Are you referring to the Jewish community there? If you are, then, yes, at some point people would have had a problem with them. They were disliked, mistrusted, misunderstood. etc. etc. It's just not mainstream news.

One of the most beautiful cities in the world was the world's first ghetto. In face tht word Ghetto came from dialetto veneto, ghêto, where Shakespeare's Shylock lived.

Yes. I'm aware of the origin of the word. And it's irrelevant here, although the fact of the first named ghetto having been in Venice doesn't somehow make it a pretty sort of idea.

The issue is apparently integration – or lack thereof. If there are issues with the integration (or otherwise) of certain groups, then there are groups that have been here for many years who have not integrated.

Is it 'integration' to live in very insular communities, using laws and courts that are different to the laws of the land for certain types of dispute? Or for children to be made to dress in a way that marks them out as different from the majority of the population of that country? Or for the same children to be educated in a way that is dominated by the learning of their religion (50% of lesson time in a Jewish girls' school in Hackney is spent on the Torah etc).

How does this help integration?

If people are serious about integration, then they should start by realising that it isn't only the Muzzies – because we all know that that is what this is really about – who live in ghettos and do not integrate.

I think some do thanks.

The pleasure is entirely mine.

I had you down as one of the lumpen one who didn't.

It doesn't.

Isn't this why people are starting to say Multiculturalism doesn't work?

When it comes to the East End. Don't forget it was "The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing"

As for someone talking about ONE NATION. What a funny choice of term considering its significance in politics over here in Oz.


P.S. Don't feel as though your intelligence was being challenged because I had a "QI' moment to share with people who may not have known about Venice.

In a way it isn't, but in a significant way it is. Certainly fundy religions of various flavours do have non-integration as an aim.

The "Muzzies" as you so delicately call them, don't live in ghettos any more. They populate whole areas of towns and cities. It is absurd to call the majority population of a very large conurbation a "ghetto". It's like saying that the substantial white majority in Bradford in the 50s outside the tiny black immigrant communities was a ghetto.

But if refusal to integrate is a problem as Miliband describes it, then whilst it is right to acknowledge the existence of ALL groups that won't integrate, it seems perverse to pretend that overwhelmingly it isn't de facto "Muzzies" that he is referring to.

But really the point I am making is that there are here religious convictions that are set in stone, to the extent that they are not at all open even to discussion. That is, Miliband and others can discuss them all they want, but the sort of obstacles to integration that I have given examples of CANNOT be removed, and are NOT negotiable, so there is no conversation to be had. Moreover, the greater the size of the "ghetto", to stick to your terminology, the greater the increase in overt manifestations, as it seems to me in such communities those tending towards the ultra conservative, fundamentalist gradually gain the ascendancy, and gradually enforce ever-increasing compliance with their flavour of their belief system.

But those may be problems that may be being stored up for future generations. History does not hold out much hope that substantial polarised populations of differing religions can even co-exist peacefully in the long term, much less integrate, but we are not discussing conflict and violence. In the here and now, do you think that there is any chance at all of these groupings, including the "Muzzies", integrating in the sense Miliband is talking about? Or do you, like me, think his remarks are totally naive and misguided, and he has no clue what he is talking about?

You open by asking "if people are serious about integration". I wonder whether you are as naive as he is, and actually do not realise that the people Miliband is talking about cannot, ever, integrate in the way he means, due to their inviolable religious convictions? The better question would be to start with the certain knowledge that such integration is 100% impossible, and ask where we go from there.

Its an interesting question and of course some of us have been here before albeit the problem had a slightly different flavour to it.

Those who were kids and teenagers from the late 60s right through the 70's to the race riots of the early 80's (which I'm not convinced were anything to do with race, more a reaction to a government who offered nothing to whole sections of communities) will be honest enough to acknowledge that we had a "problem" first with West Indian and then with British passport holding Indian and East/West Pakistan immigration via a couple of former African colonies.

The "problem" being of course that we initially saw relatively small groups of immigrants moving into relatively small areas of our cities and setting up what we perceived as "ghettos", Chapeltown in Leeds was throughout my childhood simply a byword for anything to do with black people and it was somewhere that we didn't want to go to.

Do we percieve West Indians as a "problem" now ?

Would there be an occurance of the sort of thing that happened to a friend of a friend where she left home and didn't speak to her parents for a decade afterwards (and her father never again) because she had started dating a West Indian boy and eventually set up home with him ?

No of course not because we've all grown up a lot since then and importantly, the West Indian community have done what is quaintly called "integrated" and shown us that actually, they were never that different all along.

The "African Asian" immigration of the early 70s have, I would argue also "integrated" in a way that we never expected when they first started arriving from Uganda and Kenya, many had been wealthy business owners but came here with nothing but their knowledge and a work ethic, you could also argue that these immigrants in the main were not Muslims, have kept their religious beliefs and yet we still live easily alongside them - you certainly would not see the sort of attitude that a close friend of mine exhibited in the late 70s when he, and the neighbour on the other side, both put their houses up for sale when a family group of Indians moved in next door to them.

So we've always had a problem with immigrants of a different skin colour (did we have a problem in the 1940s with Polish and Italians making their homes here after the war ?) but within a generation have generally "integrated".

And of course integration has to be a two-way thing - why do we always assume that the immigrant has to change to suit our ways, how many of us enjoy what we believe to be an Indian/Asian curry now and don't give a thought to the fact that before the 1970s such a thing didn't exist - who has "integrated" ?

Ultimately the only question remaining is not the ability to "integrate" but the incompatibility of religious beliefs, sort that issue and attitude out and the rest will take care of itself.

Some really interesting points in general, but on this, I do think it's wider cultural issues and not just religion.

So, for instance, you get 'honour' crimes and female genital mutilation – neither of which are linked to any one religious group but bridge a number. As but one illustration, FGM is particularly widespread in Somalia, where its use crosses Muslim, Christian and animist communities.

Although I think you're spot on in saying that religious fundamentalism is a problem. But huge numbers of Muslims have integrated – I've known some socially over the years; I know some at work.

On the other hand, there are areas where a woman walking in Western dress can get abuse (yes, it's happened to me, albeit mildly and returned with a finger). And yes, I can understand why some people in such an area feel a tad unhappy about, say, such individuals standing on the street in robes and stuff, preaching their hate, just as much as I understand why huge swathes of the community in pretty much the same area chose to physically reject Mosely and his black shirts when they marched through a predominantly Jewish area in 1936.

But the fundamentalism isn't limited to Islam. Certainly in this general area of London, there's an increasing number of fundamentalist Christian churches that are absolutely nutty (we're talking the 'give up taking your anti-retrovirals, because God has now cured your HIV' variety). And they're also starting to have the sort of confidence where you see them standing in local elections and becoming a lot more politicised.

On the colour of skin being the core problem – we lived next to an elderly Polish couple in Lancaster back in the late 1970s/early '80s. Honestly, it wasn't just those swarthy types: my mother's prejudice about those "peasants" was never far from the surface*. And on the basis of all the names for pretty much every group of 'other' people that I grew up hearing, it was never limited to skin pigmentation. Which of itself is quite interesting, because I don't remember there being many black people that I knew or saw from about the age of seven onward, until I moved to London in the late 1980s.




* There's a massive irony in this, although my mother would never recognise it. The man she chose to marry was as close to being from 'peasant' stock as you'd find within England, certainly.

Yes, of course, you wouldn't want one o' them high-maintenance Southern women would you?

Phew!



I knew I could rely on you.