Good morning Grandad1943 I promised last night to read up on Nigel Farage’s ‘Oldham’ comments and get back to you.
I think that NF is being disingenuous to an American audience by citing the problem as black v white as this feeds into the narrative over there. Perhaps it was an inept way to make a point.
However for the people who live in such towns, there are undeniable tensions. Yet to speak of them tars one as being racist.
These facts about Oldham were in the Guardian newspaper yesterday and demonstrate the seismic shift in population:
“In Werneth, a tangle of terraces a mile south-west of Oldham town centre, 23.4% of the population was white at the time of the 2011 census, down from 43.2% 10 years earlier. Meanwhile, the Pakistani population grew from 38.2% in 2001 to 48.6% in 2011. The Bangladeshi community also swelled in that decade, from 11.6% to 17.8%.”
Now, I’m all for accepting that people are people and nice people are within all different cultures. But deep divisions between for example, Indian and Asian communities are a fact of life. Add into the mix young male hotheads and tensions can boil over as demonstrated by the surge in knife crime in London. Obviously drug culture plays a big part there.
Sorry this is too long a post and I don’t want to bore everyone with my opinions so I will finish by saying many second and third generation from original immigrant families do go ‘home’ to marry poorly educated villagers and then come back here to bring up their children. I know personally of professional people who have done just that as the ‘old ways’ appeal to them for various reasons. I used to think (naively) why not just go over to Bradford or wherever your extended family live to find a bride? Some never learn English so integration is nigh impossible. Witness to this are the large tracts of government leaflets say for the NHS where a dozen different languages are printed out. (If we went to their countries this wouldn’t be reciprocated). The NHS provides an interpreter for out patient appointments, funded by the taxpayer and that’s a fact.
I think what I’m trying to say (badly) is that NF was crass but not wrong. Immigration is fine provided it is funded properly and managed sensibly. Those who live in the gilded, gated sections of our society are not the ones trying to integrate!