a slightly better pandering reaction than "all romanians are roma are thieves" but I suppose it could be the same feelings hiding behind intellectualist crap. Except the former came from the mouth of the German Chancellor and the latter from the leader of a reactionary single-issue racist political party.
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May 24, 2014 18:08
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Pissflaps posted:Except the former came from the mouth of the German Chancellor and the latter from the leader of a reactionary single-issue racist political party. Nope, we've got almost the same thing from David Cameron: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12371994 Oh wait sorry, misread that, David is very much pulled by the ravings of Farage though. namesake fucked around with this message at 18:14 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 18:11
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namesake posted:Nope, we've got almost the same thing from David Cameron: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12371994 That seems somewhat more like Merkel's language than Farrage's.
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May 24, 2014 18:13
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Pissflaps posted:Except the former came from the mouth of the German Chancellor and the latter from the leader of a reactionary single-issue racist political party. aside from that being a bit misleading and while I am very happy at UKIP losing votes, firing someone, and getting a great chance to show themselves up, I feel that there is still less of a problem. poo poo Berlin is lovely and everybody just chills but then again I only ever hung out in the bohemien districts so maybe it's the rich that are the problem, perhaps we should eat them.
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May 24, 2014 18:15
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ronya posted:FWIW, from the EC report: For what it's worth, access to the Calderdale count was restricted on Friday morning, because of fears of vote fraud. I honestly doubt there was any fraud at all to be that scared about.
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May 24, 2014 18:16
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Spangly A posted:This is a ridiculous argument because Barcelona has never been and will never feel Spanish. Germany, however, has no problem with it's massive turk population. Oh alright them would it feel Catalan, or would Madrid feel Spanish? But I see your point, those particular expats are bad (because they're British?) and no one arriving in the UK would ever do anything similar because you're pretty sure about it. http://www.spiegel.de/international...s-a-716067.html quote:But it is precisely the roughly 3 million Turkish immigrants living in Germany who, according to studies by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, are less effectively integrated on average than other immigrant groups. They are more likely than others to be poorly educated, underpaid and unemployed. Yeah sounds like it's going great. (and yes I realise it's not because they are turkish immigrants that they are poorly educated, underpaid and unemployed, but it doesn't sound like the experiment is working out for them) ThirdPartyView posted:Good to see people literally making claims from the "Rivers of Blood" speech. Yeah that's exactly what I did. What in particular was it I said? maybe "I'm sure nearly all immigrants can get along very with the host country but they can do that even if they bought their own culture with them." QuantumCrayons posted:"Britishness" has only existed as a thing since the early 1700s, because before that "Scottishness" and "Englishness" were the cultures (Ireland joined later, not sure how prominent the Welsh identity was at the time). Scotland has its own legal system which is very different from the English legal system. The countries were distinct before the Treaty of Union and didn't suddenly squash together into a big cultural lump afterwards, and many people living in Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England would define them as their own nationality, rather than British. If there's a difference in how they would identify, there's probably a difference in the way the culture is. You might have more of a point if the Scots English and Brits hadn't all basically stayed put for most of those 100s of years. If the Welsh had moved on mass into London in the space of 30 years or so it might be comparable
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May 24, 2014 18:17
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Illuminti posted:Well this moved on a lot since I posted. Well the reason I asked how you feel and what your experience is of the 'loss of Britishness' is because I'm interested in how the actual problem is manifesting itself. Like you quote some statistics and say 'sorry but that has an effect' - what is the effect? Yes some numbers have changed, but what does that mean for people's daily lives? Those numbers changing is a thing that's been happening throughout Britain's history. Immigration had already shaped the society and culture before any of us were born. All of the things you're citing as 'Britishness', they're all characteristics of an already diverse society, that's been interacting with and exchanging different influences and ending up as something entirely new. It's a gestalt, you can't separate out foreign influence and be left with true Britishness, especially when your criteria are as vague as 'sense of humour' or 'the way we interact'. And it's even more complicated when you look at the way that societies just change in general, even if you could isolate some kind of pure British experience, how far back do you think you could go where people would interact the way you're used to, or share the same sense of humour? There have been huge cultural shifts over the 20th century alone, never mind going back to earlier societies like the Victorians. How much do you really think you have in common with them? Hell, it's pretty much a cliché that every generation will look at the next and feel like everything's changed, that they can't identify with it. So: quote:The new culture just replaces what had been there and evolving over hundreds of years. But even if you recognise that and just don't like it (and honestly embracing change will make you happier than wishing things would stay the same), the question is really how it affects you. Are you unable to enjoy the British sense of humour as much as you could, because you're around immigrants who don't share it? Are your daily interactions with people worse, because you talk to immigrants who act differently? Are you experiencing a decline in law and order, because immigrants are causing trouble where there was no trouble before?
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May 24, 2014 18:22
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Alecto posted:Well yes, but it doesn't matter because they don't stay. Your figures are misleading because in the past, immigrants moved here and added to the long term population. A significant amount of European immigrants are staying for a while and then going home, they're not starting families, not establishing communities like 'normal' immigrants. Why should someone who's just going to work here for a few years properly integrate? I don't think the fact that they don't stay is irrelevant. If 200,000 europeans moved into Ipswich, it would change the culture of the place regardless of if they were going to leave in 5 years from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_migration_to_Spain quote:Of these, according to the BBC and contrary to popular belief, only about 21.5% are over the age of 65.[1]
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May 24, 2014 18:23
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Illuminti posted:Oh alright them would it feel Catalan, or would Madrid feel Spanish? But I see your point, those particular expats are bad (because they're British?) and no one arriving in the UK would ever do anything similar because you're pretty sure about it. Have you never met people in Gibraltar? They aren't bad because they're British, nor is it a unique problem. The British > Spanish expat community are bad because so many of them are utter wankers engaging in white flight without even feeling cognitive dissonance at the hypocrisy. That's why I pointed out the majority of British expats don't have that reputation, it's a very local thing that you either completely missed through ignorance or deliberately used as bait because you know Gibraltans are arseholes. Given your reply was utterly unrelated to what I said I'm unsure!
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May 24, 2014 18:23
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A Sloth posted:Wow, the denial. I never said purely a South Asian problem, but those who heavily abuse the weaknesses tend to be so. You must be an idiot to put these two things in the same sentence.
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May 24, 2014 18:24
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Illuminti posted:I don't think the fact that they don't stay is irrelevant. If 200,000 europeans moved into Ipswich, it would change the culture of the place regardless of if they were going to leave in 5 years And here we are! I feel this is a good thing and represents best our history.
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May 24, 2014 18:24
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Illuminti posted:I don't think the fact that they don't stay is irrelevant. If 200,000 europeans moved into Ipswich, it would change the culture of the place regardless of if they were going to leave in 5 years According to that source, only about 30% are of normal working age. So unless you can prove that the vast, vast majority of Brits there are not in any way integrating, then it would seem likely that the large proportion that don't is because almost 50% of the migrants, are, well, old. In contrast, barely over 10% of our immigrants are over the age of 56. Do you see how that might create a very different situation? If the whole of France moved into my living room I'd be a bit upset, but given that that's not going to happen I don't see a need to be worried about it. The validity of the alarmism about how many orders of magnitude more immigrants are coming than ever before is severely diminished because of the fact that they won't stay. You can't compare this type of immigration to previous because they are far less impactfull; they won't occupy houses for nearly as long, they won't use national services for nearly as long, they won't even use schools as they won't be here long enough to have children. So yes, the Europeans are here in far greater numbers than, say, the South Asians ever were, but in terms of impact, each South Asian is worth orders of magnitude more than many of the Europeans. Alecto fucked around with this message at 18:45 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 18:43
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Britain's institutional approach to multiculturalism is a little different from Germany's - a lot of it is the legacy of empire. The ethnic organizations that dominated in the 1970s - Standing Conference of Asian Organisations: the Standing Conference of African Organisations; the Standing Conference of Pakistani Organisations; the West Indian Standing Organisation, &c. - have such names because up until the 1960s the issuance of passports to Commonwealth citizens was the responsibility of the High Commissions in those areas, i.e., the Colonial Office. Therefore those High Comms were responsible for assisting migrants in integrating. That is to say, Britain applied its attitude toward ethnic relations in the wider empire back home. This made more sense than it sounds today, given a great deal of political activity by migrants over politics in their origin countries, especially during the assorted traumas in Pakistan/India/Bangladesh/Sri Lanka over the 60s-80s. That is to say: a social expectation that the ethnic communities will form organizations that nominate representatives, which white Britain then either appoints to a consultative position, or otherwise liaises with in some way, with the concerns of the FO dominating. So, whilst the NGOs endorsed candidates, they did not 'get out the vote' particularly enthusiastically, or rely on running candidates; instead they relied on building a network of contacts in the government or civil service (with a converse understanding by Whitehall that this is right and proper). Conversely the attitude of Whitehall remained paternalistic - e.g., engineering contacts between the (British) Indian Worker's Association and Indian trade unionists in order to pursue British foreign policy wrt Nehru's government. The ethnic model was pretty strong; the American trend of trying to forge larger alliances to participate more actively in protest politics (i.e., civil rights movement style) foundered instead, at least in the 1960s; Citizens Against Racial Discrimination and such sputtered a bit and then folded. Germany undergoing a similar period straightforwardly did not have any such institutional legacy. Germany also treated immigration as a foreign relations matter - i.e., expecting Turkey to somehow deal with the politics of guest workers for them via the Turkish embassy. Duly note that many of the Turkish workers did return to Turkey. The problem was that the tenor of politics shifted and Turkey turned out to not have any ability to oblige Turks who wish to remain in Germany to return. But unlike Britain, Germany couldn't just snap its fingers and find people who are skilled in liaising with the relevant communities on a long-term basis from a government role. Britain could and did recall staff from the High Comms, but Germany couldn't. Conversely there was no understanding amongst Turkish enclaves of a culturally legitimized path to assimilation established by an earlier colonial era. Predictably: very little integration, very little political participation, an intense amount of mutual distrust.
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May 24, 2014 19:19
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Illuminti posted:I don't think someone can't become "British". Of course they can, but with mass migration into areas, what becomes british in those areas is not an evolution of what a lot of the old population would call British, it's a very different thing. How very good of you to allow immigrants to become "British", as you put it. It's unfortunate though that they seem to becoming the wrong kind of British for your taste. The nerve of them, coming over here, not evolving properly.
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May 24, 2014 19:19
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Can someone please tell me what the gently caress Britishness is? I've lived all over the UK and I don't think I've ever met a single person that conforms to whatever romanticised idea of Britishness people have. One of my best friends was a 7ft tall Rasta that would organise cricket games where the entrance fee was a six pack of beer (he loved German beer and you would deffo be on his team if you brought some) and would make it a point every winter to check on all the old folks living around there to make sure they had plenty of shopping in. He was a third generation immigrant and he was almost certainly one of the most decent people I've ever met. I guess he probably wasn't proper British, though because he had dreads and talked with a thick Patois (even though he spoke perfect English and studied English at A level)
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May 24, 2014 19:54
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tl; dr - the Britain has never really held that to the notion of rigid social partition that will somehow allow the guest workers to not affect the lives of citizens in any unwanted way (a la Germany back then, or Dubai today). rather, its history is one of managed, prescriptive multiculturalism, with the mindset of that management being a classist one (even if executed by Labour, because even Old Labour was pretty dang elitist) the contemporary interpretation of multiculturalism that the place of (say) the British Bangladeshi in Britain should be determined by British Bangladeshi community activists rather than predominantly carved out by movers and shakers at Whitehall is a relatively new one, but that's mainly because the contemporary attitude that the place of anyone in Britain at all should be determined by their community rather than predominantly hammered out at Whitehall is pretty new too. As late as the 1980s (i.e. Thatcher) the government, like previous governments, still perceived ethnic policy as a space for ways to realize broader policy objectives. A lot of Bangladeshis are small business owners - therefore they (or at least their business associations) are consulted when constructing small business policy, and that's how networking with assorted ethnic communities is done. The Caribbean community has specific concerns about the Met - therefore the Met is handed a one-off parliamentary review. The steady elevation of broad-based ethnic integration as a permanent concern into the DLCG is comparatively recent. ronya fucked around with this message at 20:04 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 20:01
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Ddraig posted:Can someone please tell me what the gently caress Britishness is? Your upper-lip has to pass a stringent stiffness test.
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May 24, 2014 20:03
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What is a "third generation immigrant"? That phrase is gross nationalist BS used to insinuate that someone born in a country is still "foreign". I'm as white and british as they come but my grandparents are from the RoI. Does this make me a "third generation immigrant"? What is the cut-off point? 8th generation?
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May 24, 2014 20:04
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Radio Prune posted:What is the cut-off point? 8th generation? Whichever generation you cease to be suspiciously dark skinned, apparently.
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May 24, 2014 20:08
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Radio Prune posted:What is a "third generation immigrant"? That phrase is gross nationalist BS used to insinuate that someone born in a country is still "foreign". I'm as white and british as they come but my grandparents are from the RoI. Does this make me a "third generation immigrant"? Uh yeah It has a fairly specific yes-or-no meaning and is useful for social scientists, I think you're attacking the wrong thing here
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May 24, 2014 20:12
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someone tell me how wrong my glib analysis was
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May 24, 2014 20:14
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My bet is your grandparents were born before 1927 and thus British anyway (and technically, it could be argued that all Irish are british still).
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May 24, 2014 20:15
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Radio Prune posted:What is a "third generation immigrant"? That phrase is gross nationalist BS used to insinuate that someone born in a country is still "foreign". I'm as white and british as they come but my grandparents are from the RoI. Does this make me a "third generation immigrant"? I agree completely. I used the term because it's what he actually identifies as. I guess I don't really understand it, since it's kind of redundant but I guess he feels somewhat linked to his past via it. I imagine even he would admit it's bullshit if pressed on it. Also a stiff upper-lip is an American concept so even the most British trait comes from somewhere else.
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May 24, 2014 20:16
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In all my life I've known one guy who acted like the stereotypically staid, dependable middle-class gentleman with a wry and understated sense of irony we like to imagine is the essence of Britishness. He's an ethnically Chinese Singaporean.
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