Immigration presents problems. If there is too much the indigenous population feels threatened. They feel their way of life and values are under threat.
They are justified.
A people take pride in their culture, feel their identity through it and dislike change. They feel that they belong here and their values are the result of a long history. This is where their ancestors lived and died. There is continuity. It is strong stuff. Some call it patriotism. It breeds nationalism.
Yet immigration brings enrichment. Some change is a good thing.
It is a balance.
If the native culture begins to feel displaced, threatened or peripheralized there is trouble. We get the rise of racism and nationalism. We find the right-wing and fascists exaggerating and feeding the flames of anger, resentment, fear and division to create hate.
Britain is a small island that has had to much immigration too quickly – both Islamic and Eastern European. It has caused fear and resentment. People feel their culture is under threat and are hitting out in fear and anger. They feel nobody is listening.
There is strain on our infrastructure – housing, schools and medicine. There is concern about jobs. There is a dislike for a culture that is threatening and usurping with its different beliefs and values, its larger families, its different perspective, its different dress and culture. People are afraid.
And the politicians have ignored their genuine fears. All they care about is the economy.
The answer to these fears is integration, for the incomers to fit in, speak the language, reflect the customs and values of the culture they come in to. For money to be provided to create more housing, more schools and more health services.
Unfortunately this integration is not happening. Instead of more money being put in, there have been swingeing cuts to services and all this serves to exacerbate the problem.
The Tory government have just slashed the budget to teach immigrants English so they can integrate. They are still funding Religious schools enabling religious and cultural segregation. Without being able to speak the language they cannot gain employment and fit in. Without mixed education they cannot assume the values of the indigenous culture.
It seems that the Tories are actively working against integration. They are deliberately keeping them apart. It is like instituting an invisible apartheid.
By cutting schools and health budgets they are actively exacerbating the harmful effects of immigration.
Do the politicians really want to stoke up anti-immigrant sentiments?
Their actions fall into the hands of the fascists like Tommy Robinson who prey on the fears of people. They talk of burqas, mosques, sharia law, rape gangs, and equate Islam with terrorism, with a plot to take over the country, outbreed and usurp. They talk of Eastern European accents and the proliferation of knives and crime gangs, the taking of British jobs.
And immigrants feel threatened, group in conclaves and respond by becoming more militant.
And the answer is integration.
Integration takes time, money, effort and strategy. I see none of that in Tory policy. Maybe they feel they can politically benefit from the anger created by this botched mass immigration?
