Has Whitewavemark2 posted on this thread since she started it yesterday morning?
Hmm……. Light the touch paper & stand back….
It’s been a while so I will start us off…….whats for supper and why?
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I appreciate both sides of the argument, how some businesses will have been adversely affected by Brexit and how some communities were swamped and why they voted as they did.
Arguments have to be nuanced though, I do have an issue that we must celebrate all immigration as positive. Nothing is that clear cut as in a "totally good" or "totally bad". Immigrants are people like the rest of us, undoubtedly some have an absolutely brilliant work ethic and appear to be educated to a better standard, why? because they haven't had a cushy existence, there is more rigour in their education system, their regimes are harsher, their safety net in the form of benefits is non existent and they generally have more backbone and application, well blame our education and welfare systems. British nationals refuse to do such menial jobs as harvesting crops etc., The newcomers are not afflicted with the raison d'etre of "I'm not getting out of bed for that!" However, with the best of them also came the worst of them, their criminal underbelly. It's a fact, foreign nationals are over represented in our prison system and sometimes they bring cultural downsides that cannot be subsumed into the British way of life without causing conflict.
Having said that I can imagine how hard it is to overcome the stereotype of having to bear the weight of being negatively viewed by an overwhelming stereotyping. To be Albanian for example it's automatically assumed you will be part of some criminal gang. I get it! my paternal grandfather was Maltese, he left there to widen his horizons, first he went to France where he met my grandmother after WW1 they married and came back to London where my grandmother was from and he set up his photography business. However, being Maltese it was assumed, by some, my extended family told me that because a contingent from Malta were involved in criminal and vice like activities around Soho, that stereotype was applied. When Kate Atkinson wrote her book "Shrines of Gaiety" which was about the underbelly of Soho nightclubs, low and behold, her main gangster in that was Maltese with the name of Azzopardi, bloody hell! a family name, I didn't know whether to be pleased or annoyed. I also understand why people come here for a better life, again my maternal grandfather's Jewish family left Alsace, and set up a clothing factory in London, I know not why, maybe trying to escape anti semitism, and well the Irish side from my maternal grandmother, simply like everyone else from Ireland, they were probably starving. I expect many of us are from immigrant stock, as soon as the subject comes up we get this "that's our make up immigrants Saxons, Normans, Huguenots, Jews, Irish, Jamaicans, but compared to the overall population, that wave upon wave, they were a small trickle, before the accession countries came and whoosh they came in their millions, sometimes changed the face of towns where the infrastructure wasn't necessarily there to support the number, or If the established communities objected to the nature of their whole environment being changed over night, then like Gillian Duffy, who had the ignominy to be labelled "a bigot" by Gordon Brown so these people who were on the arse end of what was rapidly unleashed, were and are perceived to be xenophobes living their lives, resisting change, whilst slurping on Brown Windsor Soup to the strains of Rule Britannia.
I remember when Grayson Perry did his tour programme round the US talking to both factions on the right and left and his overwhelming conclusion and to a certain extent surprise, was that he found the left more intolerant and censorious than those on the right. Ponder on that maybe 
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