Douglas Murray on denunciations and Lawrence Fox

Autumn Rose, I may not sure what I am trying to say.

I am sick of accusations of racism. Fine if justified and evidenced, but not when it is everyone who voted Brexit or anyone who had their doubts about M&H.

I would like to see colour blindness, recruitment on merit, and acceptance regardless of background.

I accept that there needs to be care taken to ensure that prejudice does not creep in and that allowance is made for disadvantage.

However it feels as if 'diversity' has gone beyond that and may actually be damaging, emphasising one group over another (eg LGBTQ+ over disability) or by focusing on skin colour over relative advantage.

Inarticulate I know. However I, like many, felt deeply bruised by the Brexit debate and the awful, nasty accusations that came from ex-friends and neighbours. Fox may not be the best spokesperson, but he is trying to articulate something that people feel. My sense is that there are too many topics where debate is not allowed, and this in itself is harmful. He may not be right, and people are welcome to disagree. But let's have more than simply cry 'racist'.

I live in a rural area which isn't very mixed. I worked across the whole county which had very multicultural areas and towns which were predominantly white. My policy as children's librarian was to ensure all libraries had a diverse range of stock. Occasionally I'd get complaints 'we don't have any black people here.'
I would visit village schools with my varied collection of books to promote and very often found there were minority children there.
What bothers me about the Lozza thing is firstly there is prejudice, misconceptions among people who have little day to day contact with black people, secondly if what they see on tv is black academics hurling accusations of 'white privilege' it will only entrench views.
Why do we rarely see several black academics disagreeing about race and identity, because they do.

Whatever happened to this attitude ?
"I disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it"

I am concerned that someone stating their opinion can be on the receiving end of death threats, attempts at preventing them from getting work and hateful social media messages.

Because this is why people see wrong and stay silent-like Rochdale.

Scary stuff

Need my dad also experienced the no dogs etc

But what you are describing...why does any of it matter? Genuine question. Or have I misinterpreted you?

I do find these discussions really odd in fairness.

I regularly note the huge difference between London and countryside. Get on a tube and expect a mix, get on a train and it may well be all white. DD noted the same when she went to a predominantly white middle class University.

But it's fine. DDs school friends were racially mixed, Uni friends are different, predominantly northern, many from state schools and some of her closest friends are first generation University. They are a new diversity for her, whilst they have become adept at spotting Londoner differences. (Regular appointments with a dental hygienist is one - who knew.) I think it is great. It is not about her being able to boast of a friendship group of varying hues. It is about her being able to take people as she finds them regardless of colour and background.

Change takes time. Go back a couple of decades and it was very rare to see black or Asian people skiing. A colleague explained. Black people were far too sensible to spend money going somewhere cold when they could have a holiday in the sun. Things are changing, and it is much more common to see mixed families and groups of young people. Ditto the Tooting Lido. Equally I saw colleagues of Nigerian origin start to migrate to market towns in search of cheaper housing.

The pace of diversity will pick up as we have more mixed race families and more secondary migration. And that is ignoring the diversity there already is, including perhaps South Asian Doctors and Chinese restaurant owners, and well as non-visible ethnics including East European farm workers, or the descendants of WW2 refugees. (Lots of Polish names in Cornwall, or the Armenian community in Bournemouth.)

The assumption that racism is the opposite of diversity is flawed.

My family is probably 5 generations London. My dad experienced the post war, no blacks, no Irish, no dogs prejudice. My son risks being accused of white privilege. Integration takes time.

Complaining about lack of diversity in a single place is a little weird, isn't it? If I head off to Nairobi, or to some rural town in Japan, I'd be kind of an ass to complain there aren't enough white people to make it diverse. (Actually I have a vivid memory of some elderly relatives complaining about Nairobi being taken over by the natives which I found quite shocking at the time. )

“ I live in London but I leave it often enough to know that parts of the country are pretty white, enough to scare my "white" children because they are just not used to such a monoculture and find it disturbing, unreal”

Did Suzanne Moore really say that? That’s shocking if she did.

No wonder Fox is getting death threats. That’s the pattern isn’t it...speak out, get death threats, pipe down because of your family. What an awful place we’re in.

I note a comment below the Murray article which quotes Suzanne Moore:
"I live in London but I leave it often enough to know that parts of the country are pretty white, enough to scare my "white" children because they are just not used to such a monoculture and find it disturbing, unreal and, to be frank, lacking.". The Guardian has been churning out this nonsense for years and now we get the backlash which means years of Tory rule.

Why do you think this is "nonsense" MsSafina?

I grew up in a very "white" part of the UK, rural and small market towns. However, the nearest big cities were within easy travelling distance and very ethnically diverse.

I moved to London in my 20's. For the usual reason of horrendous problems finding anywhere to live with rental agreements longer than 6 months, I moved around a lot in London over the next 10 years. When I first lived in areas where white faces were very few and far between, I found it a bit strange to begin with.

Then I moved to one of the least ethnically diverse cities in the UK and I found that strange and, after many years, I still do. It was not just the "visuals" but finding that local music radio was dominated by heavy rock rather than reggae - that was a big loss as far as I was concerned and very "lacking".

My mother visited me soon after I moved there and I took her around the city centre to show her the sights. After about 30 minutes she stopped dead in her tracks and said, "Well! I don't think much of this as a "City"!" When I asked her what she meant, she said, "Where are all the black people?!"

Some years ago (10? 20?) I read an article about aspects of this stereotype in the UK, ie. "Black people live in cities; Cities are where black people live; Black people are 'out of place' in the countryside." It brought me up short because I suddenly remembered when I lived for a year out of London in a small, ethnically diverse city, where I had a black boyfriend and was sharing a house with two white women and two black men.

The six of us used to go out together, usually playing tennis, and there were couple of "wind up the racists" games we used to play to amuse ourselves. The "winter game" was to go to random country pubs and stroll in chatting. Without fail, everyone would turn their backs on us and the bar staff would stride off leaving no one to serve us. The "game" was to see how many ash trays and empty glassed we could steal while chatting noisily to each other, admiring the decor, speculating on how old the building was, etc. then exiting still chatting, ashtrays and glasses stuffed in our pockets and under our coats

The "summer game" was visiting posh, rural tennis clubs in our tennis whites to make the Club Secretaries squirm. Leaving the boys in the car, us three girls would go in carrying rackets, swishing our blonde locks and batting our eyelashes, asking if we could enrol as members and were there any courts free so we could play right then as visitors?.

Every time, we would have some slavering old git fawning over us and bringing the Visitors Book to sign us in. At which point, one of us would call go out and call to the boys that we were in luck and we could join and play, while the other two cooed their thanks and explained that we wanted to play mixed-doubles.

In walked the lads and we would just stand and watch the squirming and back-pedalling, "mistake, fully booked, not taking any new members at the moment, etc." Then we would head back to play on the Council Courts.

Having said ALL that - when I was living there I was driving through the surrounding countryside to work one day and in the middle of nowhere passed a black man waiting at a bus stop. It was such an unusual sight that my mouth fell open!

So, I do not find the comment quoting Suzanne Moore unbelievable "nonsense" though the language is a bit "pass the smelling salts!".

I do not find it odd to suggest that people, adults or children, notice dramatic changes in their environment that are out of kilter with their expectations.

If they notice that something is "missing" then they would, by definition, perceive that as something "lacking".

Would they find it "disturbing"? They did not expect to find themselves outside their "comfort zone" so maybe they did find it unsettling?

"Unreal"? Perhaps they had had until then what amounts to a parochial upbringing, although I am pretty sure that that is not how a Guardian journalist would characterise growing up inside the M25. If true that they did find it "unreal" then it was not before time that they were taken out of their bubble to experience the diversity of "lived experience" in the UK.

Children in those "white" parts of the UK that Moore refers to might well have had more experience of visiting places in the UK with greater obvious, visual, ethnic diversity than her children had of "white" parts of the UK. In which case, they would have a better understanding of diversity within the UK than her children and be better equipped to function comfortably wherever they found themselves.

Moore's language overly dramatic language made me think of the CEO of the Lake District National Park, who is fretting that the visitor profile is not more "ethnically diverse". Maybe he should also be be putting on "therapeutic diversity" holidays for the children of white Guardian Journalists, with psychotherapists on call in case they get too disturbed and detached from reality??

Racist? If you say so, perhaps. In the same way that voting Brexit because you are concerned about the democracy and direction of the EU project makes you racist.

What I don't get is I have read several articles in left win publications saying that many people in these smaller towns were happy about the longer standing ethnic communities in their towns, and these articles very much took the approach that gosh, aren't these people stupid, they don't realise that the people in this other community are black and come from immigrant stock too, so as racists they should also reject them.

When the obvious explanation is the issue isn't really about race or being from some other place, and that is why the people are differentiating.

Video from House of Lords question on grooming gangs. Scroll through to
B Williams response at 1 min - vulnerable girls are the problem and crimes committed by people not men.

I never said most of the girls However, one third of the 1400 Rochdale victims had social service involvement. That is significant. The Jay Report specifically refers to a recurrent theme being girls picked up from children's homes The victims of this systematic sexual abuse were deliberately targeted because of their social and economic vulnerability

Yes it is significant but how many of those girls with social services involvement had none prior to being victims of the gangs. The reason some had SS involvement in the first place was directly because they were victims of the gangs. Some parents begged SS to take their girls into care and hide them away.

I fear this labelling of the girls as 'vulnerable' detracts from the predatory nature of the perpetrators and suggest that only vulnerable girls of a certain socio economic status are at risk. Which is not the case.

Yes, he's talking sense in that article BovaryX.

These days I find it quite liberating to agree with what's said even if I'm not keen on who is saying it.

Is Hardeep Singh the same as Hardeep "Handy" Singh Kohli?

If so, I wonder why he's dropped the Kohli?

Hardeep Singh's critique needs to be taken one step further. Islam is the common factor amongst the groomers. And institutional misogyny the common factor within the police, social services and the way in which the victims and whistleblowers were treated.

That is from The Times. One of the most shocking things about this case is that the girls in care were deliberately targeted because of their vulnerability

I agree with much of what you say, but it's important to remember that most of the grils were not in care, and that in some cases SS only became involved when the parents of the girls requested it.

@Needmoresleep. Excellent post. Anyone who had any scepticism about the direction of the EU was deemed a heretic or a racist or, perhaps worse, a fascist. Though the EU is very lenient when it comes to the behaviour of the Polish and Hungarian Governments.

This contempt for the working class perhaps first gained currency with Blair and immigration. David Blunkett put it well.

"The sillier end of the Labour Party has always been the best ally of the Conservatives. All my time in politics has shown me that when a party moves away from the concerns of ordinary people it fails.

As a politician in Sheffield, I know that people can be both worried about the effects of uncontrolled immigration and yet welcoming to the newcomers they encounter. Fear and reality are often two very different things."

Whatever someone's views on immigration were, it would be hard to deny that there were huge impacts on some agricultural market towns and the poorer areas of some cities, whose character changed rapidly. Though equally there were benefits, for example it could be argued that immigration improved some London schools by raising aspiration. Unfortunately the topic, and thus the detail, became #nodebate, with policy seemingly driven by a left wing middle class urban elite. Any working class dissenters were written off as racist, yet these were the people who in most cases were welcoming their new colleagues, neighbours and school mates. The failure to debate did not help ensure policy around key social infrastructure such as schools, hospitals and housing was properly influenced by people's concerns.

Voting Brexit or Tory has looked like the best way to be heard. As the Brexit results came in a senior Labour politician said on TV that Labour needed to start listening. The journalist reminded him/her that the same had been said at the previous election, when did Labour plan to start?

I don't think they have started yet. On too many topics the urban elite seem to be relying on their own ideology, restricting conversation and name calling rather than listening.

People are not stupid. I have just spent a decade responsible for a mother, never an easy character, living with dementia. My brother, very active within his left-leaning London CLP, did virtually nothing. (Ok his wife once tweeted something about how important it was to value our elderly, but that was about it.) I did it, in part, to demonstrate to my own children the importance of family and thus viewed Meghan, to the extent that she had any relevance, from that perspective. Racist? If you say so, perhaps. In the same way that voting Brexit because you are concerned about the democracy and direction of the EU project makes you racist.

Then the #nodebate around TWAW. If there is a need to amend the GRA let's talk. What are the concerns? Is the need based on the £100.00 fee, some dodgy suicide stats and a desire to be validated. I assume not, though its hard to hear the rest above the shouting. Equally let's hear women's voices on the subject of risks and safeguarding. Transphobic? If you say so.

I don't know much about Fox and am not that interested in him. However I get his frustration about controlled language and the use of name calling rather than debate. And I get the frustration of northern voters who felt the need to vote Tory.

Weirdly, and despite all the research resources available to them, there seems to be no indication that the Labour leadership candidates, understand at all. That learning from election results, promised so long ago, has yet to happen.

I note a comment below the Murray article which quotes Suzanne Moore:
"I live in London but I leave it often enough to know that parts of the country are pretty white, enough to scare my "white" children because they are just not used to such a monoculture and find it disturbing, unreal and, to be frank, lacking.". The Guardian has been churning out this nonsense for years and now we get the backlash which means years of Tory rule.