The Daily
Hate is again running stories of hate and division. I their latest printed
diatribe they are attacking Muslims who live in Savile Town a suburb of Dewsbury, that is
according to the Daily Hate: ‘The corner of Yorkshire that has almost no white residents’.
However, according to
the local authority, Saviletown, a suburb of Dewsbury in the borough of
Kirklees has a British Asian population of around 10%. The photograph coverage
that the Hate gives the story would support the notion that Saviletown was
indeed highly populated by people from Asia. But then, a national daily of the
Hate’s size and stature can print pretty much anything and sell it as the
truth.
From my experience, most
immigrant groups do tend to congregate in areas where others of their co-nationalists
live. Jews escaping the pogroms of Russia, Poland and Mitteleuropa in the late
19C and early 20C settled in the East End of London; and, other large cities.
From the 1930s, and throughout the war years, Irish immigrants headed for
London, and tended to live in and around Camden, Islington and Brent in the North
of the capital city. Like most other immigrant groups not all the Irish were
destined for London. No, they moved into cities such as Birmingham, Manchester,
and Liverpool.
Many of the Jamaicans who came to the UK in the 1950s located in parts of West
London, as well as in and around Brixton in South London. Again, not all
settled in London, this can be seen from the large populations of
Afro-Caribbean people living in Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.
Greeks, Chinese, Italians,
Indians, etc, all migrated to our shores and for the most part began their stay
in Britain in their respective communities.
My point is that immigrant people often feel safer amongst familiar faces,
customs, shops etc. It’s called safety in numbers.
In my experience Irish men of my father's generation definitely resisted
integration into British society. Unlike the Irish immigrant women, who did
mix socially and subscribe more to the various wider British communities they
entered.
Sure, the majority of Irishmen spoke English. Yet they did not think like the
English. If a non-Irish person had walked into any one of the hundreds and
hundreds of Irish pubs dotted around our major cities in the 1950s, 60s, 70,
80s, and later they would've had difficulty understanding the very heavy Cork,
Kerry, Mayo, Offaly, Sligo, etc accents spoken therein.
The music enjoyed by the diaspora Irish was different to popular music listened
to by the rest of British people. Many of their songs reflected the loneliness
and yearning of the immigrant torn from the hearth of Mother Ireland. The other
category of song was the Irish rebel song. These songs embodied the mistrust
and antipathy that many Irish people felt towards the oppressive British state.
They allowed Irishmen living in Britain to demonstrate the rebel in their soul,
even if it was only from 6 o’clock to 11 o’clock on a Saturday night when they
socialised in their pubs and clubs.
Yet today, the children and grandchildren and even great grandchildren of these
immigrant Irish people are now very much integrated into the melting pot of
British life.
Similarly, generations of Jamaican and other Afro-Caribbean see themselves as
British (that's not to say racism doesn't still exist in Britain, as it does).
I can see a time when immigrant peoples of the Islamic faith will become an
integral part of Britain, in that they'll worship in their own way, stay with a
cuisine that suits them and to some extend follow their own dress sense. Other
than that, they will do, and act as most other people in the UK. They'll go to
work, put a roof over their family’s heads, worry about their kids, watch
football, moan about the weather and become generally cynical about British
politics.
