I once heard a young British woman of African extraction say she had never experienced racism. Whilst I expect she's in a minority, it still strikes me as significant that any such person could say so.
In the same way, whilst I don't think it is the end of the world when young Muslim men have been patrolling the East End of London driving away unsuitably dressed women, people drinking in the street and, in one unpleasant incident, a gay man, it clearly says something about Britain now which I think is interesting and baleful.
You can find the videos by searching for Muslim Patrol on Youtube.
Before Christmas the 2011 Census results revealed that non-whites living in London were for the first time a majority. I don't find this as surprising or as appalling as the Tory press seems to. Even when I was living there twenty years ago it was clear that London was an international city rather than a British one (one of the great things about Manchester is that it still retains a good deal of its Mancunian character; London on the other hand lost almost all of its London-ness).
But also I think the issue of skin-colour is a red herring. Who cares if people are white or not? I don't; or not much. For me what's much more important is their culture. I've often observed that I have more in common with my friend of Ghanain origin than I do with most of the white adults I meet in this corner of SK8. Culture is not a fixed thing - it flits across individuals with a fluidity that physical characteristics cannot match.
Are the majority of Londoners British? The answer appears to be yes. It seems that only about a third of people living in London were born outside the UK. That's still an awful lot of people though, and it brings me to why culture matters.
If you can't have a cohesive society where people are treated differently because of their skin colour, neither can you have one where people live in cultural ghettos. I always thought when I was young and idealistic that integration and acceptance would inevitably happen when children met and mingled at school. Unlike some, I have walked the walk, and my children have been to state schools were Muslim children were sometimes a majority. At their inner city Sixth Form College there is, sadly, very little mixing, something which has been formalised to the extent that the quadrangle where the Muslim students go at break is known as Quadistan, whereas the grass where the white kids hang out is called Vanilla Hill. These are names devised by the kids.
One reason why Enoch Powell was wrong about immigration of the 50s and 60s was that he failed to see that people from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean with a common post-Christian heritage would in the end rub along with and happily intermarry whites. I suspect it's the children of those marriages that are making up much of London's non-white majority.
What immigration's subsequent apologists failed to realise was that such integration wouldn't necessarily happen when Muslims came to Britain. Integrating cultures which differ so radically in their attitudes to family life, the role of women in society, relationships between men and women, the consumption of alcohol and sexual behaviour was always going to be much more difficult. The Muslim vigilantes in the East End are British people too. But whilst there are some things about their culture that I admire a lot, the sub-Taliban attitudes of Muslim Patrol are not mine.
