It doesn't.

Isn't this why people are starting to say Multiculturalism doesn't work?

When it comes to the East End. Don't forget it was "The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing"

As for someone talking about ONE NATION. What a funny choice of term considering its significance in politics over here in Oz.


P.S. Don't feel as though your intelligence was being challenged because I had a "QI' moment to share with people who may not have known about Venice.

In a way it isn't, but in a significant way it is. Certainly fundy religions of various flavours do have non-integration as an aim.

The "Muzzies" as you so delicately call them, don't live in ghettos any more. They populate whole areas of towns and cities. It is absurd to call the majority population of a very large conurbation a "ghetto". It's like saying that the substantial white majority in Bradford in the 50s outside the tiny black immigrant communities was a ghetto.

But if refusal to integrate is a problem as Miliband describes it, then whilst it is right to acknowledge the existence of ALL groups that won't integrate, it seems perverse to pretend that overwhelmingly it isn't de facto "Muzzies" that he is referring to.

But really the point I am making is that there are here religious convictions that are set in stone, to the extent that they are not at all open even to discussion. That is, Miliband and others can discuss them all they want, but the sort of obstacles to integration that I have given examples of CANNOT be removed, and are NOT negotiable, so there is no conversation to be had. Moreover, the greater the size of the "ghetto", to stick to your terminology, the greater the increase in overt manifestations, as it seems to me in such communities those tending towards the ultra conservative, fundamentalist gradually gain the ascendancy, and gradually enforce ever-increasing compliance with their flavour of their belief system.

But those may be problems that may be being stored up for future generations. History does not hold out much hope that substantial polarised populations of differing religions can even co-exist peacefully in the long term, much less integrate, but we are not discussing conflict and violence. In the here and now, do you think that there is any chance at all of these groupings, including the "Muzzies", integrating in the sense Miliband is talking about? Or do you, like me, think his remarks are totally naive and misguided, and he has no clue what he is talking about?

You open by asking "if people are serious about integration". I wonder whether you are as naive as he is, and actually do not realise that the people Miliband is talking about cannot, ever, integrate in the way he means, due to their inviolable religious convictions? The better question would be to start with the certain knowledge that such integration is 100% impossible, and ask where we go from there.

Its an interesting question and of course some of us have been here before albeit the problem had a slightly different flavour to it.

Those who were kids and teenagers from the late 60s right through the 70's to the race riots of the early 80's (which I'm not convinced were anything to do with race, more a reaction to a government who offered nothing to whole sections of communities) will be honest enough to acknowledge that we had a "problem" first with West Indian and then with British passport holding Indian and East/West Pakistan immigration via a couple of former African colonies.

The "problem" being of course that we initially saw relatively small groups of immigrants moving into relatively small areas of our cities and setting up what we perceived as "ghettos", Chapeltown in Leeds was throughout my childhood simply a byword for anything to do with black people and it was somewhere that we didn't want to go to.

Do we percieve West Indians as a "problem" now ?

Would there be an occurance of the sort of thing that happened to a friend of a friend where she left home and didn't speak to her parents for a decade afterwards (and her father never again) because she had started dating a West Indian boy and eventually set up home with him ?

No of course not because we've all grown up a lot since then and importantly, the West Indian community have done what is quaintly called "integrated" and shown us that actually, they were never that different all along.

The "African Asian" immigration of the early 70s have, I would argue also "integrated" in a way that we never expected when they first started arriving from Uganda and Kenya, many had been wealthy business owners but came here with nothing but their knowledge and a work ethic, you could also argue that these immigrants in the main were not Muslims, have kept their religious beliefs and yet we still live easily alongside them - you certainly would not see the sort of attitude that a close friend of mine exhibited in the late 70s when he, and the neighbour on the other side, both put their houses up for sale when a family group of Indians moved in next door to them.

So we've always had a problem with immigrants of a different skin colour (did we have a problem in the 1940s with Polish and Italians making their homes here after the war ?) but within a generation have generally "integrated".

And of course integration has to be a two-way thing - why do we always assume that the immigrant has to change to suit our ways, how many of us enjoy what we believe to be an Indian/Asian curry now and don't give a thought to the fact that before the 1970s such a thing didn't exist - who has "integrated" ?

Ultimately the only question remaining is not the ability to "integrate" but the incompatibility of religious beliefs, sort that issue and attitude out and the rest will take care of itself.

Some really interesting points in general, but on this, I do think it's wider cultural issues and not just religion.

So, for instance, you get 'honour' crimes and female genital mutilation – neither of which are linked to any one religious group but bridge a number. As but one illustration, FGM is particularly widespread in Somalia, where its use crosses Muslim, Christian and animist communities.

Although I think you're spot on in saying that religious fundamentalism is a problem. But huge numbers of Muslims have integrated – I've known some socially over the years; I know some at work.

On the other hand, there are areas where a woman walking in Western dress can get abuse (yes, it's happened to me, albeit mildly and returned with a finger). And yes, I can understand why some people in such an area feel a tad unhappy about, say, such individuals standing on the street in robes and stuff, preaching their hate, just as much as I understand why huge swathes of the community in pretty much the same area chose to physically reject Mosely and his black shirts when they marched through a predominantly Jewish area in 1936.

But the fundamentalism isn't limited to Islam. Certainly in this general area of London, there's an increasing number of fundamentalist Christian churches that are absolutely nutty (we're talking the 'give up taking your anti-retrovirals, because God has now cured your HIV' variety). And they're also starting to have the sort of confidence where you see them standing in local elections and becoming a lot more politicised.

On the colour of skin being the core problem – we lived next to an elderly Polish couple in Lancaster back in the late 1970s/early '80s. Honestly, it wasn't just those swarthy types: my mother's prejudice about those "peasants" was never far from the surface*. And on the basis of all the names for pretty much every group of 'other' people that I grew up hearing, it was never limited to skin pigmentation. Which of itself is quite interesting, because I don't remember there being many black people that I knew or saw from about the age of seven onward, until I moved to London in the late 1980s.




* There's a massive irony in this, although my mother would never recognise it. The man she chose to marry was as close to being from 'peasant' stock as you'd find within England, certainly.

Yes, of course, you wouldn't want one o' them high-maintenance Southern women would you?

Phew!



I knew I could rely on you.

Taking up the "ghetto" conversation... when is an area a ghetto?

Is Stoke Newington a Turkish ghetto? Is one end of Spitalfields / Bethnal Green a Bangladeshi ghetto?
Both are known for the concentration of one ethnicity / country of origin that they contain ... but are they ghettoes?

Is an Eruv a ghetto?
It's basically a delineated area within which some of the rules about the Sabbath can be got-around.
But it's going to attract more Jews than gentiles into an area, is it therefore a de-facto ghetto?

And is a ghetto necessarily a bad thing? After all, those living there probably feel comfortable surrounded by people of similar beliefs and background.

If it is a bad thing, e.g. for the lack of integration it suggests, how do you counter it?
Should you counter it?
After all, people usually end up moving out into other areas.
Or are some ghettoes too big for that to happen now?

When I lived in Bow in the 1990's, I was given a lift home one night by a young man of Gujarati parentage who, you'd have said, was very integrated.
As we passed through Whitechapel he was bemoaning the state of it, and wrinkling his nose about it being "all Bengalis now".

Shocked?
Yes I was.
I knew that he and his parents had experienced some seriously nasty racial intolerance when he was a kid ... and yet here he was being very sniffy indeed about Bengalis.

But if they are brought up within those parameters, their own opportunities are inevitably limited by them.



Get rid of faith schools, for starters.



No.

The BNP was certainly picking up black supporters back when Derek Beacon was around in London. And there's absolutely nothing to suggest that racism is somehow exclusive to any one group.

Quote ="Mintball"And there's absolutely nothing to suggest that racism is somehow exclusive to any one group.'" It most certainly isn't. As for ghetto. The term is very misused these days. We don't have ghettos, like Venice was or the Warsaw one in WW2. They are ghettos in the true sense of the term. Prison like. Where people were locked up. We don't have people having to wear yellow badges like Jewish people were made to wear in Poland and other countries, or indeed historically in Venice in the 14th Century and in England before that (121icon_cool.gif. I found this if anyone's interested www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso ... enice.html Though I find hierarchies in a ghetto somewhat strange: [iThe German, Italian and Levantine communities were independent, yet lived side by side to one another. A hierarchy existed among them, in which the Sephardic (Spanish and Portuguese)/Levantine Jews were at the top of the scale, Germans in the middle and Italians at the lowest rung.[/i

Quote ="Mintball"And there's absolutely nothing to suggest that racism is somehow exclusive to any one group.'" It most certainly isn't. As for ghetto. The term is very misused these days. We don't have ghettos, like Venice was or the Warsaw one in WW2. They are ghettos in the true sense of the term. Prison like. Where people were locked up. We don't have people having to wear yellow badges like Jewish people were made to wear in Poland and other countries, or indeed historically in Venice in the 14th Century and in England before that (121icon_cool.gif. I found this if anyone's interested www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso ... enice.html Though I find hierarchies in a ghetto somewhat strange: [iThe German, Italian and Levantine communities were independent, yet lived side by side to one another. A hierarchy existed among them, in which the Sephardic (Spanish and Portuguese)/Levantine Jews were at the top of the scale, Germans in the middle and Italians at the lowest rung.[/i

Why? Isn't the issue not faith schools but people with different cultural backgrounds. Might not a better solution have been to have said you can live here if you convert to Christianity and fit in with our traditional ways?

It's happening in Stoke and other areas now.2nd generation Asians are complaining about Poles taking "our" jobs

Is this an attempt at a provocative post?

For children born in an almost monocultural ghetto / area, faith schools are another block across the path into the wider country, community and integration.

As for offering citizenship in return for conversion to Christianity, that smells of ethnic cleansing rather than integration.

Well the Asians should stop moaning and work harder then.

What a weird post. So many bizarre assumptions. If a person IS a Muslim, or a Jew, or Shinto, or Buddhist, or Scientologist, or Mormon, or Quaker, what on earth makes you think they would even consider "converting" to another religion? I may abhor all flavours of religion, but I still understand that (sadly) the religious are morally committed to their religion of choice (or should I say brainwashing, but that's another story).

Different cultural backgrounds? That's the [iopposite[/i of the problem. The rich mix of cultural backgrounds is precisely what gives all metropolitan communities their buzz and vitality.

"Fit in with our traditional ways"? What traditional ways are those, and "fit in" how exactly? All take up Morris Dancing?

By emulating Dally's beliefs, intolerances and phobias.
Obviously.

^ This.

Boo, down with this!

I long for the days when a stroll down a local high street would reveal only fish and chip shops and the occasional restaurant behind chintz curtains where you could get a roast beef dinner with boiled-to-death vegetables.

The food that built an Empire, whilst others in far flung places were sat on the toilet after eating their fare.

I bet you've got a portrait of Winston Churchill above the fireplace don't you ?

You think that most households can do better than this now – whether with a curry paste or without?

TBF, he was referring to a little restaurant with chintz curtains.
I think you'd agree that restaurants now are way, way better since Brits have ventured abroad and furriners have come here.

Oh aye.

Kebabs. And (as opened in Angel only a few days ago) 'curry burritos'.

There has been an improvement in some restaurant food in some places. The biggest improvement has arguably come at the high end – we really didn't have one previously – and has been massively influenced by the French; in particular, the Roux brothers and Raymond Blanc, who have, between them, influenced (and trained) a couple of generations of chefs now. That's been a huge sea change.

I remember my first steak, in a steak house in Lancaster, which was considered very good. It was tough and the only thing I remember was being utterly bemused as to why people raved about steak so much. It was a couple of decades until I tried again, and that was in an Argentinian steak house in Amsterdam.

On the other hand, we've lost most proper fish and chippies – and Wimpys, when they were cheap but decent.

For reasons of work mostly, I eat out regularly in a variety of towns and cities in the UK. And a lot of what I experience (usually when I'm not getting to choose the eatery) is vastly over-rated and frequently over priced for the quality; my experience of chain restaurants varies from seriously poor (provoking lengthy written complaints) to not bad. I think it's a shame that there aren't more places like the baker I passed in Glasgow a couple of years ago, where I bought a meat pie and ate it outside – and it was gorgeous.

The emergence of the gastro pub annoys some ('a pub should smell of ale, not cooking' was a complaint I heard recently) but has also produced some of the better eating experiences at a lower price range.

A rule of thumb for dining abroad is to look where locals go – and you can apply the same thing in the UK too. So for instance, few locals eat on Brick Lane, but there is one curry house just a tad off the beaten track where local people do eat. Similarly with Chinese restaurants – and many others, I'm sure.

Equally, it's worth noting that, while it may be possible to argue that there have been improvements in our restaurant scene, it's still come at a time when home cooking has declined further: dining table sales down, microwave sales up and, by 2005, the UK consuming more ready meals than the whole of the rest of Europe put together.

If I took that advice I'd spend my whole life eating in McDonalds.

Just as well they are healthier than recipes from our top tv chefs.