The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #110424   Message #2488927
Posted By: GUEST,Howard Jones
09-Nov-08 - 07:18 AM
Thread Name: England's National Musical-Instrument?
Subject: RE: England's National Musical-Instrument?
"I, rather, have never attacked anyone on the basis of skin-colour or race...I only question the act of immigration itself." But when you question immigration, you come up with the wrong answers.

As this is a music website, I'll address musical culture first. The greatest threat to England's musical traditions came not from immigrants but from American popular music culture, which was willingly embraced by the English early in the last century, under the influence of the gramophone and wireless. We may regret it, but the "folk" voted with their feet, and chose jazz and blues and rock-and-roll over their good English traditional music.

If you're talking about culture in its wider sense, I find it hard to believe that fewer than 8% of the population (which includes people from ethnic minorities who were born and raised here, and who are more English than you) could have had the influence on our culture you suggest - what influence they have had, most people regard as being largely positive. I accept however that it would be naive to ignore that it has brought some social problems.

If you mean economic migration, this can only mean you object to people coming here from abroad and taking jobs away from native English workers. Does that sound familiar? Except of course, you haven't got a job, and as someone else has pointed out you seem to have chosen to live in one the worst possible places in the entire country for finding one, especially in manufacturing.

WAV, all your talk of being a "repatriate" doesn't alter the fact that you are an immigrant:

"a person who has come to a different country in order to live there permanently" Cambridge Online Dictionary

"a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country" AskOxford dictionary

Incidentally, "repatriate" is usually either a verb or a passive noun, ie someone who is sent back to their own country. Did the Aussies get fed up with your witterings and kick you out?

WAV, have you heard the expression "when you're in a hole, stop digging"? Everything you write simply reveals more about the enormous depths of your ignorance, whether it's about politics, English music, English culture, singing, playing recorder, and now concertinas. If you don't know about something, you should be asking questions, not attempting to give answers.

But you've been told this before.