My Bubble, Your Bubble, One Big Bubble?

Have you noticed what’s happening? It’s like this. Everyone is going somewhere else. I started to really take note when I was still working in academia, toiling at the University of East London I took the Docklands Light Railway quite regularly travelling between uncountable meetings of various acronymic bodies all with the words Thames Gateway somewhere in the title. During those trips I was asked the question, “do you know which was the language most spoken by passengers on the DLR. Quick as a flash I realized it wasn’t going to be English. But seeing as how nearby Newham is supposedly the second biggest Bangladeshi community in the World, I assumed the answer must be Sirhati. Wrong, the most spoken language is Russian. Don’t ask me why there are so many Russians but I had a theory. Perhaps every Russian young man wanted to be part of the building boom around Canary Wharf. All of those amazing looking, Russian speaking young women, the genetically worryingly different looking offspring of hairy shot putting women, are the bricklaying off duty distractions for these young men. They are a kind of bling ridden RAGS, an acronym for Russian Anglo Good time Slappers. I say this without the slightest evidence, other than the very sketchy way these pneumatic breasted but skinny bummed women dress and speak into customised mobile phones. Other women of an English persuasion grumpily inform me that normal women are just not made that way, and therefore these remarkable bodies are purely the result of enhancement surgery. Wonderful stuff if that’s the result!

So apart from the fact that there a great many Russians and Bangladeshis in East London what else do we know? We know that huge numbers of people have immigrated to the UK in the recent past. It depends on who you listen to what numbers you believe. I have to swiftly announce a vested interest here. All my grandparents bar one came to this country from somewhere else. They were Russians and Polish and into their past were German roots, and going back even further they probably originated from Israel or Khazaria, whichever version of history you subscribe to. But then again you are reaching back a millennia or two or more, so it isn’t too urgent an enquiry. Almost everyone on that train, any train in the UK, comes from somewhere else like me, either in the dim and distant past, or in the last few years. We arrived here for various reasons. Looking for better economic chances, more freedom, free expression, whatever drives men and women to move on. I know it wasn’t the weather.

All of these people came to this little United Kingdom over a very long period. Otherwise we would all be Picts or Celts or some such. Whereas we are a dolly mixture, a sort of early version of the rainbow nation, except most people never realized it, as they were too concerned being terribly British, which was a bloody myth. We are also Saxons, Romans, Jutes, Normans, Vikings, Huguenot French, Jews from many countries, West Indians, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Arabs and we could go on to name a hundred more countries. We supposedly have a bigger concentration of Polish people in the UK than anywhere else in the World except Warsaw, more Irish than any place other than Dublin and there’s certainly more Australians in Earl’s Court in London than you could fit into most cities in that fair country.

But being Brits we are nothing if not ingenious, so while these people pour into our country we leave for somewhere else, in almost as big numbers. So we continue to send vast numbers to Australia, France, New Zealand, America, Canada, and Spain. This works fine because the French send huge numbers of their people here to work in our City financial institutions, there are also several hundred thousand American in London, there are also huge numbers of Canadians living in the States, and New Zealanders who live in Australia. So we don’t have one-way traffic here, as everyone is swapping where they are for somewhere else. Like a giant swap market, we all think the other guy has got something better going on someplace else. In proof of this Time magazine recently stated that 31% of London’s current population was born outside Britain, and New York had an immigrant population of 34%. There are many people who believe that this figure is over 40% in both these huge cities. But the interesting statistic is the number of people leaving whilst these tides of humanity were arriving. Hong Kong is the third leg of the financial human traffic tripod, with enormous numbers of Asians joining the local Chinese community that will eventually render it cosmopolitan. Perversely there is now a huge Chinese community in Vancouver, British Columbia. It all supports my contention that everyone seems to wants to be somewhere else.

Recent polls demonstrate that the vast majority of English people would like to live somewhere else in the World. The most popular destination is Australia.

If the traffic were one way, inwards to London, the population would have become unmanageable long ago. What’s really happening is that we have different movements, both in and out, for different but allied reasons. We have, for example, the super rich Russian oligarchs coming here because the tax regime has been generous, there are very nice things to buy, and we’re between the USA and mainland Europe both psychologically and geographically. Our politics are stable and our law enforcement is OK, at least a whole lot better than Putin and his ex KGB cronies are likely to provide. On the other hand, we have those young, poorer Russians, travelling with the Docklands Light Railway. They’re probably here for just the same reasons as the odd million or two young Poles, to better themselves economically in a place that’s not too bad. Mostly they all think they’ll be going home, or moving on to a third country. History proves that most will stay, just like my grandparents who came from the same kind of place for the same kind of reasons. It’s only two generations since he travelled on the London underground (subway to the uninitiated) and, not being able to read English got totally lost when he had to take a journey with which he wasn’t familiar. Too embarrassed to admit to this deficiency he wouldn’t ask anyone for the route but stoically travelled to every station until he saw a familiar looking sign. I asked him about this in the direct way children have, “why didn’t you ask someone for help?” and he looked at me with that kind smile he reserved for me and said, “What, I should ask the Cossack gunuffs!” It meant he still harboured fear and loathing for the Cossack attacks from his childhood in the Tsar’s Empire, when they used to kill and maim the Jewish community without mercy, before the Nazis got up to speed. Yes, there is that other reason why people come to our country, and still do. They’re running from today’s Cossacks, Nazis and other genocidal lunatics. My poppa, in his late sixties, was still that frightened little boy, scared to expose any weakness that could expose him to attack. That’s the other reason people move on. We should be strong and secure enough to welcome and help the weak and oppressed, otherwise there’s no reason to be us is there.

This does not mean we throw away our common sense and become a place where people come not to seek their fortune but to remove ours. Spongers, of whom we have enough of our own, should not be allowed into our country, and those that have already crept in should be thrown out. Don’t you agree that we should all have to abide by the rules of our country and breathe the air together in our one big bubble?