the issue with britishness

is surely a reaction to the very chipping away of all those quietly binding features of our society; you can't take everything away & replace it with nothing; so there comes a point at which some people will react - inevitably, some in unsophisticated ways, some violently, and so on; people didn't generally feel the need to string up flags in the past because they were basically quite secure in their sense of who they were, and felt more or less that everyone around them shared that same sense; some now think that in the drive for diversity, they've become unfavoured, second class.
Immigrant groups, or some of them, tend to think pretty similarly, which is why they're often not internally very "diverse" - they live in certain places, worship at certain places, speak their own languages, fly their own flags and so on - they do, in other words, all the things that people usually do in order to feel like they're members of a group and preserve their own identities - if it's "diversity" we're keen on, then the rules ought to apply equally to everyone, or we'll just end up with a place occupied by various competing tribes.

Posted By: paulg, Apr 1, 17:37:49