To:    BBC Radio London
Re:    What's happened to Wembley - my old home town?
Date: Thursday 15 June 06

An email I sent to the Vanessa Felz Show on BBC Radio London in response to a call for views on the London Borough of Brent:
I was born and grew up in Wembley (now part of Brent) in the 1950's and 60's and witnessed how its population, along with its entire culture and character changed from native British to multi-ethnic mix.
 
When, a few years ago, I went back for a nostalgic walk down memory lane, I was shocked and confused: the streets and buildings were nearly all as they had been, but the people had completely changed: not just a new generation, but a different race and culture and a cacophony of foreign languages.
 
Looking for the odd white face amongst the crowd, I was left feeling like a foreigner in my own country, which made me sad and then angry. Not, I hasten to add, at the immigrants themselves, who one can hardly blame for taking advantage of the opportunities made available to them (and who on the whole are nice enough people), but at the politicians who allowed this to happen, and the intellectual elite, especially in the media, who encouraged them, and who silenced anyone from the native population who objected (as many did) by accusing them of "racism". My parents joined the "white flight" feeling bitter and betrayed, although they didn't flee far enough and the flood of immigrants soon caught up with them; but to their credit, they never voted for BNP (or whatever it was called back then); they just stopped voting for anyone.
 
I am left wondering how such madness (allowing mass immigration into our already overpopulated country and imposing multi-racial/multi-cultural society on an ethnically and culturally more-or-less homogenous native society) could occur in our "enlightened" and "democratic" country. Now there's subject for an anthropologist, who perhaps (hopefully) some day soon we can hear discussing his study with Laurie Taylor on BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allow.

 

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