Milo

According to Liberal Party Policy Statement :: Individual and Group Rights Britain has always been a, “diverse and multi-cultural society”. Where are the facts for this claim?

I acknowledge that Britain has always had immigration; particularly from the commonwealth. However mass immigration only started after WW2, as far as I know the only culture we had was British culture.

People used to come here and live our way of life. I know of several people with Polish parents and the only way you would know they were Polish is by their name. Britain used to be a melting pot, now it's totally the opposite.

Multi-cultural Britain is a recent invention!

alfred the great

Multiculturalism is indeed a new thing. Since 1945 we have been swamped by immigration. In 1951 our population was just over 50 million , we now have well over 60 million , discounting , the millions that are here illegally.We were until 1945 a nation with a shared history , and a shared way of life . Now we are just a melting pot. What people are the L;ibs talking about , and in what numbers did they come. Maybe a few Jewish people have been here a long time , and a few French protestant huegonots 400 years ago , but i would estimate 95% of the people , were celtic and northern european. So another bit of propaganda. Can they say who was here and in what numbers.

Tom Wilde

Under Roman rule, there was a lot of cultural diversity in Britain, with people and languages from all over the Empire. Latin was the language of commerce, officialdom etc but Brythonic was certainly spoken by more people.

In the post-Roman period (5th/6th century) there is good archaeological and literary evidence that the native Britons fought the Anglo-Saxon invasion to a standstill by the early 6th century and then for fifty years tried to establish a British state which would encompass the new arrivals. Meanwhile, the Picts and the Scots continued to have their own kingdoms with their own languages north of the border.

Alfred the Great's successors established an English kingdom containing both Saxons and Danes. This wasn't a matter of repression or genocide - it involved people of different cultures learning how to knock along together without too much fuss. (Are you listening, Alf? Your namesake was a multiculturalist!) To make communication easier, people started leaving the complex grammatical endings off words, and so the English language started to take shape.

From the 13th century onwards, England rules Wales too, and the Welsh carried on with their culture and language without being forced to speak English (whatever other repression there might have been). From at least Tudor times onwards, there was a large Welsh presence in London. By the end of the 19th cent there were lots of Welsh-language schools and chapels in London and other English cities. We still do have our own culture while simultaneously being part of the mainstream of British culture.

A-the-G mentions the Hugeonots and the Jews, and there were also the Flemmings (Ian Flemming presumably was of Flemming descent).

Then there were the blacks in Liverpool, Bristol and elsewhere.

A common theme is that minority communities weren't forced to assimilate but were left to live as they saw fit. They may have started off in little separate communities, but given a generation or three they all ended up in the mainstream anyway.

And yes, I do know that the numbers since WW2 are proportionately greater than most of the previous migrations, and no it isn't a picnic (especially now we have a welfare state to maintain), and no I don't support open borders or unrestricted immigration, but I still think that the many instances of British multiculturalism from the past have taught us a lot about how to knock along together. The French have a bigger immigrant population than Britain and aren't managing nearly as well.

British-Conservatism

Post war immigration as opposed to pre-war immigration has composed mainly of non-whites and led to multiracialism.
That is why integration has failed totally.

__________________
http://conservativedemocraticalliance.blogspot.com/

Ea of Dune

This whole area of history is up for debate for a start. The Germanic invaders/settlers all spoke a variation of a Germanic language which eventually evolved into Old English (Englisc). The Jutes, Angles, Saxons and Frisians where all tribal variations of the same peoples. From a religious perspective their practices where almost identical.

The Brythonic speaking people of the British Isles would have had much in common linguistically with the Gaelic speaking peoples as well (with both branches of language probably evolving from some proto-Brythonic language).
I guess a good example is Mac in Gaelic meaning Son and Map in Old Welsh meaning Son of (ap in modern Welsh I believe?)

Really The British isles where formed of three core groups of people. The Anglo-Saxon peoples who absorbed/removed the Brythonic people they encountered, the Scotti who absorbed the Pict/Brythonic peoples of Caledonia and the Brythonic Britons of Cornwall and Wales.
These three core groups are still very much alive today as you can see.

Err it's not really like that Tom. The Danes for a start came from the same land mass as the Angles, culturally the Angles/Danes Saxons etc. where incredibly similar. The main difference by the time of the Danish invasions being that the Danes had not been Christianised.
Apart from the decades of slaughter and warefare that took place, it was only when Alfred lead the counter offensive and was able to push the Danes back was any kind of peaceful settlement drawn up. For example Guthrum Jarl of Eastenglum becoming a Christian had a considerable effect upon bringing some form of peace to Eastern and Southern England.
Even in 978 Athelred was paying Danegeld to keep them from ravaging the land.
By the 11th century though Cnut was still passing laws I believe that distinguished between Danes and Angles for tax purposes.

This is hardly some happy multiculturalism as you seem to suggest above. The Danes acted as a ruling class over the English people even once Christanised this only changed slightly and these people all came from the same stock and geographical area originally.

Then came to Normans.....

Which language are you reffering to here then? Danish, Norse or Englisc i.e. the three Germanic languages all coming from a common route that where spoken within England (with Danish and Norse being absorbed into the English dialects of the areas they controlled)?
If you mean English the progress of the language is far more complex then you spell out above.
I can take copies of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle and read entries from 610 and 1066 and the language has barely changed with regards to endings.

Really, I thought English common law was pushed into force in Wales and Welsh shires where treated lower on the pecking order then English shires?

But would I be correct in pointing out that factory owners in the Industrial revolution forced Welsh workers to speak English?


Relatively small amounts who where absorbed into prevelent culture.
The Flemmish at one point I believe made up around 25% of the population of Norwich. This did indeed cause some trouble however these people where absorbed into the prevelant culture after a few decades. Last time I checked Norwich wasn't a Flemmish speaking city though, although the Norwich variant of the Norfolk dialect does have some influence by the Flemmish immigrants.

Agreed but once again these population where absorbed into the communities they contributed and married into.

I wouldn't agree with this 100%, in some cases yes and some no. Considering the Flemmish population of Norwich where absorbed into the mainstream culture in a matter of decades (and spoke a different language) where as the Danes took several hundred years even though their language had similarities with Englisc, goes to show really it can go either way .

I think you make our history fluffier then it really was. I wouldn't have wanted to be a Jew in medieval York when they locked them in the tower and burnt them to death, or a Northumbrian during the harrying of the North.

Still it's all a very fascinating topic.

Ea of dune

Mikeuk

Absolute bollox, but hardly surprising, given the source.

Before 1945 Britain was a 99% white Northern European society. Incomers tended to receive a hot rather than a warm welcome. The apprentices of mediaeval London rioted against Flemish merchants and fatalities and huge damage to property resulted. The apprentice riots were suppressed with severity.

Later the Germans in the Steelyard were the victims. Later still the riots were against the persons and properties of French Huguenots, and of course the settlement of eastern European Jews fuelled Mosley's campaigns in the East End.

The race riots of 1919 in Cardiff, Liverpool and elsewhere show the level of 'racist' antagonism in Britain at that time. It is notable that the Judges and Magistrates of the day treated even innocent non-whites with very little respect.

So the image of a Britain that has been 'happily multi-racial for centuries' is, at several levels, a thundering lie.

Mikeuk

Tom, you live in la-la land.

The Danes (ie Vikings) came to England to extract Danegeld and ultimately (under Canute the Great) to lord it over the English. Do you really suppose anybody, anywhere, 'knocked along together without too much fuss' in 1000 AD?

When the English invaded Wales the Welsh were treated as untermenschen. Marriage was forbidden between English and Welsh and Welsh traders were required to be out of English settlements by sundown on pain of death. Of course the Welsh language was not recognised - remember the apocryphal legend about the presentation of the first Prince of Wales - and the people were subdued by a chain of mighty state-of-the-art fortresses unequalled anywhere outside the Holy Land.

Finally, both the name of the author and that of the people of Flanders are spelt Fleming, with one 'm'.

alfred the great

After this evenings excellent history lessons , i will reiterate , that prior to 1945 . we had become an island of people will a very similar way of life. The amount of immigrants from different cultures religions was miniscule, But because of an open door policy to immigration , we now have the overcrowded mess we can see, Any english man who objects is called a racist or nazi , and is provented from venting his spleen by legal or illegal methods. There is only ukip or bnp who seem to want to do anything about it and either wil get my vote. Dear lib lab con traitors you can lie has much has you like , but it is compleyely natural , we are all members of tribes and it is completely reasonable to defend he land of our forefathers.

Darren Green

Tom... this diverse and multi-cultural society (as you put it) was FORCED UPON US!!!!

WE NEVER ASKED FOR IT. There has NEVER been a referendum in this country on mass immigration

Perhaps if there had been one, fewer Britons would now be living abroad, in places like Spain or Australia.

Tom Wilde

Re the history lessons, too many individual points to respond to. I think I'm right about the broad thrust of what I said - that Britain has always been multicultural is the sense of being home to more than one language and more than one culture. I expect its true that I made the history sound a lot 'fluffier' than it actually was. Still, there plainly were very long periods of peaceful cooperation and coexistence in between the occasional bouts of bloodshed and mayhem.

I do realize, of course, that to some people none of this counts as multiculturalism because all of the diverse cultures involved were white. We were all blond aryans wandering around singing arias from Wagner and waving cardboard swords at one another, and it was all terribly cosy, naturally. (Sigh). I think such people grossly overestimate the importance of skin colour.

Not by me. I'm more relaxed about immigration than most posters here, and I parted company with UKIP over this issue, but I've never said that anyone who wants to stop immigration must be a nazi. I've called people racists if they seem to me to be racists, and I've called people nazis if they follow nazi leaders, but that is another matter altogether.

I positively like British multiculturalism, and miss it when I travel elsewhere. However, it plainly has been a huge change, and I tend to agree that people should have been given more of a choice about whether they wanted it. I think probably there was never a plan to change the face of Britain as much as has actually happened, but one thing led to another through the famous inability of politicians to see any further than the next election.