Monday, April 23, 2007

The Multicultural Swap Shop

Anyone as old as me will probably remember the Saturday morning show hosted by Noel Edmonds. I was a little bit old for it myself and was always more of a Tiswas fan, but I can now see a possible idea for a revival.

The basis of the idea is this.

As a generalisation, the vast majority of people who favour large scale immigration tend to live in areas that are, as much as it's possible to be, fairly immune to the effects of immigration. This is because most of the people who think immigration is good tend to be fairly affluent, live in areas that immigrants couldn't possibly afford until they've made a million or two, have private health care, send their kids to private schools or state schools that reflect the cultural makeup of their residential area (i.e. affluent and with few first generation immigrant kids) and whose jobs aren't at risk from immigration.

For these people, immigration means more restaurant choice, cheap nannies and cleaners.

Also as a generalisation, the majority of those who are opposed to immigration tend to live in areas that attract immigrants - because housing is cheap - so immigration has a much more immediate impact on them. They find their families and friends squeezed out of their areas as priority for homes goes to immigrants. They find their schools packed out with increasing numbers of children for whom English is not the first language (often not even a second language) and see their children struggle and become alienated as a result. Those children see their friends leave and more strangers arrive. Strangers with strange ways. The people in those areas see their wages depressed, work becomes harder to find with more and more people chasing fewer vacancies at ever lower wages.

For these people, immigration means the loss of homes, friends, schools, jobs, finance and an increasing feeling of being a stranger in their own town - their own country.

So, anyone who thinks immigration is great should post their details and location on the Multiculural Swap Shop web site and what we'll do is find a similar family, nearby, who live in one of these "ethnically diverse" areas to swap with them.

The pro-immigration family can go and live on the sink estate and the anti-immigration family can go and live in the leafy suburban avenue. Although we can't do much about the jobs, we'll ensure that the pro-immigration and the anti-immigration families continue to pay for their old respective homes.

The pro-immigration family's kids can go to the local bog-standard comprehensive or primary where 20 out of every class of 30 don't speak English, and the anti-immigration family's kids can go to those nice schools that use selection by postcode.

I wonder if I'll get many takers?

5 comments:

Harry J said...

Any fans of multiculturism reading this that fancies a swap please get in touch. I can offer somewhere 'wonderfully diverse' and 'vibrant' in inner city Wolverhampton. Anything considered. Indeed anything has got to be better than what my local area has become.

Sir Henry Morgan said...

Another good post Stan.

Anonymous said...

A perhaps more practical idea is to identify those areas wherein the favourable live and place all the asylum seekers there. This could be done on the (spurious) grounds that such people were less racist. After a few years of forcibly enjoying the benefits, ask them again.

Stan said...

Not a bad idea, anon - except that the people who control where "ayslum" seekers are placed are the same people who control government - local and central.

Although this post is quite flippant - the point is serious. Thousands of honest, decent working class Britons are being displaced from their homes, their jobs, their towns and families to make way for immigrants. Can you imagine if the same thing was applied in reverse? You don't have to because the Nazis did it in WW2 and we called them evil.

Snafu said...

I'd prefer immigrants to be moved to areas that return Liberal Democrat MPs as they are the keenest supporters of unlimited immigration...

Would it be long before constituencies in Devon, Cornwall and Richmond lost their Liberal Democrat MPs!?!