I feel like a stranger where I live

On 29 December 2013, Jane Kelly's essay, 'I feel like a stranger where I live’, appeared in The Telegraph.

This is it:

"The streets around Acton, which has been my home since 1996, have taken on a new identity. Most of the shops are now owned by Muslims and even the fish and chip shop and Indian takeaway are Halal. It seems that almost overnight it’s changed from Acton Vale into Acton Veil. I miss banter, the hail fellow, well met chat about the weather, or what was on TV last night.

More worryingly, I feel that public spaces are becoming contested. One food store has recently installed a sign banning alcohol on the premises. Fair enough. But it also says: 'No alcohol allowed on the streets near this shop.'

I am no fan of street drinking, and rowdy behaviour and loutish individuals are an aspect of modern British 'culture’ I hate. But I feel uneasy that this shopkeeper wants to control the streets outside his shop...

Since the start of the year there have been several reports from around London of a more aggressive approach. Television news footage last week showed incidents filmed on a mobile phone on a Saturday night, in the borough of Waltham Forest, of men shouting 'this is a Muslim area' at white Britons.

There are, of course, other Europeans in my area who may share my feelings but I’m not able to talk to them easily about this situation as they are mostly immigrants, too. At Christmas I spoke to an elderly white woman about the lack of parsnips in the local greengrocer, but she turned out to have no English and I was left grumbling to myself.

There are other 'cultural differences' that bother me, too. Over the past year I have been involved in rescuing a dog that was kept in a freezing shed for months. The owners spoke no English. A Somali neighbour kept a dog that he told me he was training to fight, before it was stolen by other dog fighters. I have tried to re-home several cats owned by a family who refuse to neuter their animals, because of their religion.

In the Nineties, when I arrived, this part of Acton was a traditional working-class area. Now there is no trace of any kind of community, that word so cherished by the Left.

Instead it has been transformed into a giant transit camp and is home to no one. The scale of immigration over recent years has created communities throughout London that never need to, or want to, interact with outsiders.

Now, despite the wishful thinking of multiculturalists, wilful segregation by immigrants is increasingly echoed by the white population, the rate of white flight from our cities is soaring. 

According to the Office for National Statistics, 600,000 white Britons have left London in the past 10 years. The latest census data shows the breakdown in telling detail: some London boroughs have lost a quarter of their population of white, British people. The number in Redbridge, north London, for example, has fallen by 40,844 (to 96,253) in this period, while the total population has risen by more than 40,335 to 278,970. It isn’t only London boroughs. The market town of Wokingham in Berkshire has lost nearly 5 per cent of its white British population.

I suspect that many white people in London and the Home Counties now move house on the basis of ethnicity, especially if they have children. Estate agents don’t advertise this self-segregation, of course.

Instead there are polite codes for that kind of thing, such as the mention of 'a good school,' which I believe is code for 'mainly white English.' Not surprising when you learn that nearly one million pupils do not have English as a first language.

I, too, have decided to leave my area, following in the footsteps of so many of my neighbours. I don’t really want to go. I worked long and hard to get to London, to find a good job and buy a home and I’d like to stay here. But I’m a stranger on these streets and all the 'good' areas, with safe streets, nice housing and pleasant cafés, are beyond my reach. I see London turning into a place almost exclusively for poor immigrants and the very rich.

It’s sad that I am moving not for a positive reason, but to escape something... Mass immigration is making reluctant racists of us all."

You know what I don't get, Jane? Why those who have ethnically cleansed themselves (and those who are about to) out of their own ancient stamping grounds are still voting for those who have betrayed them so profoundly. If they voted en masse for the BNP or the National Front, for example, there'd be a good chance that those in charge would put them first for a change.

Perhaps a lot of these people have been conned by the mainstream's 'racist, fascist, bigot, Nazi' rhetoric. If so, they should have a little think about those whose policies have forced them to up sticks and go. Was it the same people who encouraged the third world to come here in their many millions and take what we always believed was ours? Was it those who made so many decent, British people afraid to speak out for fear of being sneered at or even criminalised?

It was, wasn't it? The mainstream politicians and media put the foreigner first and sold us gleefully down the river. And as they did so, they assured us that those who would have put us first were the worst people in the world.

It was such a simple and obvious con, I'm amazed so few caught on. As I said, I really don't get it. I don't get how tens of millions of Britons could have been so trusting and so tolerant for so long. Trust of the untrustworthy and tolerance of the intolerable over so many decades bespeaks stupidity, I'm afraid. And cowardice.

We are not what we were.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you were to vote UKIP, it would be a start. If you were vote en masse for Nationalism, however, you'd up, running and on your way. At least you ought to be.

I say 'ought' for good reason. We are not ruled by democrats, you see. We never have been. Those who decide things are the types that will blithely invent a world war just for personal profit and the further entrenchment of their power over us. They will provoke a world-wide recession for the same reason. Thus, if it ever looked like a truly patriotic and Brit-friendly political party was about to take power in this country, we would, almost certainly, find ourselves subject to martial law and a police state. Up close and personal. The gloves would come off big time and there'd be no more pretence.

So why vote in ways that might inspire such an outcome?

If you are inclined to wonder thus, ladies and gents, you should relocate to Acton Vale, take off your frilly, pink knickers and bare your behind before the Multicult.

Your future, and that of your children, is already theirs.

Jane Kelly is a contributing editor of The Salisbury Review.

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