• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

John Cleese: London is no longer an English city.

Status
Not open for further replies.
Graffias

Graffias

Rogue
Joined
Apr 29, 2011
Messages
924
Reaction score
309
Location
Midwest U.S
Gender
Male
Political Leaning
Socialist
John Cleese: 'London no longer English city and that's how it got 2012 Olympics' | Mail Online

Mass immigration has turned London into a city that is 'no longer English', John Cleese claims.

The former Monty Python star says he now feels like a foreigner walking through the capital's streets.
California-based Cleese, 71, moved to the U.S. more than two decades ago, having grown up in Somerset.

The comic was asked what he thought about British culture and the recent London riots during an interview on 7.30, a television show in Australia, where he is currently on a stand-up tour.

He replied: 'I'm not sure what's going on in Britain. Or, let me say this – I don't know what's going on in London, because London is no longer an English city.

'That's how we got the Olympics.
'They said we were the most cosmopolitan city on Earth. But it doesn't feel English.
'I had a Californian friend come over two months ago, walk down the King's Road and say, "Where are all the English people?"
'I mean, I love having different cultures around. But when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, "Well, what's going on?"'


​
 
Isn't it ironic the guy who deserted his own country wonders where are all the English people.
 
It sounds like he is judging it based on how people appear. Is he saying that London is no longer English because it's no longer white? Last time I checked, people of many different skin colors are born in London, and their English language is fine.

Also, if he hasn't been there in two decades, then what does he even know about the situation?
 
Temporal said:
It sounds like he is judging it based on how people appear. Is he saying that London is no longer English because it's no longer white? Last time I checked, people of many different skin colors are born in London, and their English language is fine.

Also, if he hasn't been there in two decades, then what does he even know about the situation?
Click to expand...
To be fair, wasn't london first settled by romans, italians, and other Mediterranean peoples early in it's history? So there is really nothing new here.
 
Crosscheck said:
Isn't it ironic the guy who deserted his own country wonders where are all the English people.
Click to expand...
You do make a good point inn regards to Cleese.
 
Multiculturalism leads to destruction of diversity.
 
And this is why listening to celebrities' opinions is beyond stupid. Cleese is a moron when it comes to this stuff, he's a comic not a political analyist. He sees a bunch of brown people and gets all bent out of shape.
 
What's English, anyway? Geesh - they have such a complicated history it's amazing there's any one defied notion of what it takes to be 'English'

That's like saying 'Chicago isn't an American city anymore' :rofl
 
Grant said:
What's wrong with Hispanics?
Click to expand...

Nice try grant.

I was merely pointing out the irony of the guy who abandoned his country, saying London isn't English enough while living in a 40% Hispanic state that has a massive illegal immigration problem.
 
Cleese is obviously not very well travelled. London is no exception to the general rule that more and more big cities are following in NYC's footsteps and becoming the crossroads where the world meets. It's the same in Paris, Rome, Madrid, heck even tiny little Geneva. It's not without problems, for sure and the local culture is being eroded a bit because of it in the capitals. Yet, travel a little outside the main cities and you do find the local culture still intact almost everywhere.
 
Arcana XV said:
Cleese is obviously not very well travelled. London is no exception to the general rule that more and more big cities are following in NYC's footsteps and becoming the crossroads where the world meets. It's the same in Paris, Rome, Madrid, heck even tiny little Geneva. It's not without problems, for sure and the local culture is being eroded a bit because of it in the capitals. Yet, travel a little outside the main cities and you do find the local culture still intact almost everywhere.
Click to expand...

Cancer always begins as a localized phenomenon.
 
RiverDad said:
Cancer always begins as a localized phenomenon.
Click to expand...

I disagree. Both in the comparison to a deadly disease and with the idea that it will spread. The facts are what they are. Travel outside the big cities in any part of the world and the native culture will hit you in the face like a ton of bricks. :shrug:
 
First off, I can't believe anybody takes the Daily Mail seriously enough to found a thread with one of their articles. :lol:

Second, this whole "cancer" analogy is bull. If it's true, how come New York City hasn't spread like a cancer all over the rest of the state after all this time?
 
And it could certainly be felt well before.
As Hitchens notes, at least the food in London has improved dramatically in 30 years.

Londonistan Calling
The London neighborhood of the author's youth, Finsbury Park, is now one of the breeding grounds for a new phenomenon: the British jihadist.
How did a nation move from cricket and fish-and-chips to burkas and shoe-bombers in a Single generation?
by Christopher Hitchens
Vanity Fair, June 2007
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/06/hitchens200706

They say that the past is another country, but let me tell you that it's much more unsettling to find that the present has become another country, too. In my lost youth I lived in Finsbury Park, a shabby area of North London, roughly between the old Arsenal football ground and the Seven Sisters Road. It was a working-class neighborhood, with a good number of Irish and Cypriot immigrants. Your food choices were the inevitable fish-and-chips, plus the curry joint, plus a strong pitch from the Greek and Turkish kebab sellers. There was never much "bother," as the British say, in Finsbury Park. Greeks and Turks might be fighting in Cyprus, but they never lifted a hand to one another in London. Many of the Irish had republican allegiances, but they didn't take that out on the local Protestants. And, even though both Cyprus and Ireland had all the grievances of partitioned former British colonies, it would have seemed inconceivable—unimaginable—that any of their sons would put a bomb on the bus their neighbors used.

Returning to the old place after a long absence, I found that it was the scent of Algeria that now predominated along the main thoroughfare of Blackstock Road. This had had a good effect on the quality of the coffee and the spiciness of the grocery stores. But it felt odd, under the gray skies of London, to see women wearing the veil, and even swathed in the chador or the all-enveloping burka. - Many of these Algerians, Bangladeshis, and others are also refugees from conflict in their own country. Indeed, they have often been the losers in battles against Middle Eastern and Asian regimes which they regard as insufficiently Islamic. Quite unlike the Irish and the Cypriots, they bring these far-off quarrels along with them. And they also bring a religion which is not ashamed to speak of conquest and violence.

Until he was jailed last year on charges of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, a man known to the police of several countries as Abu Hamza al-Masri was the imam of the Finsbury Park Mosque. He was a conspicuous figure because, having lost the use of an eye and both hands in an exchange of views in Afghanistan, he sported an opaque eye plus a hook to theatrical effect."..."
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
TacticalEvilDan said:
Second, this whole "cancer" analogy is bull. If it's true, how come New York City hasn't spread like a cancer all over the rest of the state after all this time?
Click to expand...

This sure looks like cancer to me:


Immigrants fanned out across the United States in the last decade, settling in greater numbers in small towns and suburbs rather than in the cities where they typically moved when they first came to this country, new census data show.

Following jobs to rural and suburban areas, in industries like construction and the food business, immigrant populations rose more than 60 percent in places where immigrants made up fewer than 5 percent of the population in 2000. In areas that had been home to the most immigrants, the foreign-born population was flat over that period.

In Los Angeles County, long a major destination for new immigrants, the foreign-born population remained largely unchanged for the first time in several decades. In contrast, it quadrupled in Newton County, in central Georgia outside Atlanta. . . .

Roberto Suro, author of “Strangers Among Us: Latino Lives in a Changing America,” estimated that several years ago, before the housing bubble burst, one out of every three newly arrived Hispanic immigrants was working in construction.

These workers were joined by their families, and communities that had never encountered immigrants in large numbers suddenly saw large influxes. Friction often followed.

Stafford County, Va., for example, where residents have demanded a crackdown on illegal immigrants, saw its immigrant population nearly triple. . . .

The country’s biggest population gains were in suburban areas. But, in a departure from past decades when whites led the rise, now it is because of minorities. More than a third of all 13.3 million new suburbanites were Hispanic, compared with 2.5 million blacks and 2 million Asians. In all, whites accounted for a fifth of suburban growth.

Even in rural America, where the population grew the slowest — just 2 percent since 2000 compared with 7 percent nationwide — foreign-born residents accounted for 37 percent of that growth. Three-quarters of them were not citizens, suggesting that they had arrived only recently in the states.​
 
None of which says anything whatsoever about anything I said.

That aside, that passage seems to be talking primarily about rate of change, not about the actual makeup of the community. If a rural town had one immigrant and then a second one moved in, that's a 100% increase in the immigrant population -- and yet, completely irrelevant to the discussion of local culture.

Case in point -- a 60% increase from 5% or less means 8% or less. Woo. Hoo.
 
TacticalEvilDan said:
None of which says anything whatsoever about anything I said.

That aside, that passage seems to be talking primarily about rate of change, not about the actual makeup of the community. If a rural town had one immigrant and then a second one moved in, that's a 100% increase in the immigrant population -- and yet, completely irrelevant to the discussion of local culture.

Case in point -- a 60% increase from 5% or less means 8% or less. Woo. Hoo.
Click to expand...

And cancer spreads and grows, it doesn't leap frog and arrive in full bloom in different parts of your body.
 
RiverDad said:
And cancer spreads and grows, it doesn't leap frog and arrive in full bloom in different parts of your body.
Click to expand...

You can't clearly -- or even vaguely -- demonstrate that the mix of cultures in the large population centers that serve as cross-roads is having a palpable effect on the culture of the surrounding countryside.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom