Resulting from years of relentless unchecked Leftist agitation.
If this were happening in a part of the developing world, in which white British were quickly becoming the single most growing demographic, soon to take over areas once populated by indigenous people who are greatly displeased with the outcome, the Left would be banging the drums, calling it colonialism and imperialism and demanding an end to it. That it takes place in Europe, it’s called ”multiculturalism” and ”diversity” and therefor ”moral”, the indigenous people just have to suck it up or be deemed racists.
See how it works in reverse?
And in Merton in South-West London, and too many places like it, a polite apartheid reigns: an accommodation rather than an integration. The white population has more or less reluctantly shuffled along the bench and allowed others to sit down.
Since 1980, Merton’s minority population has risen from 10 per cent to over 50 per cent today. Its primary schools — which were still majority white as recently as 2003 — are now 64 per cent ethnic minority. The area has become, in the jargon, ‘super diverse’.
The mosque in Merton, which dominates its neighbourhood, replaced an Express Dairies bottling plant which provided a few hundred jobs for local people and lots of milk bottles — an icon of an earlier, more homogenised age.
The symbolism is not lost on the mainly white older residents, who, when I was there researching the effects of mass immigration on British society, did not seem to be embracing diversity with as much enthusiasm as the proponents of multiculturalism think they should.
They are not unusual. Thanks to over-rapid immigration in recent years, Britain is heading for an ethnic minority population of around 25 per cent by the end of this decade.
I always think of a mosque as a future football field.