Been reading a lot of posts by members of forums to which I belong about the deleterious effect of ethnic diversity on Western society. Mostly applied in the context of raised crime rates, ethnic and religious conflict/terrorism, raised unemployment levels, cost of welfare benefits etc.

What is ethnic diversity in countries in which have been ethnically diverse for centuries….and have never been ethnically homogeneous bar at the time of the first colonists? As far as I can ascertain every one of us in Western countries is descended from immigrants/invaders even though some of our ancestors arrived a long time ago and those of others arrived relatively recently?

We in the UK have been whining about immigration, since long before we started turning half the world pink. Watched a TV programme on “Yesterday” about “Ipswich Man” and saw that nothing much in the UK had changed re antagonism to any individual perceived as different, whether because of race, colour, sexuality etc since about the days of the Domesday Book…and we have, in 2013, political parties like the BNP promulgating attitudes 400 plus years old.

Way I look at it is that we got rich on the backs of the poor, both in our own country and in countries all over the world and it seems more than hypocritical to complain when people we have trashed for decades, if not centuries turn up and say “Where’s mine!” And now the rest of the West is starting to reap the whirlwind…and they have only themselves to blame.

Anyway is ethnic conflict really because of ethnicity or is it more because of the attitude of the people who have lived in a country for ten minutes objecting to those who arrived two minutes ago getting the benefit of what they had paid in to benefit themselves over that ten minutes? Ethnicity, whatever it is in this mongrel world, has nothing to do with anything really…..the problem in the Western world is the growing and more vituperative sense of greed, self interest and entitlement by people who just don’t want to share their good fortune with people less fortunate….or are maybe just chuffed to bits to always have people arriving they can blame for all their life’s problems, to save them having to wonder if they should be taking some responsibility for their own lives?

Ethnicity isn’t the problem….Friedman’s version of capitalism ruling the West is the problem….and our Western propensity for pushing that interpretation of economics onto other countries under the guise of democracy, with the help of the World Bank and IMF. I find it hard, tbh, to be against immigrants who come here because we in the West haven’t left them with enough food and resources to get a life as good as the one they see some of us having on what should have been available for them to have a minimal standard of living in their own countries.