Sal Paradise wrote:Would you agree:
1. 20% of the population currently provide 50% of the new births?
2. Bradford has one of the highest instances of unoccupied retail spaces in the UK?
3. Westfield have left a huge hole - literally right in the centre of the city?
4. Two of the five post codes with the highest instances of uninsured vehicles in the UK start with BD?
I agree with all of those. But what do any of them have to do with the success or failure of multiculturalism in Bradford?
Sal Paradise wrote:I cannot see this village thing you suggest is going on - i see two distinct segregated areas Pakistani/Bangladeshi and the rest.
Then I can only say that you're blind. Especially so if you think the Pakistani / Bangladeshi part of the city is one when it's as fractured as everything else.
You've really never come across people who've never left the housing estate they grew up on? I grew up with people who were proud to say that.
You've never met the Pringle jumpered Volvo driver who hasn't been into the city for years?
Would you be also telling me that you've never come across professional middle class people from Asian backgrounds? Are they all Indian or something?
Quote:You will not see many white residents in Mannnigham/Frizinghall/Great Horton
You really are blind.
Quote:This soup of multi cultural integration you elude to is simply a fantasy IMO.
I don't think such a thing does exist. It's one of the reasons I haven't said it does. What I have said is that Bradford highlights the way all modern society is segregated and alienated from itself, and that race and religion are just two other means by which that happens. There is nothing unique about the problems Bradford has except perhaps degree.
I did give examples of where people from different backgrounds but with similar outlooks work together, if that's what makes you think I do believe it exists. Here's another. I work at the university. We have the highest proportion of students from the same city of any in the country. I see thousands of young people from this city with similar outlooks in life integrating just fine.
In all the places I have lived I have also seen it happening, and that includes Manningham and Great Horton. I lived in the latter for ten years, right in the middle of BD7 - the worst of the post codes you mentioned. I've also seen it not happening in those places, as well as the estates I grew up on, and it's always the mouth breathers with no idea of what they could be other than what their parents were. We have many of those of every stripe and it doesn't matter if your parents conceived you in a Kashmiri mountain village, a middle class suburb of Lahore, Ilkely, or under the pool table in the Holme Wood Bound.
Quote:How many other cities have Pakinstani only schools where whites are prohibited to attend
There are plenty where schools are allowed to discriminate on the grounds of religion, if that's what you mean. I think it's disgusting, fwiw.
Quote: - do you really live in Bradford?
For just shy of forty years.
I'm not claiming it's a paradise. I'm saying if you look at things through a race coloured lens then race is what you'll see. It's *way* more complicated than that.