To think everything will be unrecognisable in 50 years

[CurdinHenry]

Just thinking about how different the UK was in the 70s and how change is supercharged now by tech and mass migration and the loss of shared cultural reference points in TV and newspapers and radio.

I live in Glasgow and many parts of it are no longer at all Scottish-seeming apart from the old sandstone tenements. What even is Scottish any more? It's hard to imagine Scottish independence being taken up by the new communities. But what's next?

I think human societies are programmed to self destruct every so often in the absence of external numbers control pressures and I think that's what's starting now across Europe. We have never had it so good in the history of time yet rage flourishes

What can we do as individuals, I'm just not sure

What's the shared culture with white people that I don't have with the Hindu doctor or my black friend?

I agree this is very unlikely in 50 years.

Following on from my first post about integration though - any community whose has a cultural and particularly a religious resistance to integration can create pockets of a country which feel, ironically given the stated aims of multiculturalism, nearly monocultural.

It's this concentration, not the population as a percentage across Britain as a whole, which is most visible to those who those who live in or near one of these communities or who pass through one (so nearly everyone in London, for example, or in the Midlands). Even those who don't live anywhere near one of these communities will have frequently seen images in the media.

Yes, immigrants have always settled with others from their heritage, for obvious reasons. But I think that lands differently when suspect that it's not simply the completely human desire for proximity to one another, but a moral opposition to the incumbent culture, which is driving this self-ghettoisation.

I agree that this 'suspicion' is something that can and has been weaponised by the Right. But many of us who live around these areas have experienced firsthand an unwillingness to forge a new, shared culture and community. It's a very different experience to what living in Brixton or Latimer Road felt like in the 80s, for example. And enough Muslim leaders have framed integration as moral contamination for that position to become widely known.

So the argument about percentages across the whole country is disingenuous I think - and contributes I'm certain to people's feeling that they are being treated like fools by what they consequently call 'the liberal elite'.

Well said

My area of London is way higher than average but it feels fine and very multicultural.

Agree.

I understand - mine does too, but it's adjacent to areas which do feel pretty monocultural. And as someone who is quite out-and-about locally I'm conscious that there is a real resistance in lots of my neighbours to anything more than a brief nod in the street. That's something I don't feel about other communities - Some Of My Best Friends Are Black, lol hohoho. Plus Indian- and South and South-East Asian-heritage, and Farsi- and Turkish-speaking Muslims.

I'm not complaining personally - as I said, I'm a radical feminist so most of my own feelings are motivated by ideas that could be considered quite abstract (to the extent that any ideology is abstract.)

I'm really just trying to be intellectually and personally honest while thinking seriously about why we are where we are right now, across the country.

I know that some of the wave of feeling about this is down to straightforward racism, or an unconscious fear of the Other, or a displacement of blame which should be pinned on different doors. All of those have been exploited by the Right.

But I do think there's more going on when the feelings of a significant proportion of the country are denied validity or logic by a much smaller - but much more powerful - portion of society.

As I said in a previous post, I'm politically at the extreme Left (though its a very personal view and I pretty much despise all organised extreme Left groups).

So I view Left-liberalism (or however you describe it - I mean the views of your average city-dwelling educated middle-class person) not, as the Right does, as a weak, wet and idealist approach to social organisation, but as the weaponisation of our natural humane feelings by 'power'.

In other words, nice liberalism is the method through which the decent majority of us are persuaded not to examine either power structures or the powerful themselves. It's the friendly mask which has enabled a a relentless, global capitalism - uncontrolled by any one group but with a drive to power that currently seems unstoppable - which I think many of us are starting to feel the force of.

I would really, really like to hear those on the Liberal Left - which used to comprise most of Mumsnet, and is still a core proportion of their audience - respond to my points in a way which goes beyond the 'be kind' pablums which don't, when examined, seem to have an intellectual or political core.

How do we deal with the schism that Left-liberalism has left us with?