To be deeply disappointed in John Cleese

[drspouse]

I have no idea if this is typical but he just tweeted that London isn't an English city any more
What is it then pray tell? What's not English about it??

He has said something that, while probably factually correct, could potentially hurt the feelings of certain minority groups - so he must be quickly shouted down as an immoral deviant.

This is what the British liberal-left do best. Years of this silencing of legitimate debate on important issues like immigration contributed to the Leave campaign's victory in 2016. The more you tell people how they must think, the more they will turn around and bite you at the first opportunity.

To be fair an awful lot of places in Britain have changed out of all recognition in the last 20 years. The bit of the South Wales valleys where I grew up is an awful underprivileged slum. The centre of Liverpool is gorgeous and vibrant. Nice bits of Manchester are student ghettoes. Nasty bits of Manchester are now quite nice.

Nothing stays the same, people should realise this.

And I’m not a Londoner but I lived there 30 years ago in a rough bit of Dalston that seems a lot nicer now. I don’t live there now but I visit a lot. It’s a fantastic place to visit and the people I know who live there love it.

It's a multicultural city obviously. We went recently and got lost in a certain part of London and asked for help including a bus driver and struggled with a language barrier with three out of the four people if that's what be was getting at. I've not seen his comment tbh.

Like Tinkly said things change though and it's always happened.
In the place I now live the village was entirely white English until they were inundated during the potato famine and in the years after when family came over with many non English speaking Irish (including my family) trying for a better life. Most of the Irish settled here, housing was built and they stayed.

In the early 1900s vast numbers of non English speaking Welsh flooded the area (again my family) for the mines. The coal board built housing.
I would say from talking to people most people still here now are from those people.

The Irish came and we ended up with extra faith schools and an extra church.
The Welsh came, used temporary chapels in a tin hut until they could build their own Methodist churches.
I think there are three in the nearby small town and there were two in our village.

A lot of the English already here moved further out. I'm not sure how they felt about it at the time but the entire makeup of the area changed dramatically.

The same for London.

The same for parts of Manchester which were areas of high poverty but now are being filled with expensive luxury apartments.

Old news

I live on a South London estate...Totally agree with him!

@lovesmarties

100% spot on!!

He's right - however the dog whistle is so loud we can all hear it

I love how people talk about leaving London because it's 'changed from when I was a kid' to live in less diverse areas but yet reject the idea of being racist

In that case is Corby a Scottish town? Are others now Polish towns?

He’s a misogynistic, he’s homophobic and, unsurprisingly, he’s now revealing himself to be xenophobic too. It’s not especially surprising, these things do tend to go hand in hand!

Considering England's colonial history, I can't think of a more English thing than having a multicultural capital.
My point exactly.

Louise fair point, they do!

An ex colleague of mine moved to north London from Romania. She was an Anglophile and very excited to be moving to a city she loved from everything she had read about it, had very high expectations. . She told me she was so shocked by the reality that she asked the person who had collected her from Heathrow : " are you sure this is London?"

I can't wait to move out, it has changed beyond recognition in the last 30 years and not for the better.

it has changed beyond recognition in the last 30 years
I quite agree.
The food is better.

I'm sure he's said this before. He is a silly, bitter old man who doesn't even live in the UK. If you wander around London asking for directions, you will be bumping into 100s of tourists, many of whom don't speak English because they don't live here. There will also be huge amounts of black and Asian people, who were born in London, speak English perfectly well, going to work. They won't be wandering around waiting to be asked directions but they will count towards the non white British category on statistics.

I am not British. I lived 15 years in the uk. I never felt English but I felt like a Londoner. So i know what he means if i work backwards from how i felt. But still... stupid remark

caringdenise so your colleague decided to immigrate to a country from a country where huge amounts of people have also emigrated to London and complain about immigration? Is it OK if they are white immigrants?

Londoner born and bred here. Growing up, my neighbours were about 60% British - English, Scots, Welsh, Irish - with the remaining 40% a mixture of European-born German, Greek Cypriot, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Maltese, Basque, Indian, Pakistani, African, various Caribbean islanders and more. These are just the nationalities I recall. This was 50+ years ago. John Cleese lived a few streets away. London has always been a home for whoever finds themself there. Maybe he was too busy with his American wives to notIce then.It's a place specific to itself.

How incredibly dull must you be if you want to live somewhere where people are all the same.

Are you saying all white English people are the same? I hate this assumption that living in a mono cultural area is dull or boring and we're all racists. White english people may not be diverse in terms of skin colour, religion etc but we are diverse in other ways. Why are English people so keen to do ourselves down and declare us boring and backward?

He isn’t wrong though. It’s easy to get all offended and say that he doesn’t understand that people from different ethnicities who are born in England are English, but in my experience, London is full of first generation immigrants. That includes white ones from Australia and NZ as well as the more affluent EU countries. It doesn’t have to mean there are too many brown faces (although it could just be a racist remark), it could equally be an observation that there are many cultures and nationalities that make up the London demographic. It also doesn’t have to be a negative thing, London celebrates its diversity.

He wasn’t ‘celebrating’ diversity though.

Agree with Ilovesmarties. It’s the shouting down of any rational debate in this area that has unfortunately led to bloody Brexit.

I also think the government pack most immigrants into urban areas that are already overcrowded and underfunded, putting even more strain on services such as health, housing and education. As a teacher working and living in an area that has had a huge amount of immigration I have seen this first hand.

I agree with this, and it does annoy me when champagne socialists who live in areas where this isn't a problem pontificate to thr plebs about 'embracing diversity' etc.

As for what JC said - well London has never been a 'quintissentially English' city has it? Even in the golden age of Pearly Kings and Queens walking down the street singing 'cor blimey guv'nor' there were still lots of areas of London heavily populated by non-English people and cultures.

Plus its always changing in lots of ways anyway - when I was growing up areas like Dalston, Hoxton and Shoreditch were kind of crappy, now they have been 'gentrified' and are cool.

I agree with him I’m afraid. I live here and I love it but it’s so wonderfully diverse and full of Various Nationality and cultures. that comes with bad things and good things.