In the
Huffington Post David Miliband is quoted as saying that if we take in a lot
more refugees it only amounts to 40 a year in each constituency, a political
map rather than an administrative one.
In August 1972
when Idi Amin expelled the Ugandan Asians it was one family per parish to give
it the imprimatur of faith. It did not work out like that. One city that took in more than most was
Leicester, now one of the UK urban areas said now to have people defined as
white British to be in a minority.
This tale from The Mail on Thursday says that a high street there is an
example of how extensive diversity is.
This is not a town centre street it is one of several in the inner ring
of housing on a busy route out of town, the road to Coventry.
Then today Friday the story is expanded to show location and give
some reference to the past. As it
happens this was a patch that I knew personally between 1940 and 1970 and
indeed lived for a time on one of the side streets depicted.
It was the
ground floor of a late Victorian or Edwardian building at £3 per week. Zoopla now estimates the rental at £1820 a
month for the house as student housing.
Probably the demand for student housing is as substantial here as in
many towns arising from the huge expansion of higher education.
The inference
in the articles and indeed by academics that what has happened represents
"diversity" and before this came to be the local population was a
strongly homogeneous group of like minded nationalist people all of one ethnic
type.
But it wasn't
like that at all. "Diversity" may, in our modern world, be assumed
and purported to be solely ethnic with very limited criteria but in the past there
were many and various serious divisions in the way people regarded each other.
There was a
complex of pecking orders and distinctions that you knew and lived by. A basic one was religion. The Anglicans and the Dissenters were not the
same and each sector was divided in itself.
High and Low on the one hand and among the Dissenters a rich variety of
Congregations all firm in their beliefs.
There was a
minority of Roman Catholics who tended to be apart and a very small Jewish
community, largely in the medical profession.
When the Dominican's arrived to build a Priory with a large Church near
the town centre there were strong protests and fears of the Inquisition.
But the
landlady at their nearest pub' "The Daniel Lambert", a small discreet
back street one, was of the view that when some of them visited; they called it
"the other confessional", they were much to be preferred to the local
licensing committee, then in the grip of the Methodists.
This kind of
thing was only the beginning. There were
pecking orders of class, inevitably, manifested by housing location and any
status conferred by position in one club or society or association or another. There was a strong sector of Working Men
Club's, born out of the Mechanics Institutes etc. which had its own structure.
Not only was
there ordering by employment status and work but in the different firms and
economic sectors. There was a pecking
order of engineering firms. David
Attenborough has moaned about his short period working at a button
factory. I knew the owner well, a good
and decent man, David was lucky to be admitted there.
As for the
origins of the then population there had been the usual coming and going. The families of a good many in town had
arrived from broadly the area of The Midlands but with others from further
afield in Britain and Ireland. There
were a few Italians in the food trades and ice cream makers and others arriving
from the war years, including quite a number of refugee Poles.
Many had come
because the town had become very prosperous with a thriving, expanding
versatile diversified industry and commerce.
It was a key town in the British "Mittelstand" of the early
20th Century. It was badly damaged by post
war high spending centralised government planning and controls and policies which
leached the prosperity and prevented real growth of middle and small firm
businesses.
The first of
the migrants in numbers from Asia and Africa arrived when this was in train. The radical changes in the local economy and
their extent over the next few years was a very difficult business made much harder
by the impact on housing and public services.
Another complex layer of diversity was being imposed on an existing one
which became displaced. The older one was
affected because of the mid 20th Century secular trends and the economic and
structural changes of those decades.
The academics
and media of the present with their extreme, narrow and limited view of the
past have obliterated the diverse reality of the ways of life in our
communities as they were and had been before.
Then was bad and now is good in the Orwellian sense of political
thought.
It is a pity
that the LSE team did not nip across town to another part where there is a
community of Algerians with interesting ideas on diversity and identity.
They might
have tried "Molly O'Grady's" by the Market Place for a sample of
traditional Leicester beer. It used to
be called "The Saracen's Head".
This piece reissued, D?
ReplyDeleteThe Mail ran a second part so a rejig.
DeleteAh the A46 to Coventry. I used that road a few times until the M69 was opened.
ReplyDeleteAs for diversity you are right. In the past it may have been based on different social factors but that is no reason to airbrush it from the picture.