Latest Moan From You and Me 2024

Is your view impartial, Pete? We all have a position on this. At least the Refugee Council gives statistics, and explains that there's no such thing as an "illegal" asylum seeker, under the 1951 Refugee Convention - in spite of what the Tories maintained.

 

Processing?
What does that actually mean, just let them all stay, and you have cleared the backlog.

Quick, all we need to do now is build another 95000 houses.

 

No my view is my view based on what I see on the streets.
At least its reality and not some cobbled together report by someone living in an ivory tower.

 

I have a very old, in both senses, friend who was born in and lived in Finland until the age of 22 but calls herself Swedish. I’ve never had the courage to ask her how that works. Could you maybe shed some light on it for me, @Selleri?

 

It's historic @Tidemark. I had a Finnish friend in Belgium who told me Finland has passed from Swedish rule to Russian and then independence. Some pockets of Finland still have Swedish as their mother tongue but they are generally bilingual.

 

Oh gosh. I had no idea.

Anyway, when she was 22 she came to this country as an au pair, for a short stay, but soon met a dashingly handsome and extremely bright law student and decided that he was the one. He was Pakistani. He was very talented and became a QC. Lovely people. When a very unpleasant person began to harass me and try to take a piece of land that the Land Registry said belonged to me, they sorted him out for me. Not pro bono. As a favour. Both immigrants.

 

I guess it's all about how you identify yourself. For example I believe that colonial British offspring were brought up as British and identified themselves as such, but if they stayed, their children might have grown with more blended identity and so on.

My daughter was born in Southern Europe and grew there until age 7, with parents of two different nationalities. She speaks both parents' languages fluently and was brought up with books, stories, songs, food, celebrations etc of both. At the same time she grew into the host country society with friends and school and was no different from the rest of the kids.

I have asked her what she thinks her national identity is.

Her reply has always been a lovely window to the world of the multiculturalism: "Mmmhhh, don't know" It's not really important to her, she appreciates all of her cultures and heritages very much but she's just her.

Passport is important though! That makes you officially a citizen of all countries you have a passport from.

 

@pete You mean you see lots of people who don't look or sound like you? It's interesting that this is seen as much more of a problem in some parts of the UK than others, and that there are some places (eg Liverpool) with a large number of immigrants, but where it's not considered a problem. I guess it depends where you live.

Some of my ancestors fled France in the 1680s and settled in London. They were among 50,000 Huguenots escaping persecution. Considering that the population of England was under 5 million at the time, that was potentially a cause for conflict, and apparently there was quite a bit of antagonism because of the huge numbers of immigrants speaking a different language, and potentially taking jobs from the locals, but they actually added to the prosperity of the country (many were highly skilled silk weavers). The fact that they assimilated into the general population is shown by the fact that about one in six people in Britain has Huguenot ancestry.

There's really nothing new in the current situation.

 

Not many people look or sound like me, I'm unique.

Its not considered a problem in parts of London either, from those areas all the British people have left.

Its happened around here in probably the last 20 yrs, of course up until then there were always people who were from other countries, but its reached the point where the British population of the area is almost out numbered in some parts.

And some of them are not the sort you would want to meet in a dark alley.
We have enough of those types who were born here, let alone importing them.

 

On the other hand he was criticised massively for ignoring the muslim vote and concerns around Gaza which resulted in some prominent Labour MPs losing their seats in Islamic areas like Blackburn and Leicester and (temporarily) Rochdale.

I'm not a massive fan of his, but according to some quarters he is favouring muslim voters/citizens, and others he is ignoring them. It can't be both.

 

We are only out of space, because we have allowed a small handful of very rich people (who own much of the media, coincidentally the same media that keeps talking about immigration), to take far more than their fair share of land, leaving less for everyone else.