Vocal Voices

Former cabinet minister Priti Patel has told people not to label her a BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) as she says it is patronoising and insulting. She also wants to stop the labelling of people, quotas, and the putting in place people just because they are women or because they represent a minority group.

She has Indian parents, but was born British and she is proud of it and I reckon that she speaks for the majority of us. It is time to stop the agendas of promoting lesbians, gays, LGBT, blacks, Asians and, yes, even women, just because that is what they are. What we need is a true meritocracy and if we have to fight for it we must.

I quite agree, Frank.

But I can't say I agree that one should automatically get the nationality of the country they happen to be born
in, (you don't call a canine puppy a horse if it happens to be born in a stable, and because an English woman
gives premature birth to a daughter when on holiday in China, it's ludicrous to say the baby is Chinese.)
Still, that's the way is , I suppose, so we just have to live with it.

We should, however, stop labelling people with descriptions that have no bearing on the jobs they are doing.

It is time to stop the agendas of promoting lesbians, gays, LGBT, blacks, Asians and, yes, even women, just because that is what they are.

You could usefully start with the BBC. I am slowly being driven crazy by the number of times they promote BME etc. in what is ostensibly the basic News bulletins. You watch, the first person interviewed in the top news feature of the day, is invariably a BME. They are pushing an agenda, and when I take power, one of my first edicts will be to proscribe them!

Aggers, we are a huge melting pot here!! Vikings, Romans, Celts, Angles, Saxons, Normans. It's been going on for centuries. We can't change that tradition just because the current influx don't look like us......My DNA test had me at only 14% English! I was mostly Celtic and NE European

If you are born here, you are British. End of. Priti has a good point there. Labels are divisive.

I think it is called identity politics?

Brighton council are going overboard with 101 definitions on how you should address "gender fluid" people.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/92946 ... s-Alliance

They can't get the bins emptied but for micro-minority stuff like this, they major on it.

Kaz wrote:Aggers, we are a huge melting pot here!! Vikings, Romans, Celts, Angles, Saxons, Normans. It's been going on for centuries. We can't change that tradition just because the current influx don't look like us......My DNA test had me at only 14% English! I was mostly Celtic and NE European

I guess you're right, Kaz., but we could change that tradition if we wanted to, but of course we won't .

Kaz wrote:Aggers, we are a huge melting pot here!! Vikings, Romans, Celts, Angles, Saxons, Normans. It's been going on for centuries. We can't change that tradition just because the current influx don't look like us......My DNA test had me at only 14% English! I was mostly Celtic and NE European

Actually Kaz that is not quite correct. Before Roman times Britain was fairly stable with virtually no influx. During Roman times the Roman empire drew in a very large mixture of different nationalities.

Then after the fall of the Roman empire, Britain was subject to colonisation by races from over Europe culminating with the Danes. Once the Normans took over England in 1066, that was it until WW1.

Before WW1 90% of the people in the UK had not travelled more than 10 miles from where they were born and the main ethnic mixes in the UK were Irish and Blacks from the slave trade.

It is only since the end of WW2 that we have seen the kind of inward fluxes of immigrants that you are talking about. It is ever, nowadays, the claim that the UK has always seen large immigration. That is, in fact, the United States of America, not the UK.

Well into my lifetime interracial marriage was deemed as something to be avoided. The racial attitudes I remember from the 60's, in Cyprus and the 70's in the UK, would land people in jail today.

However the fact that we are now one of the most racially tolerant countries in the world does not mean we can change history to suit the current circumstances of immigration. Prior to WW2 other races did not see the UK as a major target for immigration and the "lounge lizards" of the Empire did nothing to encourage them and neither did the rank and file people of the UK. "A touch of the tar brush old man" was not a joke or just a slur in the days of the Empire. It was how people lived their lives and how they thought.

WM,

Whilst I really laud Priti for coming out and saying this. Because it is what I firmly believe; the saddest thing I see in the UK is that it is ONLY her, or someone like her, who could say that.

A white, indigenous, UK MP saying that would be hounded out of office. Especially a man but even a woman.

That leaves me wondering exactly what kind of country the UK is today. I can tell you that the French would not put up with that kind of nonsense for a second and they have been, racially, more tolerant than the UK; for Centuries. Inter marriage between their colonials and indigenous French was never seen as bad, or even wrong.

We should not get too hung up on the racial, indigenous peoples issue. It is a pointless discussion as we are mongrels of some sort, it just depends on how far back we want to go.

What Patel was against is not particularly the BME thing, she used that because it is the label she is most often tagged with. She could have used the Hindu thing, or the woman thing, or maybe something else. What she is saying is that all these labels are patronising and insulting and is worried that people are being put in positions simply because of their label, even more so when it is 'label of the month' and one for which 'action' should be taken.