Congratulations: you’re making a name for yourself, telling white nationalists exactly what they want to hear: that the contribution of immigrants to Britain has been negligible.
Presumably you exclude yourself from that statement, given that having emigrated to Canada as a child, you migrated back to Britain in adulthood to make your life here.
Standing before half-empty conference halls, you lecture on the failure of multiculturalism. Again you must exclude yourself, given that your mother was Polish and your father a Punjabi from Kenya.
I get it: multiculturalism is code for Muslims, for they alone live in segregated communities, believing in all sorts of awful things that set them far apart from the majority. Domestic violence is their problem. Blind prejudice too.
London is no longer an English city, you tell us, once again blaming uncontrolled mass migration. But the changing demographics of the city are complex. Could that exodus of longterm residents from the capital not be attributed to more obvious factors?
The fact that the average London mortgage now costs 14 times the average combined household income, for example? Or that renting a one-bedroom property costs 45% of the average salary? In central London, where you live, it’s nearer 70%.
My grandmother was an immigrant. She came over from Ireland like so many others to work in London’s hospitals as a nurse during the Second World War. This is what people mean when they say Britain was built on migration.
They don’t mean that the English were layabouts, sitting on their hands, while immigrants toiled hard in their place. They just mean that migration made an undeniable contribution to the development of many of our most trusted public institutions.
You may argue that the answer to staffing our public services is not the supply of cheap labour from elsewhere — a perfectly legitimate contention. But tell me: where is the appetite to fund significant salary increases, which make these roles attractive to indigenous labour?
Where are the crowds of Englishmen lining up to drive the lorries which deliver goods to our supermarkets? Where the young Englishmen heading into the countryside to pick cabbages from our fields? Where the young people keen on pursuing careers as nurses, carers and social workers?
In their place, you will find many migrants, many of them more invisible than you. White South Africans, New Zealanders, Australians, Scots, Irish and Poles. Others less invisible: descendants of the Caribbean, West Africa, South and East Asia.
Indeed, so dire is the recruitment crisis in public services, that many organisations have had to set up recruitment teams dedicated to attracting employees from overseas, promising them better wages and a higher standard of living, which in the end turns out not to be true.
Not everyone has it in them to reinvent themselves as a media pundit as you have, obscuring nearly every trace of their actual background in order to be accepted by the English. Why should they have to?
Both your original Polish and Punjabi names, now obscured by an Anglicised sop, carried perfectly honourable connotations: “God heals” and “one protected by God” respectively. Why hide who you really are for the sake of building a career as a middle-aged social media influencer?
Just be yourself. Embrace whichever culture you wish to. The thing about Britain is that there is no overarching unitary culture embraced by all, and never has been. Have you not heard of the North-South divide? Perhaps you will encounter some of that on your trip to Hull later this month.
That’s where I’m from originally: a town of class divides, significant wealth inequalities and ecumenical diversity. Be warned that your affected Queen’s English may be incomprehensible to the restless natives of this erstwhile Labour/Lib-Dem stronghold who pride themselves on speaking Ull.
As the royalist historian you are, you will recall that King Charles laid siege to the town during the English Civil War. And who should be the most treasured of local heroes? Why, none other than the slavery abolitionist, William Wilberforce, after whom numerous local institutions are named.
Hull is a city which prides itself on its independent spirit and diversity of cultures: the array of long-established Christian denominations alone evidence of this. Back in the day, we had cream-colour phone boxes, showing the rest of the country that we had our own culture and identity.
Dear sir, you yourself are multicultural. Whether you choose to deny that is no business of mine. If you have chosen to adopt the caricature of an upper class English toff as your cultural identity, who dares differ? That’s your choice.
But not all of us Englishis desire to be steamrollered into some imaginary monoculture dreamed up by a half-Polish, half-Indian opportunist with an identity crisis, who thinks the way to the top is by appealing to the small-minded prejudices of sycophantic nationalists.
I’m okay with my multicultural identity, thank you. It is how and what we have always been.
Yours etc.
Last modified: 21 September 2024