Cycling UK Forum

mattheus wrote: 12 May 2025, 4:25pm

Tangled Metal wrote: 12 May 2025, 2:00pm

mattheus wrote: 12 May 2025, 11:33am
This is a bit of non-sequitur. Seems like you've taken a dislike to the politician in question and just want to rant.

No point in engaging in such posts. Sorry.

But you still did!!

Ouch - what a zinger!!!

p.s. Does tim need you to stick up for him??

You think that comment had anything about Tim? LOL! It was a comment about you!!

Now back to you for the last comment!!

Nearholmer wrote: 13 May 2025, 12:24pm I’ll admit, it’s confusing.

Some sources say that turnips came with the romans, but others state that they were introduced by Flemish weavers c1550, and some say that around the time of the Norman Conquest the root vegetables in England were carrots (those small purple and white ones), and parsnips, which were called Welsh Carrots.

Could turnip-culture have died-out when the Romans packed-up??

Could be. It's amazing how many things we take for granted as British that aren't.

Onions, leeks, turnips, cabbages, apples, rabbits, the list goes on.

I think I read that damsons are named after Damascus and were brought here by returning crusaders.

Nearholmer wrote: 13 May 2025, 12:24pm I’ll admit, it’s confusing.

Some sources say that turnips came with the romans, but others state that they were introduced by Flemish weavers c1550, [...]

In eastern England, the Flemish weaver immigrants are known as the strangers. There's a Stranger's Hall in Norwich and some other things named after them, plus it's why several Norfolk towns have plains, not squares.

So we're already descended from strangers in East Anglia. I don't understand why Starmer doesn't want the rest of the UK to be like us!

mattheus wrote: 13 May 2025, 2:49pm It's kinda interesting that you stuck your nose into a converasation that didn't involve you, [...]

Not as interesting as you confusing the public boards with private messages. If you don't want others involved, take it there!

At least until the next silly UK law bans private messages.

To be fair to Starmer (someone has to be), I think I know what he means by us becoming "strangers", though it is an odd way of putting it. I think he is talking about lack of social cohesion, and possibly also about different groups not mixing. That, in turn, allows mistrust and resentment to fester away. If that is what he is referring to, there has always been some of that, but an excessive flow of migration does increase the danger of it growing as a problem. And that will help Far Right politics by feeding the fear of "the other". So there is a reason for people on the Left to be concerned about this, as well as those on the Right.

I saw a clip of Jeremy Corbyn ticking-off the PM in parliament, and IMO he made some very, very sound points, not so much about the choice of language as about the miserable failure to talk about the very many positives that immigration has brought, particularly to the NHS, and how that ends-up pandering to the further-right.

It’s the same big mistake that Cameron, and nearly every other politician for that matter, made over the EU ………… simply being far too quiet, for far too long, about the positives, leaving the field wide-open for negativity.

I think that prominent politicians and others can, if they want to, and despite the newspaper headline barrage, and junk-TV, and foreign propaganda, “lead the conversation”, as in take it in particular directions, after all Farage has no difficulty doing it in the opposite direction (mind you, he does devote his entire life to one issue at a time, and doesn’t have any actual responsibilities!). There are very positive British values that they could build upon in doing so, and while it might not alter the whole landscape it could tilt it enough to be useful in terms of social cohesion.

pwa wrote: 14 May 2025, 6:17am To be fair to Starmer (someone has to be), I think I know what he means by us becoming "strangers", though it is an odd way of putting it. I think he is talking about lack of social cohesion, and possibly also about different groups not mixing. That, in turn, allows mistrust and resentment to fester away. If that is what he is referring to, there has always been some of that, but an excessive flow of migration does increase the danger of it growing as a problem. And that will help Far Right politics by feeding the fear of "the other". So there is a reason for people on the Left to be concerned about this, as well as those on the Right.

His use of "strangers" seems to be causing him problems

Comparisons between Keir Starmer’s speech and Enoch Powell’s speech
The words causing the most backlash was Starmer saying that without cracking down on immigration, the UK risks becoming an “island of strangers.”
The phrase has drawn similarities to Powell’s assertion that Britons in 1968 were finding themselves as “strangers in their own country”. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politic ... 27558.html

An article worth reading

This familiar narrative seems to follow a prevailing wisdom which is parroted in political, media and public debates – that appeasing the far right is the way to defeat it. Rather than beating the far right at their own game, however, research shows that these techniques simply legitimise their key talking points and further normalise exclusionary politics.https://theconversation.com/keir-starme ... hem-256499
The bottom line is that you do not beat the far right by becoming them. It doesn’t work electorally or ideologically, and even if it did, minoritised communities suffer the consequences regardless. The far right is not some threat lying waiting in the future – its normalisation is happening now.

The cowardice of UK politicians in pretending we can have our cake and eat it very nicely laid out by Peter Foster (I think of the FT)

https://bsky.app/profile/pmdfoster.bsky ... xzjvq7i22s

mjr wrote: 13 May 2025, 8:57pm

mattheus wrote: 13 May 2025, 2:49pm It's kinda interesting that you stuck your nose into a converasation that didn't involve you, [...]

Not as interesting as you confusing the public boards with private messages. If you don't want others involved, take it there!

At least until the next silly UK law bans private messages.

I do appreciate your input, but may I ask if you even know what the original topic was?

mattheus wrote: 14 May 2025, 9:21am

mjr wrote: 13 May 2025, 8:57pm

mattheus wrote: 13 May 2025, 2:49pm It's kinda interesting that you stuck your nose into a converasation that didn't involve you, [...]

Not as interesting as you confusing the public boards with private messages. If you don't want others involved, take it there!

At least until the next silly UK law bans private messages.

I do appreciate your input, but may I ask if you even know what the original topic was?

"The original topic".

Conversations in a public place involve wide-ranging and usually unpredictable wanderings. This is their value - that the conversation is not canalised, confined and locked up in some small place dictated by some self-appointed arbiter.

Or, to put it another way, if you don't care for the direction of a conversation to the point that you can do nothing other than carp about some imagined rule about confining it just to what you want it to be about, go and begin another one elsewhere. Of course, that too may well wander away from your desired path, to go through lands-unknown to your current ken.

On the other hand, why not just enjoy the conversation and join the other wanderers in it as they discover notions previously unsuspected yet possibly attractive, revealing or even of utility?

Cugel wrote: 14 May 2025, 10:50am Or, to put it another way, if you don't care for the direction of a conversation to the point that you can do nothing other than carp about some imagined rule about confining it just to what you want it to be about, go and begin another one elsewhere.

I don't believe I did any such thing!

Cugel wrote: 14 May 2025, 10:50am On the other hand, why not just enjoy the conversation and join the other wanderers in it as they discover notions previously unsuspected yet possibly attractive, revealing or even of utility?

One can hope!

tim-b wrote: 14 May 2025, 8:08am
His use of "strangers" seems to be causing him problems

QUite frankly, Britain has always been a country of strangers. Wave after wave of exotic cultures have swept through, generally from east to west, displacing some former residents but, as often as not, completing an eventual integration and amalgamation of language, ideas, institutions and a folk. One might even say that the very essence of being British is to be one who has inherited a vast swathe of complex culture made of a large number of constituents from all over the planet.

In my personal life I enjoy this in two main ways:

Many of the habits and modes of life of all sorts of people, near neighbours and far, seem bluddy strange to me! This is, however, the normal state of British life. All of us (well, not quite all of us) learn early to cope with it and to reduce the strangeness to a condition of understanding not complete but enabling a tolerance of the weird differences to ourselves and our own strange ways.

The strangeness and our constant practice at dealing with it, becomes not just a norm but an eager expectation. For example, until we moved to West Wales our life was in a NW England town next to a large university attracting all sorts of British but also foreign folk. This made a very interesting and educative (and entertaining) melting pot. In fact, it was more of a broth pot, producing an exotic yet delicious soup of international fodder for the mind and the socialisations.

A move to West Wales saw a similar syndrome, in that Welsh culture and language, being quite well preserved around this neck o' the coed, is fascinatingly different from the stuff found to the east .... yet with enough common views of things to make an easy integration into local ways & means of living. Exotic Welsh ways are being adopted and enjoyed by yet another Sais immigrant.

************
Those who carp on and moan about "strangers" tend themselves to be harbouring some hard &fast cultural brain infestation of the kind that insists that only it has The Truth and The Ways of Righteousness. But such attitudes in Britain belong to 1642, not 2025. John Knox and similar may not be completely gone from Britain but they've certainly become atavistic throwbacks!

Yet Knoxian feelings often get a grip of the brains of humans looking for scapegoats and pariahs to ease their feelings of unworth and neglect. Understandable but really a rather stupid mode to adopt, given that its likely to produce an even worse state of mental and social degradation in those who allow themselves to become intolerant little mob ciphers.

Yeees, weeell…….

Britain has unquestionably seen multiple waves of new arrivals over the centuries, but it would be a bit fanciful to pretend that hasn’t involved multiple un-welcoming parties being assembled, and a few outright atrocities, even when the new arrivals weren’t actually invaders in the proper sense of the word. I will cite the massacre of the Jews in York in 1190, the race riots of 1919, notably but by no means exclusively, in Cardiff, and the 1958/59 race riots in London, as instances of un-welcoming.

Conversely, at times we’ve been quite welcoming. Only two or three years ago, we managed to behave like decent human beings towards Ukrainian refugees, and looking back the country accepted a lot of Polish people, and in some areas very large numbers of Italians (who were what would now be disparagingly called “economic migrants”, and who had five minutes before been “on the other side”) post-WW2. We also managed not to get seriously nasty in the longer run about European, mainly Jewish, people arriving in big numbers in latter part of C19th, although that wasn’t a 100% peaceful process.

It’s the fact that our collective response can go either way that makes me agree with Comrade Corbyn that the PM has neglected his duty to foster social cohesion by setting out the positives of immigration. If our response can go either way, it’s part of his role to make sure it goes a good way. I actually think The King does a better job on that front, which is high paise from me, given that I’m ambivalent about both the institution and the incumbent.

Cugel wrote: 14 May 2025, 11:11am QUite frankly, Britain has always been a country of strangers. Wave after wave of exotic cultures have swept through, [...]

Those who carp on and moan about "strangers" tend themselves to be harbouring some hard &fast cultural brain infestation of the kind that insists that only it has The Truth and The Ways of Righteousness. But such attitudes in Britain belong to 1642, not 2025. John Knox and similar may not be completely gone from Britain but they've certainly become atavistic throwbacks!

Did such views belong in 1642, though? That was just 46 years before the Immortal Seven invited a Dutch prince to invade and take the thrones, and less than 100 years later, a Saxon prince inherited as a result of some legal jiggery-pokery. I think our rulers were keener on building international links back then, and less concerned about keeping people trapped in our own countries because mobility was so limited, long before even the bicycle.

Such attitudes in Britain should be left in 1925 (when a jury acquitted British Fascists of kidnapping the leader of the Communist Party), not 1642 and definitely not 2025. The politics of envy and fear of strangers should be left as mostly a 20th century sickness, and not allowed to repeat again this century by cowardly politicians who think they don't need to confront it because they can control and direct it. If you're near the Holocaust memorials in Huddersfield, Nottingham, Stamford or London, visit and reflect on the words: Never Again. If you're near Birmingham, Chesham, Edinburgh, Kendal, Norwich, Paisley, Stone, or Taunton, maybe go visit its Peace Pole. Maybe take your MP along, if you can.