To think everything will be unrecognisable in 50 years

Of course they are? Your point being?

But if you ask 100 people what love means, none of them are going to say things about harming people or getting revenge on them are they? Because it has a broadly accepted meaning.

If you ask anyone what British culture is nobody is going to say ‘the Taj Mahal’ or ‘gnocchi’, because again there is a broadly accepted definition. That doesn’t mean everyone will say exactly the same thing, but you will find the same threads running through all the answers.

Ergo it’s somewhat subjective but only to quite a narrow degree.

OK. So fairness and decency aren't important in your understanding of British culture. Got it.

And it wasn't what her post was about.

What is the broadly accepted definition to which you refer?

Showing my age but I'm thinking of the era from SKA to Massive Attack.

Mass migration is as old as time

This is an incredibly patronising post.

Do you also disagree with the Indian government's view of India as a multicultural nation?

Or perhaps you think they have also shaped their constitution and their education system in order to make me and my family feel more comfortable?

Quite obviously tangible objects or practises associated with Britain.

It’s very obvious and you’re bending into pretzels to look for invalidations.

Probably but it won't happen overnight, just as the changes we have experienced happened bit by bit..

I'm merely asking you to confirm what the broadly accepted definition is. Seeing as it is apparently so obvious to you, I'm sure you won't have any trouble spelling it out.

The 3-day weeks and power cuts were only for 2 or 3 months in 1974, not the whole decade!

For most of that time, the power cuts were planned, so you knew when they would happen. I was sharing a flat with my then BF and a friend, and we were fortunate enough to have gas cooking, gas fires and gas water heating, which wasn't uncommon then. Friends who lived close by would congregate at ours on power cut evenings, and we played card games and board games by candlelight. I got rather good at bridge.

The power cuts meant we often got off work early, so had loads of spare time and no loss of pay.

I have some very fond memories of those days, and the seventies generally.

It’s not patronising it’s the truth.

We’ve had a discussion on here before and I’ve seen your other posts, some of which I agree with, some of which I don’t. But you’re hard left to the extent you ignore basics facts and evidence which don’t suit you. You will do your utmost to reject Britishness, and support multiculturalism and immigration without critique, because you feel your family is safer and more accepted under such a system.

But - for instance - your child (who is presumably non white; or mixed?) is 10 times more likely to be killed in an act of Jihadi terror than she is in a far right attack. You misperceive this because jihadi terror feels less personal to you, whereas far right violence more personal because of your family’s ethnic makeup. But that means it warps your logic.

This is an extension of that. It’s like you think if you acknowledge there are practices and objects associated with Britain which together make up British culture; you’re somehow acknowledging your family doesn’t fit within it. When they very much do; because India is a huge part of British culture (cricket; tea!). It’s a wonderful thing, not something to back away from.

I think that's 100% true about skin colour. But that's not what this is about - it's about integration.

Most communities in the history of immigration have had, for different reasons, a drive to integrate. I think that is not the case currently and that's critical.

Our culture and society is probably now more welcoming than it's ever been to immigrants who want to be British*. I think most people are not default, unashamed racists anymore, as they were in the 70s and 80s. I absolutely know that institutional racism, micro-aggressions etc still exists, but broadly speaking your average white Briton who has been through the school system is much less likely to use racist slurs for example, or to express hostility to second-generation incomers on the basis that they aren't white. It's not enough - but it's meaningful in the broader context of what is going on now.

What is happening now is a response to a lack of integration. I, a lifelong leftwing feminist, feel it myself. I don't like groups of men gathering to smoke on the corner of my street while the women are invisible after school pick up time. I don't like seeing six-year-old girls in restrictive clothing which makes it impossible to run and play, while the boys do so freely.

I don't like the fact that multiculturalism has prioritised the 'cultural sensitivities' of the male authorities who preside over those cultures, and not the human rights of half of that culture. I don't like the 'don't tell Muslim women that their choices are invalid' narrative that asserts that, magically, those deeply patriarchal cultures are the only ones where social pressures, internalised misogyny, and fear of retribution don't impact those 'choices'.

I especially don't like the fact that it is now pretty much impossible to say so publicly in the liberal-but-privileged circles in which I live and which run the country at most levels. [As an aside, I am not liberal myself - I'm far towards the radical wing of both leftism and feminism and believe liberalism has been the smiling face of the globalised capitalism that is about to destroy us.)

I know that my position is probably unusual - I doubt that many people calling for limits to immigration are doing so because they are concerned with women's rights. But I think what I experience - a sense that there is a growing portion of our society which is actively and openly hostile to what we call our 'common values', however poorly applied and fractured those values are, however far we have to go before those values are actually structural in our society - is very, very common.

That sense of a rejection of common values can be about ideology or politics, or it can be as simple as 'the men gather on the street corners to smoke, and they pretend I don't exist so I have to step into the road to pass, and the women are inside' or even more simply 'multiculturalism has somehow caused a whole area is mono-cultural'. On the latter point, you can indeed argue that people somehow didn't have a problem when the monoculture is White British - but it's nevertheless insane to pretend that it's not basic human psychology to notice when an incursive group takes the geographical place of the previous group.

Most of the people who are expressing a profound unease at where we're at are able to do so precisely because they are not in the liberal-but-privileged class. They don't have the vocabulary or political sophistication to articulate the nuance of what they feel, so it gets expressed through the language of a retrogressive racism which I don't think they actually feel. Or perhaps, the overt expression of racism has been more recently accepted for them than for privileged liberals, so that language bubbles back more quickly.

But we are idiots if we pretend that it's not a problem.

Doing so alienates the people who still form the majority of this country, and who, if they lose faith in the flawed project of liberalism, could fuck everything, for all of us. Because while liberal govts pretend they can't hear them, anyone who has an interest in harnessing their rage pretends they can.

*while retaining their distinct heritage.

@thestudio that is a truly brilliant post. It’s a shame nobody will directly address what you wrote in a considered way.

well SKA was late 70s, early 80s and Massive Attack were formed in 1987 so I wouldn't include either of those as example of modern music.

Of course Glasgow is Scottish.

Unless you are a racist bigot.

Hallelujah if it lessens the propensity to support independent.

Unless you are a racist bigot.

Ok. So you think you know more about Indian culture than the Indian government? I find that astonishingly arrogant, but whatever.

If you think I'm hard left... then either you don't know much about me, or else you don't know what "hard left" actually means. Yes, I'm left leaning, but very much centre Ieft.

Your characterisation of me is wildly out. I don't reject Britishness at all, I simply don't agree that you, or anyone else on this thread, has an exclusive right to define what Britishness means, because it won't mean the same thing to everyone. As for immigration, who says I support it without critique? I do believe that we need immigration controls but I would like to see a debate about the specific immigration controls that we need which isn't infused by racist rhetoric. And yes, of course I want my family to be safe - everyone wants that.

You are being incredibly patronising to assume that my views on this are all about my family and how we fit in, and you are also just wrong. I held the same views long before I met or married my husband because of the values that my British parents passed on to me.

Please just stop trying to talk down to me and accept that I am entitled to hold a different opinion.

And if you are going to accuse me of ignoring basic facts and evidence, please have the courtesy to provide specific references to the facts and evidence that you believe I am ignoring - otherwise it's just an unfounded allegation which has no merit.

But you’re doing it again. Paying the lip service without the drill down. It’s like a No True Scotsman fallacy - you accept immigration control is needed, and that British culture exists; but when asked for specifics or to define the parameters of them, you say ‘well it’s subjective and only racists think whatever your definition is’.

It’s tiresome. It’s an agenda we can all see through.

Absolutely!

I scratch my head in disbelief when I read some things about “the past” when I was actually there. Particularly the 80s: everyone was either a yuppie waving round wads of cash and quaffing champagne or wearing a donkey jacket in the miners’ strike. I actually saw this in some children’s book about “Life in the 80s”.

Makes me wonder about all history, frankly. I object to posters telling us about how bleak the 1970s were. FO with pontificating without any actual knowledge 😡

This is a total misrepresentation of what I said, and you know it.

You're right that I declined to define British culture within a single Mumsnet post. You were not able to do this either when I asked you to do so. But we both agree that British culture exists.

With regard to immigration controls, I did not offer any specific views because that is not what this thread is about. But instead of asking what I thought they should look like, you leapt straight to the assumption that I didn't really mean what I said.

It is evident to me from your posts on this thread that you are far more interested in trying to misrepresent and discredit what I'm saying than you are to actually engage with my perspective in good faith. Perhaps you feel threatened by my posts. Perhaps you don't know what to say. Perhaps you just can't be arsed.

I do agree that it's tiresome, so let's leave it here.

As an aside, I love that the No True Scotsman fallacy is being invoked in a thread about what True Scotsman-ness entails.

it's an agenda we can all see thriugh

What would that agenda be then? @ExtraHotDoubleShot

Me too given she can’t say.

An uncritical left wing agenda which has an overall detriment to the UK but enables her sense of her family’s acceptance and safety,
even though it’s illogical.