Making A Difference

Ol' Blighty, My Pind

How are the Brits surviving India? By getting the hell out of London.

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Ol' Blighty, My Pind
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So Manku has time to think, and he has his views now on Britain and being here, and to put them into verse.
Ik duniya nayi vasavange
Mitran de samne baith ke
Te ik gal sabnu samjhavange
Yaro Punjab nu London nai banana
Asi London nu Punjab banavange."

(We will create a brave new world/We will sit with our friends/And make one thing loud and clear/ Friends, Punjab will never be London/We will make London a Punjab).And, more specifically to the white British people:
Goreya mayn nai jaana
Chhad ke tera desh
Veleyan nu ethay roti mildi
Dil vich fikr nai koi
Khao piyo mauj udao
Is da jikr nai koi
Pubbaan de vich beer nai mukdi
Kadey nai honda Dry Day
Ethay jamna ethay marna
Jeeja hovey ya sala
Bai final gal tenu samjhavan
Toon chal ja pardes goreya
Main nai jaana chhad ke tera desh.

(Listen to me, white guy,/I’m not leaving your country now/Do nothing, still there is dole,/Not a worry in the world/Eat, drink and be merry,/Nobody gives a damn,/The pubs never run out of beer/There is never a dry day/We’ll live here, we’ll die here/Brother, or brother-in-law/Let me tell you finally, white guy/You go somewhere else if you like/But I’m not leaving your country now).

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Good thing the British National Party has no Punjabi-speaking members; they are bound to have had a view on Manku’s poems. Because this is not just a Manku poem; it’s the theme song of the Indian story in Britain. Manku just puts it more honestly than most.

And he puts it a little more accurately than he imagines. Because as immigrants are coming in, substantial numbers of white British middle-class people are moving out of Britain. One way of surviving us is to leave us if we don’t leave them.

Last year about a quarter of a million people moved into Britain; about as many moved out. A good many arrivals were from India. Among those getting the 1,50,000 work permits issued last year, among about 1,00,000 asylum-seekers, many were from India claiming they were from Afghanistan, Tarique Ghaffur, senior police commissioner in Scotland Yard, tells Outlook. And never forget our brothers who overstay informally, or who arrive unconventionally in crates inside lorries and what not.

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Those moving out are white British middle-class people, to Spain, to the south of France, to Canada. Take that incoming quarter-million with the outgoing quarter-million, place them against a population more or less constant, and you see why a senior academic produced a report saying white British people will become a minority by the end of this century. The face of Britain is changing fast, and the face looks more Indian all the time.

The Brits don’t just have to survive our ways, they have to survive the numbers with those ways. You see it in London, and no more just by way of Punjabans at Heathrow.

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There were more white people in London at the end of the Second World War, when the whole population was much less, than there are today.

White Brits are leaving London for an immigrant-free countryside, and for those quaint little towns that are still English. The census shows 1.2 million Indians, some half million in London. Indian busybodies place that closer to a million, out of respect to the arrival of what are officially illegal immigrants, but who many Indians speak of as ‘the boys coming in’.White Brits are leaving, but like Manku and the rest, our guys aren’t going anywhere. London’s becoming Manku’s Punjab, and many other places besides.

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A lady down the street, who has a job as only an interpreter at a local hospital, now owns eight houses in the neighbourhood. "You only need a little money," she says. "Then you borrow from new Visa cards because they keep offering low interest at the start. Then, when it’s time to pay, you switch again. With the borrowing you make a deposit and buy a house. So you go on." The one thing that owners of Indian cornershops invested in is houses; every one of them seems to have several. You like London? Forget it, we own the place.

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Just about everything in arithmetic is going against the traditional white Brit allergic to migration. Further subtract from the white population because of low and falling birth rates. Add large immigrant families and you get a Britain with white minuses on several counts. The British National Party isn’t the only one unhappy.

If the Indian flag must be waved, given that Independence Day is here, it’s only because the Brits are having a far harder time surviving Pakistanis. "Why do you work?" a Pakistani friend asked me. I mentioned bills and things. "How much does this Outlook pay you?" he asked. I said it’s not bad, given the reputation of my editor in such matters. He told me how much smarter he is. "I’m a Rani ka Mehmaan, Her Majesty’s Guest." A great many Pakistanis have mastered the art of living off the state with lifestyles ranging from comfortable to luxurious. After all, what’s a 90-billion pound social security budget for?

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The Pakistani is more than a guest; he works with an Indian ‘immigration advisor’ in getting students from India for whom being good students seems the last thing on their minds. "They do short courses," he says. "When one gets over, they start another." And then? "Are my students such fools that in three years not a single girl will like them?" Marriage means migration.

And what of the Indian success story in Britain? As always, one man’s success is another man’s problem. Manku has more money for beer than the average white. "This is at the heart of the problem," says an Indian lord, an Indian member of the House of Lords, that is. "If we fail, we’re scrounging off the state; if we succeed, we’re resented for our wealth." And down the middle way, you are taking away jobs that others could have got. One way or another, not anything many white Brits like.

To cap this, the Indian, the Indian with the British passport that is, will cheer till he’s hoarse if India can beat England at cricket. The usual English approach with these signs is to let be. That approach is now straining at the edges. More and more signs of irritation are beginning to get past the stiff upper lip; the particularly high pitch of the media campaign against once high-fliers like Laxmi Mittal, the Hindujas, even Keith Vaz. The slow abandonment of English civility in the face of the foreigner. Now not just the loss of jobs to Indians in Britain, but loss of more jobs through outsourcing to India.

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Indian success with the curry could be indulged. Indian success in software is proving harder to accept. It is flattering to be this kind of nuisance, but the British are far more accustomed to stealing into other markets than have others steal into theirs. And it does not help that India is doing a far better job surviving the IT crash than Britain. Indian professionals in Britain are seen to work for smaller wages than the British have come to expect; and in India for even less. This is probably the current top of the irritants.

If perception is fact, then the fact is that Indians are all over with more to come, they have the jobs; when Indians don’t, India does, they have money, more and more businesses, and now more and more property. The streets are English, the houses Indian. A lot of Brits are having a hard job surviving this.

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