Another London resident speaks out

About the ethnic transformation of London, an Indian living in London writes:

This is an old story.

I arrived at London four years ago. I lived in a hostel not far from the South Bank. And the thing that struck me the most was the number of blacks. But this was far from a recent phenomenon. The blacks came in the 1950s and the 1960s (as did Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis).

A remarkable feature of London is that while it is heavily non-white, its core finance district (which is probably the engine of the British economy) is still heavily white. However, affirmative action is now being vigourously pursued here. Blacks are still vastly under-represented in the lucrative professions and this is a constant source of agony to most large companies.

It wasn’t always that way. Just 20 years ago, the professions were mostly the preserve of the old boys club and the networks. This changed when American banks arrived. The work culture changed completely and so did the general tone of life. But Americans did not bring only meritocracy and industry with them, they also brought in very aggressive “diversity” worship. And American banks and finance firms started putting enormous pressure all around to hire more blacks, Asians etc. The traditional English firms that were “old school” were embarrassed as dinosaurs and were forced to change. Now affirmative action (aggressively pushed by Americans) is the norm here.

They try very hard to hire at least a token of minorities to make sure that their workforce looks politically correct. But this isn’t always easy. While Indians are now almost everywhere in the lucrative professions, blacks are not. And the push to hire blacks has become more aggressive.

In addition to all that, the City has changed beyond recognition in just four years that I have been here. There are a LOT more hijab-clad women visible than I saw four years ago. Somalis are everywhere too. Their numbers are exploding. A friend of mine did a short stint with a law firm that dealt with immigration issues. He told me of the most astonishing case of Somali “asylum seekers” which was a family composed of husband and wife and their 26 children. The case became complicated because the husband (or father) had raped several of his daughters and two of them complained to the police.

I shudder to think what this place is going to look like in 10 years from now.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 22, 2005 05:33 PM | Send