Multiculturalism isn’t working because we haven’t created the right conditions for it to succeed.

I wish all ethnicities and religions peace and prosperity, but if people come to live here they must fit into our way of life, not we into theirs.   I integrate with immigrants every day: in my job, on the bus, in the supermarket, in my local area of Wandsworth or in the centre of London, and in the hospitals … and unfortunately many of the stereotypes seem to be borne out.

In my work, I see many Indian and other nationalities come here first by themselves, then bringing over their dependants (quite easy under the current visa system), then get pregnant and have more dependants. In addition, they pretend to be students and within a short time they stop attending classes and disappear. They can’t be traced as they have changed address.  They get reported to the UKBA and you never see published statistics on how many are ever traced and deported successfully.   The widespread belief is that the majority are never found and merely join the vast ‘black economy’ in this country.

If any do go through the motions of attending classes, they are often absent through ‘illness’ with scrappy and highly dubious-looking medical certificates from Indian ‘doctors’ or ‘medical centres’ in Wembley or Southall or somewhere similar.   These are only ever produced way after the event when threatened with being reported to the UKBA.  Whereas you and I would be off work for 1 or 2 days with ‘flu or backpain, these people seem to be signed off for a month or more by their ‘doctors’ to get over the slightest illness.

When they do attend, they are totally disinterested in studying and fail dismally. All they want to do is work, and they are supposed to have a 20-hour a week limit (new students now have a limit of 10 hours), but it seems obvious from their attendance patterns that they work longer than the maximum allowed. There are many employers of their own nationality who will flout the law on employing immigrant workers, as it’s cheap labour. Work always takes precedence over their ‘studies’, so they are constantly late for classes or fail to attend regularly unless threatened with being reported.  The whole system of student visas is therefore a joke.

So I go home every day on the bus and all around me there are people not speaking my own language:  Russians, Africans, Indians, Somalis – all life is there.

I go to the supermarket on Saturday in Wandsworth and have to pass through what is now called ‘Southside’.  Without fail, crowds of immigrant families are in the street, or in the mall, dressed in their black robes and with 6 kids for each mother. You usually get 2 or 3 of these families out together, making several groups of a dozen or more, with kids ranging from babies to teens.

They come out of their council flats and walk around without a care in the world – not just on Saturdays, but on any day of the week you may visit the shopping mall.  They always have lots of shopping bags filled with goods from Primark and wherever else they spend their money.  How they get the money and the council flats I can only speculate. They appear to be Somalis, a very distinctive-looking people, so are they ALL asylum-seekers?

I have to go to the hospital occasionally as I have had some health issues as a man approaching sixty.  I’ve worked all my life and now need to use an NHS service that I have been helping to pay  for over the last 45 years.  When I go to the local GP or the hospital, what do I see?  Queues of the same people I meet at work and in the supermarket and in the street:  Indians, Somalis, many other nationalities, but very few of my fellow English citizens by birth.  Certainly the proportion of immigrants in the waiting rooms, as you observe them come and go, is much higher than the immigration statistics would lead you to believe.

What do we have in the UK -  9%… 10% immigrants now?  In the GP’s or the hospital waiting rooms they must represent around 80% of the queue or more. I wonder how much THEY have paid into our tax and National Insurance system.  I can’t help feeling that I have worked all my life to give it away to these people.

I appreciate that some readers have what they consider balanced and fair views about immigration.  As for my own views, I am not a racist and never have been. The colour of someone’s skin is of no consequence whatsoever.

The rich, Tory-voting classes who need cheap foreign labour, will still want this flow of immigrants to continue. Their housing, transport, local communities or healthcare are not affected in the same way as they are for ordinary working people. The mealy-mouthed LibDems wouldn’t dream of picking on immigration as an issue for fear of being called racist. Labour has lost its way and is too scared of anything approaching a working-class policy or manifesto. Heaven forbid, in the age of the Miliblands.

I am not especially patriotic, the ‘refuge of a scoundrel’ and all that, but I do believe that we will lose whatever culture we have if we don’t stop immigration soon.

We need to wake up now.

"Ooh look, everyone, it's raining taxpayer money again. Isn't one lucky?"

The Royal Family is to be exempt from any cuts in public spending next year when its civil list funding is settled for the next 10 years, says The Guardian.

MPs will be powerless to reduce the £7.9m a year paid under the civil list because of an obscure deal struck between Buckingham Palace and the Treasury in 1972 when the current legislation governing royal finances was drawn up.  (Under the Tories, by any chance?  Oh yes – it was that old tosser, Edward Heath.)

Palace officials made clear earlier this summer that they are actually seeking a rise in the annual civil list payment to cover “increased costs” despite the fact that they currently have a £21m surplus in the reserves on the civil list account. Wonder what the interest is on that, ma’am…?

What a bunch of spongers.

Time to make them all redundant like a large number of us seem to be at the moment.

We hope they’ll have the good sense to go  before they’re pushed,  Oliver Cromwell-style.

We don’t need them and the morally disgusting values they represent.

It seems that politicians and the media are getting more concerned over a couple of schoolboy emails about Tory politicians than the death of innocent bystander Ian Tomlinson after a beating by the police at the G20 rally just two weeks ago.

As predicted by The Citizen, the police ‘investigation’ has turned into a sham and no doubt there will be a fudged outcome where nobody gets blamed and nobody is held responsible.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (about as independent as any of these jumped-up quangos are from their masters in government and the civil service) can’t seem to find any CCTV evidence of anything, even though millions of us have seen images on TV which cannot be disputed.   It has taken the IPCC several days even to get to this stage, when other investigations into excessive police violence – but where nobody actually died – were instigated within 24 hours.

It does no credit to the police force or the IPCC that while the offending police thugs have supposedly ‘stepped forward’, they don’t appear to have been decent or honest enough to own up to their violent beating of a British citizen going about his business, and which is highly likely to have been a direct cause of his death.

WE SAW what was done to Ian Tomlinson.
WE SAW at least one of the policemen removing his identification badge and covering has face with a balaclava before beating Mr Tomlinson.
WE SAW – in newspapers and on TV – the testimony of various independent witnesses to police attacks on the man.  People not involved in the protest rally. People from other countries with no axe to grind against the police.

People who – unlike our own policemen – have no reason to lie.

WHAT MORE DOES THE IPCC WANT?

We must not let the police off the hook on this. Nor let minor political squabbles get in the way of justice being done for this unfortunate man or for the violence which he suffered in the final hours of his life to go unpunished.

Government and the police need a clear message from us that police violence on innocent citizens exercising their democratic rights is simply not acceptable.

Please don’t let this case be swept away in a tide of indifference. We all need to stop this from becoming even more the norm than it is already.

IT COULD BE YOU – OR YOUR OWN SON OR DAUGHTER – NEXT TIME.

Never a rabid protester in the past, and never one to kick up much of a fuss in public…
I wanted to express my disgust at the mess the bankers and politicians have created for us yet again, and went along to lend a bit of support to the G20 protests in the City of London yesterday.

An ordinary, middle-aged, working-class white male, wanting to try and change things for the better in my own small way.  After all, it’s a democracy we live in, isn’t it? Aren’t we supposed to be good citizens and participate in the decision-making process rather than sit at home in front of the telly, never voting and never taking part as full members of the society in which we live?

When it comes to the next General Election, they’ll be imploring us to vote and take part, maybe even collect us and give us a lift to the polling station to get our vote. They LIKE us to care about our country and get involved, don’t they? Or is that only when it suits them?

I arrived not long after midday, expecting a little bit of pushing and shoving and the odd police helmet knocked off,  and sensed there was a real mood of anticipation and just a little apprehension in the gathering crowd over what might happen if it all kicked off in the way suggested by the media over the past week or two.
Shades of Grosvenor Square in ’68,  Brixton in ’81 and all that – for those of you who remember.

But we’re now living in such a police state that you couldn’t get near the leading small core of marchers (for it was small – nowhere near the thousands I – and probably the cops – had expected).  Hordes of police and their vans, far too many for the numbers of people involved, had divided the crowd into manageable pockets, where they tamely looked on at a distance in each of the streets surrounding the Bank of England.

Some particularly nasty and aggressive constables got the nod from someone and immediately started shouting loudly and moving in a line towards us, forcing us back.  I had no idea why, as we were all just quiet onlookers trying to get a decent shot with our cameras and mobile phones.  No threat whatsoever.

In the few minutes of police shouting I got a bit of an adrenalin rush and quickly devised a plan of action if confronted with a snarling rozzer wielding a baton at my head:  keep to the edge, not the middle, don’t get hemmed in and caught up in the melee just in case the fuzz think you’re a middle-aged white terrorist and send in a snatch squad to take you out, Taser you and cart you off in a black maria or whatever they’re called these days (you probably can’t call them black any more and they’re a rather nice gunmetal grey, anyway).

But - as they said about Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ – nothing happened. Twice.
Fat chance of a bit of a rumble. I should have known.

No way through.
And no way out if you were in the core group.

Separated and segregated from the march and with no chance of any meaningful action, even if there were any brave souls to lead us out of the trenches and over the top.

And as if to rub salt in the wounds and make the frustration  worse, you could see those who were obviously bankers in their ‘dress-down’ gear (cashmere jumpers, Jermyn Street shirts, designer jeans and brown brogues or loafers), looking on with amusement in between deep conversations about the size of the bonuses you and I will be paying them this year.

It was tempting to find the nearest bucket of something brown and smelly to throw over them.

After two frustrating hours of trying to find a way into the middle and join my fellow citizens for a bit of concerted shouting and chanting, I gave up.

Every now and again some cheers rang out in the distance and you thought ‘this is it – it’s kicking off’… but it never did.

Apparently a couple of RBS windows got broken (which  belong to all of us anyway) but more importantly, several heads got bludgeoned by the government’s police thugs as we saw on the TV news later.

So that’s it. That’s the state… or should we say police state… of Britain today.

Screwed by politicians and bankers,  thousands of us made jobless, homeless and powerless,  and you can’t even do anything about it because the long and heavy-handed arm of the law will be brought in to keep you down under some trumped-up terrorism charge in the interests of national security.

Doesn’t feel like a democracy to me.