The changing face of England

By David Ambler

Administrator’s note: Reflections by David Ambler in response to my  observation that “ something is wrong with England of late”.

You asked for some views and comments on why “something is wrong”, as you put it, with England. As usual (and I am sorry for this) I think I have overdone it but it is a subject which is an interesting one to consider and writing at length, even if my comments and opinions are superficial and ill-informed as some might claim, helps me to encapsulate how I feel.

Because I was raised in a provincial northern town in the fifties and sixties, went to an all-male Catholic grammar school in the suburbs of a large Yorkshire city, had college spells in a Lancashire engineering town, an eastern fishing port and a north-east shipbuilding town my own early experiences of England and being English were in no way influenced by the waves of immigrants, mostly from Asia and the West Indies, who were settling around England at that time but not, seemingly, anywhere I happened to be. I was largely untouched by the settlement of large communities from overseas in places like Bradford and Birmingham. I only heard and read about the influx of Indian and Pakistani peoples to feed the cotton and woollen industries in the weaving mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire (industries already sadly in decline at that time) and of the West Indians arriving by the boatload to feed the service industries of London and the major cities to become exploited bus conductors and train drivers and cleaners and perform many other menial roles that the indigenous English (I’m trying to avoid the use of the stereotyping colour labels Black, Brown and White hence the use of “indigenous” in this instance), with their rising expectations fuelled by post-war boom times, were scorning. Even more laudable professions such as nursing were crying out for the skill and dedication the immigrants brought with them but of all this, as I have said, I saw little.

After school and college ended, visiting foreign climes and mixing with foreigners of all shades and cultures outside the cocoon of England became the norm. during a career in the Merchant Navy though I still had no appreciation, during years of world-wide voyaging, of what was happening at home. When that seafaring chapter came to a close I lived and worked for many years in West Wales. The countries of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland which, together with England, make up the UK have their own culture and traditions which have survived in the shadow of English dominance and were, as far as I am aware, comparatively untouched by immigration. At this time during the Seventies and Eighties even the race riots which erupted sporadically in many English cites (parallelling those in American cities at that time) seemed distant to me in rural Wales.

So I grew up and have spent two thirds of my life to date as an Englishman with an isolated, and possibly naive, English outlook albeit for much of that time in Wales. But on returning from Guyana in the early Nineties and settling in the largest city in the South-West I soon realised that the England of my youth had changed forever, had always been changing demographically and continued to change as the latest waves of migrants from newly adopted EU countries, notably Poland, settled around me. I read of that political ward of Bradford which is nowadays 90% Asian, of the primary school elsewhere which achieved notoriety as the first in the country to have no pupils at all whose first language is English. Of the strain imposed on local welfare, employment, health, education and other primary service agencies in having to provide multi-lingual services catering for many diverse cultures. And a recent report on the 10,000 strong Somali community in my city voiced concerns that their children were being held back educationally because most lacked even the most basic English at the outset of their schooldays.

This Somali language issue is, to me, the entire problem in microcosm and in many ways reflects the situation in English cities as a whole. Successive Governments over many years have based their immigration policies around the premise that it is perfectly possible and desireable to have a multi-ethnic society where each group maintains its own traditions, customs and values. This is fine as far as it goes (religious culture for instance can never be gainsaid), but it can be argued that this has gone too far, that ethnic groups settling in England have not done enough or been encouraged enough to integrate into wider society and have developed in isolation from each other and from the established indigenous population, incidentally fuelling much of the attractiveness of right-wing racist politics to many in that population.

During a brief six month encounter with immigration when staying in North London during the Seventies I was surprised by the depth to which the Sub-Continent had already become embedded in the area in which I lived. Virtually the whole of Harrow Road had a colourful and noisy bazaar feel to it and most of Wembley High Street too (it strikes me at this point that this scene was a Sub-Continent forerunner to the Guyanese colonisation of Liberty Avenue in New York). It is natural for groups of incomers to settle wherever their fellows have settled, where they can share a language and values in what must seem to them an extremely cold, alien and often hostile environment. But too many, in my view, go no further than this. There are groups in some communities, housewives are the major case in point, who never need to learn English because they never talk to anyone outside their own families and communities. I am willing to bet that there are very many ladies from the first generation of immigrants in many towns and cities across the UK who still speak not a word of English. This ought to change as the older generations die out and I think applicants for citizenship nowadays have to demonstrate some aptitude for the English language and English culture to achieve that goal but why has it taken so long to come to this?

Does any of this matter? Only in so much as the common bond of human brotherhood is thus made more difficult to forge across racial divides and suspicion and resentment breeds on all sides. But I feel that most immigrant waves are net contributors to the economy and immigrants from anywhere tend to be those with the vision and ambition to make something better of themselves. The impressive progress of Ugandan and Kenyan Asians is a case in point. Many were already immigrants committed to their African homes until Idi Amin on the one hand and the Kenyan expulsions of all who wished to retain their British passports on the other meant that they arrived in England in their hundreds of thousands and have generally prospered here. Conversely there are what we call “sink” estates in my city with negligible immigrant populations, where unemployment is high and the standard of living low, where the level of crime and drugs usage is higher than elsewhere, where the population is largely dependent and weaned on the welfare culture and where ambition and hope tends not to flourish. So it is not only the immigrants who are gathered in ghettoes. And who is to say which group of people better deserves to be called English? Is it them, or the hard working immigrants? Is it, indeed, any others such as the disaffected Asian youth in towns such as Burnley or Blackburn where the traditional cotton industry has died with nothing to replace it? Or the recent arrivals of large numbers of economic migrants from places like Poland and Hungary? We have forged friendships with members of every major ethnic group in this city including the indigenous one (the Somalis being, so far, a notable exception) and perhaps we all deserve our English title because this is what we are and this is where we live. It may not be the England of old but it is the England we nowadays call home, for better or worse.

We can all disagree (and many did so vehemently) with the Principal of one primary school who cancelled the traditional Christmas Nativity play in case it offended the cultural and religious sensitivities of other pupils and their families. Such politically correct (PC) behaviour is anaethma to many, even to those from immigrant communities (Muslim groups were just as loud in declaiming the absurdity of this act as others were) but it is the times in which we live and, thankfully, any group or indidividual has the freedom to challenge and object. Hopefully that is something which will never change and neither, I hope, will the freedom of others to state their radical views. You mention the Archbishop of Canterbury calling for the adoption of Sharia Law. It came as a huge shock to many of us but at least he has the right of free speech and so do we to challenge such thinking (I think, incidentally, it only concerned the appropriateness of Shariah law in some areas of Muslim culture, such as polygamy or arranged marriages, which Christian English legislation is uncomfortable with). As to the dumbing down of entertainment which you mention with respect to the tastelessness of the humour in an Asian sit-com, I feel this is nothing at all to do with immigration or race but is just something that has happened world-wide and for which the entertainment industry, ever in search of profit over culture, is to blame (I fervently hope it was not a BBC production!!).

So we still have an England, it is just that it has changed. The features of Englishness are still there, for instance in our National Health Service we still have what is to my mind one of the most humane of those features, a recognition that health care should be free to all regardless of the means to pay for it. My taxes and those of many others make this possible and I doubt if many of us begrudge its universal nature, to provide healthcare even to those who have made no contribution. And, despite what is happening in the cities, the hills and farms are still there, and the villages and lakes and provincial towns and communities. They will, inevitably, change (though not, I hope, the hills and lakes) but we will move on and hopefully this progress will be for the good of all.

I was reading the other day of two events which illustrate graphically how much we have progressed. One was the Bristol Bus Boycott. It happened in 1963. The local bus company publicly declared a policy, quite legally in those days, that they would employ nobody of Afro or Asian race. It was in response to, and dictated by, the concerns of the local trades unions

who feared that the jobs of their members were at risk from those immigrants willing to work harder and for less. This led to an ultimately successful campaign to boycott the bus services until the policy was revoked. Even Harold Wilson became involved in the arguments and it eventually resulted in our first anti-discrimination legislation.There must be many from those days, from both sides of the argument, still alive and I do wonder if any in the pro “colour bar” party nowadays feel ashamed of their part in these events. But things have changed. In recent years it seems nobody in Bristol, neither White English(there, I’ve used the “colour” word at last), West Indian or Asian, can fill all the available bus driver posts. So the successor to the Bristol Bus Company went to Poland to recruit from there. Despite the “British jobs for British Workers” protests of recent months elsewhere in response to the advent of labour from Italy or Greece the full rehabilitation of the bus company has passed unnoticed and the events of ‘63 almost forgotten. Anyone, no matter who, can drive a bus if they want to.

The second event I was thinking of was an utterly idiosyncratic news item of recent weeks. There is a sub-postmaster (I don’t remember where in England) who rents the space for his Post Office counter within the precincts of an Asian owned shop. Much to the chagrin of Mr. Mustafa, his landlord, this sub-postmaster has said that he will not serve anyone who cannot or will not communicate with him in English. Anybody who wants to post a parcel or buy a stamp has to speak English or bring a translator. Such behaviour might, you would think, guarantee its perpetrator his day in court under the multitude of anti-discrimination legislation of recent years. But, no, there is nobody prepared to take on this apparent bigot. The reason? He is a Sri Lankan immigrant who has been here for (I think) 18 years or more and no doubt cherishes and applies his own notions of Englishness. Perhaps, if I were to meet him, he would come across as more typically English than anybody else I know and I think I would like him. He might even tell me there is nothing wrong with England or with being English!

David Ambler

Bristol, England

April 4, 2009