Pretty much everyone is in favour of diversity

they just tend to disagree about the point at which diversity becomes dislocation, and about the varieties of diversity that are good or bad.
In the past, even the quite recent past, it was much more easily possible to identify those things that were shared by us, and that enabled us to identify as a nation - a common history, language, moral & legal standards, culture, humour, heroes and so on - but for all sorts of reasons (of education, of "modernisation" - but also immigration, amongst everything else) these things have been gradually chipped away, so that if you now ask what it is that binds you to your fellow citizen, what makes you proud to be british (if anything ...) - it's all a bit more tricky; we end up with slightly hollow leaders like starmer, who seem to think that process is a good enough basis upon which to lead - as long as you follow the rules, it doesn't much matter where you go, or what the content is. So unless we find something new around which to gather, some renewed (& optimistic) sense of who we are (which certainly won't be provided by Farage or the Greens, who both tend to unite around disliking certain things & people) I don't really see things improving. Basically, we're in a prolonged national state of Manningdoom, but need to find a Clement.

Posted By: paulg, Apr 1, 16:26:16