Friday, 24 April 2015
One community one vote.
One of the main items on the list which at election time the politicians have to address is immigration.
The main parties are engaged in outbidding each other as to how to wrest back control of who comes here and who stays. The statistics used each seem to be from a totally different spectrum of the science and yet, as with economist there seems as many opinions as there are practitioners. The ordinary man simply wants an answer, even if unpalatable so that knowing the scale of the issue one can put into place solutions.
Immigration started on an industrial scale back in the 40s when, as an acknowledgement of the debt we owed other members of the Commonwealth for helping fight Fascism.At the same time immigration plugging an employment gap which arose because so many of our employable men had been lost in the war.
For too long as a country we have been tiptoeing around the issue of immigration.
The Establishment describing the advantages of which there are no doubt many but failing to listen to the man in the street who looks at immigration as a negative measure when set against the problem of limited resources such as school places and hospital waiting lists.
As a Bradfordian I witnessed the arrival of the Pakistani diaspora into the city and the literal ghettoisation of an area above Manningham Lane where immigrants from Pakistan congregated.
There was little attempt to integrate socially by the established community the Muslim women stayed at home and weren't encouraged to learn the English because the men wished to segregate them from the local influence.
The numbers living in a house swelled many times the local norm as newcomers joined relatives already here. Their dress and their observance to a religion that was totally foreign to the English all contributed to massive feeling of resentment, a resentment which is still held by a large swath of the local population.
Fast forward 65 years and Bradford now has the title of "Little Pakistani". The Town Council is controlled by people who trace their origins back to those early settlers because voting has a powerful element of religious cohesion. People vote not on Political lines but on Racial/ Cultural/ and Religious lines and today their cultural vote carries all before it.
In a microcosm Bradford is what the White non Muslim person fears. The intrinsic force of a culturally homogeneous group within the larger group who, for all kinds of reasons are sufficiently autonomous to be identified as separate and different from the established majority.
Separatism has long bedevilled nation states but when it rears its head within a nation state one has a potential powder keg !!
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