James Burton

On a More Serious Note...

Is our insistence on “multiculturalism” going to be our downfall?

Are we sowing the seeds for a nationalist uprising borne out of increasing economic frustrations, a ballooning population and a desire to apportion blame?

Big questions that I obviously can’t answer, but that are definitely worth thinking about. I’m no expert on this subject, but even I can feel the tensions and antipathy that seem to be growing stronger by the day. Since 9/11 Islam has taken a real battering, almost all of which is unjustified. Radical Muslims are, we’re told, a huge threat, but I wonder how capable much of the country is at distinguishing between a normal, peace-loving follower of Allah and a jilted jihad-preaching extremist. And then there’s the question of our immigrant population.

A slightly sinister and slightly more drunk man I met in a Fulbourn pub this week spent considerable time telling me that this great country was not what it once was, and that Britain – specifically England – was losing its identity.

Interspersing his comments with that phrase that has become the hallmark of the xenophobe, “I’m not racist but…”, he went on for some time about how there were too many foreigners here, taking our jobs and exploiting the liberalities of our political system, making life hard for the rest of us.

I didn’t want to tell him that I thought his attitude was dangerous and that we shouldn’t hold anything against the people who come over here and invariably work harder than us, often in jobs that many of us are reluctant to do, as I worried how he would react. It’s not that he was threatening, but there was just enough of a glint of something in his eye, an unnerving vacancy,  to make me wary of how I responded. That and the fact that the man he was with, while seeming quiet and harmless enough, I recognised as the “One-Armed Bandit”, the stuff of Fulbourn childhood legend who had earned his nickname through his criminal exploits and, obviously, being down on an arm.

I said that I didn’t feel that I was being exploited, and didn’t feel that I suffered as a result of the migrant population, but then I have a job and a home and don’t feel that my opportunities are limited because of the increasing number of foreigners setting up home in Britain. Perhaps he had suffered because of our immigration laws, making his views more understandable, but his opinion is not unusual and seems at odds with the supposedly more tolerant society in which we now live.

The man was 20 years older than me and truthfully whenever I’ve encountered these views in the past, they’ve not come from someone in my generation, but I wonder how many people my age do agree with this man’s views.