The racism on the Huntingdon train threads is appaling

[Perplexed20]

Just as the title says. The blatant racism and jumping to conclusions on the threads has been terrible. Mumsnet used to be a more informed intelligent place.

Less appalling than people being murdered? And it’s not racist to point of facts. Half of London’s murders are committed by 13% of the population. I’m sure you live in a nice middle class town OP but what about people not as privileged having this at their doorstop?!

One little propaganda trick in China they always used was to focus on ‘heroic bystanders’ and ‘victim stories’ and allow that to form the story. They did this so you wouldn’t question the larger narrative: why are Uighurs trying to kill us? Why are lone men stabbing primary age children?

It is disturbing to see the same tricks in Western media: just wait, the British media will focus on heroism in this story, because they don’t want you talking about certain failures: why have we imported a group of people with higher tendency towards violence? Why are their second gen so unassimilated?

You aren’t meant to question those things.

Good fucking luck.

In my home country, the demographics of violence have been known for a VERY long time. I have found news articles from the 1940s trying to explain this phenomenon and it wasn’t in the ‘racist’ tone you might expect of the times but in a surprisingly apologetic way. America cities have been like this since the ‘Great Migration’ from the South, which started around the 1910s.

The commentariat class likes to blame white racism for ‘white flight’ but they never seem to want to blame higher crime rates as a push factor—of course you’ll not stay in a city where the crime worsens and your children are going to be put at risk. You will leave the cities your ancestors built and you will be blamed for it, as they decay from neglect.

People cry all day long about why American whites seldom use public transport and prefer to move to suburbs and use cars. But it just became too risky at a certain point and people quietly conceded and just moved away from it all. Because the government never wanted to address it and the media never ever wanted to report on it beyond the most basic of details. Anyone who talks about it is shouted down as ‘racist’ and the problem never gets solved.

Very strange that London echoes America’s 13/55 ratio.

Immigration Is a multi layered complex issue. It’s is not one of colour, religion or race in my experience but an issue of consent.

Whilst most British people of average intelligence welcome a multicultural society. The sheer volume of people arriving, and the lack of infrastructure and housing to support them is alarming. It is nothing short of very alarming.

The British public (and I include every single person that lives here legally) did not consent to millions and millions of people pitching up
here. With seemingly no effort at sll
on the part of the government to control the situation.

Anyone that really believes that we can continue to support millions of people arriving here every year, many of whom will never work, and require a life time of support are quite frankly deluded. We are expected to pay for it though.

I don’t see this as an issue of race in the way you think op. Most people have friends and family from all different backgrounds/heritage.

It is the total absence of immigration control, and the consequences of that on our quality of life, our values to provide free health care to all and the lack of integration in many areas.

The British public have the right to say no - we have had enough without being labelled by those that prefer to silence the debate. It is not sustainable to continue as we are.

This!

Choice of language is all that matters.

What's happened has happened and can't be undone.

Words are what comfort the families, but also what determines whether the aftermath descends into a spiral of hate and fear or progress and improvement.

Sadly social media encourages the former.

Where is the ‘spiral of hate’? On the streets? There have no reports of that at all.

What is done is done sounds extremely dismissive and minimising both the horror of the attack and the impact to the victims and the community.

Exactly what suggestions do you have for ‘progress and improvement?’

Feeling outraged is a natural response to shocking and violent crime. Are you suggesting that people should accept this kind of behaviour? I think this is very unlikely!

@Nestingbirds your propensity for exaggeration and fevered speculation does you no good. Migration has reduced - millions are not coming every year.
You were on the other threads chatting shit with misplaced authority claiming that the “two suspects were working together”, that it was a ‘deliberate pre planned attack and not a mental health episode from one person’, announcing pre police statement that it was a fact it was a terrorist incident.

See, Nestingbirds, I’m not the only one who’s clocked your dubious opinions. Get my posts deleted, name-change even. You can’t help but reveal your true nature.

My first issue with the ‘statistics’ posted by ThatJadeMaker is that they are sourced from Wikipedia. Wikipedia has its uses but it isn’t generally a suitable source for serious issues. If the Wikipedia entry uses appropriate sources then you need to tease them out and identify them.

Assuming these statistics are credible, are black people in London involved in violence because it’s a nice way to pass the day? Do they just enjoy fighting, stabbing and shooting? Or is the violence linked to drug dealing and gangs fighting to control the lucrative drug trade?

The next point some racists make is along the lines of black people being inherently associated with antisocial behaviour like drug dealing, missing out the link to deprivation. The inference is that it’s something to with the genetics or culture of black people. Drug use is high in many deprived communities in western countries, regardless of ethnic make-up. While there is a lot of wealth in London, there is also a lot of deprivation. Black people are unfortunately not well represented among the wealthy but are among the deprived.

Many people in deprived communities, especially men, don’t have the role models to show them that it is possible for people like them to have a job with good financial rewards, not as financially rewarding as drug dealing but much safer. Instead young impressionable boys are dazzled by the idea of great wealth at a young age, with social media ramping up the desire to ‘make it big’.

These pressures are not restricted to black boys, though they do have to deal with additional issues like not feeling accepted by the wider community, causing them to turn inwards, and low expectations at school. In London, the example used by ThatJadeMaker and MissKitty0, because black people are underrepresented in the super-wealthy and high earning professionals category (the main people that can afford to live in London other than social housing tenants), the proportion of the black population that is deprived is much higher than the proportion of the white population that is deprived and there is therefore a greater involvement in the drug business and the associated violent crime.

There was a thread posted a few weeks ago decrying summer internships that try to improve diversity in some workplaces. The general theme was, ‘My white son can’t get a place so these schemes are bad and need to be abolished’. Do we want people from deprived communities to see these jobs as realistic options, reducing involvement in drug dealing and crime in general, or do we want to keep them as an underclass we can look down on and complain about?

I’m originally from an African country. I don’t have that mental block that many black people growing up in deprived communities in the U.K. do. All the top politicians, most of the senior management, the professionals, the music and film stars are all black in Nigeria. It never occurred to me that aspiring to be a doctor was ambitious because that level of social achievement is standard among the people I grew up with.

It was shocking to realise how some white Britons see me and how many black people growing up in the U.K. without roots elsewhere see their prospects in Britain. It was a white nursing sister who made the ‘ambitious’ comment when I turned down her offer of a permanent job as a healthcare assistant on her night team because I was going to university. It was the way she said it. She’d put me in a box and wasn’t too happy to see me climb out of it, though others were very supportive.

Representation is important. Young black kids from poorer communities need to see black people in those bog-standard professional roles that are much more achievable than footballer, actor or music star to begin to aspire to these careers in significant numbers, which is one reason these diversity schemes are important.

As an aside, it’s not just ethnic minorities that get put in a box. I was also dismayed to hear one of my two biology teachers at college tell a student that professions like veterinary medicine were not for people from colleges like ours. This was a further education college in leafy Surrey, for goodness sake! I wondered why he had to speak up and depress his students’ ambitions, even if he genuinely believed what he was saying.

You appear to have posted an activist blog.

I posted links to MI5 - I take it you’ve heard of them?

I’m satisfied that their information is going to be significantly more accurate than your ‘blog’.

Well said. Some people on this thread are impervious to facts though.

Pp dismissed my link to MI5 on the scale of the Islamic terrorist threat as ‘random bits from google’ because they’d rather accuse the ‘right wing’.

It’s very strange.

Sorry, but I think you've confused me with someone else. I've not said 'speculating and accusing' in my comments. My first comment - and my whole point - is that it's a good thing to report racist comments. What's wrong with that? Or would you prefer we all turn a blind eye? You seem to have made so many assumptions - that I've not experienced racism, that I feel 'superior', that my questions weren't genuine (they were), that I'm bullying you... You keep saying you won't interact further, but you haven't really interacted at all, except to make baseless accusations. It's bizarre!

But PP didn’t say “go around stabbing people or equivalent”. You added that so you could shoehorn in some totally different examples of killers just because their skin is white. The fact that you have had to go back 40 years and widen the search criteria and still only came up with 6 rather proves @WearyExLondoner s point.

Thought of your post when reading Sky on my phone last night.

Just so you can see what Plato does... cheers!
Edit: Oh, couldn't add a pic so will type.

"Police triggered the Plato code to all emergency services in their initia; response to the Huntingdon train stabbing, but that did not label it a terrorist attack.

Plato is called for a major incident where it's throught a suspect is on the loose and has already, or is liable to, cause serious injury.
Plat does not denote a terror attack, though it is often used in terrorist incidents".

You also should ask why when finding out stats like this.

For example, the BAME community has higher poverty, worse education and had a long history of being punished more severely through courts. We all know that high poverty has a connection to crime too.

Racism in the UK is seeped in every corner of society, shame on us.

Out of interest, do you feel the same way about the members of grooming gangs? One of the main issues is that police, social workers, MPs and news outlets refused to speak of the nationality of these men for fear of stoking racial tensions in the very towns those girls who were being abused actually lived. As a result, more girls became victims.

You assume all posters come to these debates with an open mind. Some have already decided on the explanation that suits their world view. They are only interested in information that backs that up.

Has the ethnicity of the attackers been established yet?

Yes, one poster was going on about how there should be an increase of stop and search targeting minorities. Then it came out that some poor Afro-Caribbean man got arrested because he was the same colour as the attacker. That guy was also a victim in the train.

It’s an understandable mistake from panicked people in an attack to make but no excuse from keyboard ‘warriors’ online.

Why do you want to know their 'ethnicity'?

There was only one attacker.

Really not sure why you couldn't find this out on the BBC website or similar. You'd be better getting accurate information from reputable news sources rather than internet randos (including me 🤣)

Link provided.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8r007d4kk2o

It’s nice to hear an informative opinion online for a change as the internet is awash with bots and emboldened trolls. I won’t step foot on Twitter/X anymore as it’s just an open sewer now and it would be a shame if Mumsnet goes the same way due to lack of moderation.