This is important too, for the US:
The poor are revolting, and not in the left’s favor. It’s starting to happen here too.
Pretty sure the UK was not “fairly diverse” in 1993. Trouble finding a number for that year but in 2001 it was 92% white, with Wales, NI and Scotland being 98-99% White. There has been large jumps in immigration over that time period I’ll grant.
I remember there were always Africans living in Britain, as well as Indians. Muslim immigration in large numbers might be new, but if that’s what Brits primarily have an issue with(as well as cheap East European labor), then it’s not racism in the classic sense of “I hate everything not white”, but more specific grievances against specific groups.
What you remember is at odds with reality. We had the Notting Hill race riots in 1958. We had Enoch Powell talking about the black man having the whip hand in 1968. We had to pass Race Relations Acts in 1965, 1976 and 1986. Hell, we had race riots in 1919. Immigration to the UK follows a pattern:
A new immigrant group arrives, finds a space on the margins, is accused of taking jobs, is accused of polluting the culture with dangerous foreign ideas, suffers violence and discrimination, struggles through, forms a community, assimilates, and finally worries about these new immigrants taking our jobs.
It was true for the Huegenots, it was true for the Jews before WWI, it was true for the West Indians in the 50s, it was true for the Pakistanis, the Bangladeshis and the Indians in the 60s and 70s, it’s coming true for the Poles and Romanians now and it’ll happen for the Somalis, Syrians and Iraqis.
If you think there’s some history of tolerance towards migrants to which current attitudes are an exception that demands explanation, you are flat wrong.
One of the better articles on the topic by Reihan Salam
A key section near the end:
“Had Cameron managed to secure a solid commitment from the European Union to do something as simple as limit the access European immigrants had to British welfare state benefits for, say, two or three years, Remain almost certainly would have won. Instead, Cameron’s friends and allies in Europe left him out to dry.*”
All they needed to do, was allow a country that had a disproportionate negative effect from some of the immigration flows to raise some additional barriers, and the UK would have stayed. But the arrogance of the EU doomed that scenario. Now live with it. This highlights the flaw is this sort of pan european governance, to stay means to have entire nation state populations buckle under rules that often do not favor them. If you can get 90% of the benefits (probably different for different nations) of being in the EU would the chains, why bother?
Bigotry and racism can only be used when the moral impetus for such feelings is dubious. When dislike of a group is indeed based in reason, its not.
The UK had large amounts of immigration from the Caribbean and South Asia (in particular, ethnic Kashmiris) in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Agreed with all this, wholeheartedly.
Not large enough to make the UK “quite diverse”
And even with such tiny numbers of immigrants, Britain still had significant race-based agitation.
So…let me get this straight. You’re claiming it’s reasonable to discriminate against a billion-plus Muslims because of a population of (at most) 200K of its members?
Nope, sorry, no sale.
Well, since such dislike is always based on unreason, it follows that bigotry and/or racism is the cause.
As noted earlier:
The same statement would be true of every immigrant wave to the U.S., (including several current ones), and, as demonstrated by Doug Saunders in his The Myth of the Muslim Tide: Do Immigrants Threaten the West?, it is remains true for Europe and Britain, today.
The overwhelming problems related to immigrants tend to be their reaction to the unreasoning opposition to their presence or simple hostility manufactured by the established peoples.
Every bigot ever thought they had a good reason to hate the group they were bigoted against.
The Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans, Scots, Irish, etc. etc. etc. were all at some point the unwelcome foreigners to Britain. Everyone is an immigrant. Nobody has a moral right to preserve society from superficial “foreign” characteristics.
The reality of borders is proof otherwise.
That’s a meaningless statement.
And the vast majority of people who toss out the word bigot use it to literally shut down arguments. Why bother engaging, you do not engage with bigots, they are too far gone, their rationales are based on imagined dangers or blind dislike for people not like them.
Saying you are more likely to find a member of the Christian right hostile towards gays may seem like a bigoted statement to some of you. I see it as a statement of fact.
For someone that is not hostile to gays, it is perfectly reasonable to take a dimmer view of the ideas that lead to those attitudes, and the people that hold them.
Think that makes you a bigot? Fine then indict damn near every liberal you have ever met.
Speaking from the left, I have never assumed that someone was “hostile towards gays”—regardless of his or her nominal membership in a religion—until he or she actually expressed hostility towards gays. I know, strange, right?
but not every so-called bigot was right, nor was every so-called bigot wrong.
Not everything is some repeat of the past.
History does not repeat, but it rhymes.