Miss Dickson Wright - what a nasty vicious racist woman she is!

[vivizone]

Well she fits in very well with the DM ethos.

Disgusting person

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2233958/One-Fat-Lady-race-row-Muslim-ghetto-jibe-The-Islamic-area-Leicester-frightened-says-TV-chef.html

[OpheliaPayneAgain]

softly of course Polish/Russian etc communities still use their own language and culture

You are confusing what I said about the exodus of Jews during the pogroms of the early last century - not he current EU wave of nationals.

There are now Jewish enclaves, that I'm aware of existing from the persecution over 100 years ago. They have absorbed into our culture, married within it.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom

[frantic51]

Thanks, mrsk, I get that now, she lives in a village near Edinburgh not Edinburgh itself.

[FreudiansSlipper]

if she was treated with hostiliy I am not surprised this is a line so often used do they not realise others can sense their feelings of superiority and hostility towards them of course bigots do nOt bother to look at their behaviour they just see someone as brown, black, Muslim as a groups not an individual

her comments are racist but glad too see these awful people also provide nice restaurants she can eat in

[Latara]

As long as people are happy & not causing physical harm or distress to others then i don't care how they live their lives.

& yes CDW is definitely a racist.

She is not that old - my dad is also 65, but he works full time with people of all nationalities & ethnicities - he's intelligent, working class & not racist at all.

[Softlysoftly]

But Ophelia you were using them as an example of how some mindsets wont/dont integrate but they do.

How can you compare something so long ago with time to dilute with recent immigration?

See you back here in 100 years and then we can say its a "mindset".

[Softlysoftly]

Also rural and the way she was raised isn't an excuse, my mum and dad hadn't had anything to do with any colour or creed when I met and brought home to our hamlet DH, they were shocked but I slowly found books on Islam creeping onto the shelves as they educated themselves. And they aren't academic either both left school to work with no qualifications, so ignorance is only an excuse when you choose to remain ignorant.

[seeker]

"the way she was raised" - Jesus wept- she's an educated intelligent woman who has travelled the world and had a wide and varied life. She was the youngest person ever called to the Bar, so she must be pretty bright. And she's only 65. She's not some doddery old grandma who's never travelled more than 10 miles from the house she was born in in all her 90 years.

And she is a public figure. In the circumstances her remarks are indefensible.

[frantic51]

No, sadly bigots don't look at their own behaviour. Bigots come in all shapes, sizes, colours and creeds and they never recognise their own bigotry.

[TwoIfBySea]

Look, it's fear of being branded a racist that has the report into the Rochdale sex ring omit the evidence that this was Pakistani men targetting white girls. Thus avoiding tackling the problem completely.

So yes, I do think CDW was not racist in what she said. If you saw 999: What's Your Emergency this week when the EDL rocked up to Blackpool - there is your example of racism. Bloody scary and yes, they'd intimidate everyone too!

[SomersetONeil]

"and has led a sheltered life."

She hasn't led a sheltered life, just for the record.

[joanbyers]

I wonder what the reaction would be if she was, say, a Muslim woman who went to, say, the Cotswolds and made remarks about how there were glancings and mutterings and so on and she felt very uncomfortable.

People would be saying 'oh yes, shudder, so glad I live in lovely multilcultural London, I could never live in one of these horrid little backward country places'.

[TwoIfBySea]

Thank you Frantic there's the word I was struggling for.

CDW was a bigot, not racist.

See what a week of dealing with dts' tonsillitis does to you!

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

That is racist. And horrible.

I love that bit of Leicester and know it well, and she is clearly aware she would offend people - she comes across as smug and deliberate.

[MoreBeta]

If this part of the article is literally a description of what actually happened then I too would feel disturbed in that situation:

'None of the men would talk to me when I tried to find out where I was and how to get out of there because I was an English female and they don't talk to females they don't know, while if the women could speak English they weren't about to show it by having a word with me.'

I live in a city with quite a high first/second generation Asian (mainly Pakistani) population and that has never happened to me. I do have daily face to face quite lengthy conversational contact with Pakistani men and it really is not the case. Pakistani women are generally more reluctant to speak to me in shops or in the street I find - although they will do if necessary.

Having said that I have found some Jewish people who have lived in the UK for all their lives still very obviously reluctant to integrate with people who are not Jewish and I say that as someone who has a Jewish mother.

[WhenShallWeThreeKingsMeetAgain]

So......if you tell it how it is, and you tell it how you feel........you are a racist?

FFS this country is stumbling blindly into 1984.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I wonder if it is true, though beta. She is certainly putting an interpretation on it, isn't she? 'because I was an English female and they don't talk to females they don't know' - how does she know that's why, if they didn't talk?

I think she is talking bollocks TBH. She must have been around Belgrave road area if I'm understanding rightly (not that it matters but that's where I think she's describing).

If someone refused to talk to me on the street while I was lost, I would wonder why, but wouldn't immediately assume they 'don't talk to females they don't know'. Especially not right there!

She was driving, right, so I wonder if she was cruising around shouting out of windows or something (I wouldn't reply to someone doing that).

I know Leicester and the sort of area she's describing well, and I simply don't believe she's not hamming up what happened.

[TunipTheHollowVegemalLantern]

Dickson-Wright is massively over-reacting. I've lived in Highfields, a supposedly 'ghetto' area of Leicester and never found it hostile. I can believe that she had trouble striking up a conversation and getting directions but she's piling too much significance onto that. Sometimes it is just harder to get people's attention or find someone who wants to talk to you, or you're not reading the slightly different cultural codes quite right so you don't communicate as easily as you might in another situation. It's not entirely dissimilar from some of the more paranoid 'The mums at school gate look down on me and won't talk to me' threads you sometimes get on here where the OP is actually mostly projecting.

I read about a thing they did in Highfields (admittedly it was in the free 'how we spend your council tax' magazine that used to come through the door so it may have been slightly idealised) where some of the white OAPs were disgruntled about the fact that some of the younger Asian or North African immigrants wouldn't respond when they greeted them in the street. So the community workers asked the immigrants why they didn't reply and it turned out it was because they didn't always understand what the old people were saying. So they brought some people in to teach the OAPs some simple greetings in Urdu and Arabic - result, the new immigrants were surprised and pleased to be greeted in their own language and the OAPs found the that immigrants were perfectly nice after all.

It's not the very fact that she is describing a situation where she felt out of place and found it hard to get directions that is racist - people should be able to talk about their experiences - it's the way she attributes all this significance to it. IMO.

[FreudiansSlipper]

she feels superior to those she came in to contact with that comes over very clearly she has taken the stance this is my country these people do not belong here yet she expects to be treated with respect why exactly

she may have travelled the world, had a great career and education but that does not mean she is not a fool and ignorant she is she has shown herself up to be and racist too

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Yes, I agree tunip.

The people she's talking about will be the mums or dads or families of people I went to school with, they will be people who had us round for dinner and so on - it just feels really insulting that she is writing like this and talking about 'them', with that stupid assumption about what 'they' do re. talking to women 'they' don't know.

It didn't occur to her her accent might be incomprehensible?

I'd love to see her walk around the really Geordie villages near Newcastle, see if she doesn't find people equally struggling to understand her, and I bet then she wouldn't go on about 'they don't speak to women they don't know'.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

usual - that makes sense too. I think her ref to the curry made me think of Belgrave Road! I miss that. No decent curry here.

[SpringHeeledJack]

oh nooooooooo

we were saying tother night how fab she was- even tho a big old tory (probly)

I had mental picture of her this morning leaping out of bed singing hymns,stoutly

and falling over dachshunds, swearily

and now she's a racist

[TunipTheHollowVegemalLantern]

I assumed it was Highfields as that was more of a Muslim area when I lived there and Belgrave always struck me as more Hindu/Sikh - though not entirely, and the ethnic make-ups of the areas were constantly shifting.
(There was a Polish social club at the end of my road which was patronised soley by a few elderly Polish WW2 veterans - that is probably heaving these days. And near where I lived later on there was a synagogue that everyone always assumed was a mosque because it had a dome and was slap bang in the middle of a Muslim bit.)