The Problem with Foreigners - 08/10/23 Diary and Links

A kiss and tell gone wrong: is Suella Braverman right ?

Suit yourselves lady comrades, more for me

Conference, I have been a heathen this week and I am not alone.

It would appear that both Suella Braverman (the British Home Secretary) and I were hell bent on making headlines this past week. Both for very different reasons. Whilst I was becoming persona non grata in Fulham’s dusty WhatsApp groups,the Home Secretary gave a speech declaring multiculturalism to be a failure to a Washington think tank before doubling down in her conference speech in Manchester.

For my part, my last diary proved her right. In direct violation of the sacred English social norms of privacy I described the delicious time I spent with two sweet sweet British boys at my friend’s birthday black tie event in Spain over the weekend (I make it sound more interesting than it was, there was no ménage à trois). I enjoyed writing about that night almost as much as I enjoyed living it. I put the blog behind a paywall, peaceful in my knowledge that no one I know would read it ( my friends are not even free, let alone paid, subscribers).

Just like Suella couldn’t resist trolling the liberals and flirting with the feral right fringes of her party, how could I not write that blog and scandalise my new small ‘c’ conservative friends? The details were too good to be forgotten. But I underestimated the power of curiosity. A friend of the boys took one for the team and coughed up the subscription fee to read it. He shared screenshots with the party crew as preemptive karma for all the times I am sure to be leaking to the press in the future.. The boys reached out to me, betrayed. For just this once, I was the asshole.

The revelation found me in no state to respond. Nursing a brutal hangover at Tory conference, awake on less than three hours of sleep and with a work deadline looming. I had spend the nigh before social butterflying my way around conference. I had shared a private draft link with a journalist friend who reassured me men love being written about. He said he would be delighted to feature in my writings (one day friend, one day).

Alas, I should have predicted that the same awkwardness and tenderness that attracted me to the boys in the first place would make it impossible for them to not be upset, no matter how generously they read my blog.

The clash of my Greek shamelesness with their English shyness got me thinking, is Suela Braverman right? Has multiculturalism failed?

As far as these boys are concerned, certainly. Greek exhibitionism is an unforgiving crime for my beloved English people. I have dated into these wicked circles for long enough to know better. Emotional vomiting is not welcome here.

Multiculturalism is not just eating dhal with your hands and downward dogging your way into fixing a painful back. It is also marrying your first cousin and taking curcumin instead of doing chemo. Greek women are beautiful. They are also crazy.

I see the tweets about Rishi Sunak winning the prime ministerial seat as an example of multicultural victory for me it’s a sign of liberal disingenuity about the difference between Goverment mandated multiculturalism and the cultural ideal of cosmopolitanism. People like Sunak and his family integrated seamlessly into British society. Sunak went to Winchester and has all the trappings of any other old Wykehamist. It’s not like it was particularly culturally difficult for British people to swallow him being a politician, unless by culture the liberal commentariat actually means race. In which case, yes, the man looks Indian.

There is this gem that has been doing the rounds on Twitter, a video of Owen Jones interviewing a young Tory (whether this lad is a fascist or not I cannot say just from watching him speak for 3 minutes). They are debating multiculturalism and Owen has no answer when challenged by the young Tory about the benefits of diversity. It is embarrassing but Owen, despite the decades of experience in doing voxpops and trying to catch out right wing people saying racist things outside Tory conference, has failed to put this young man in his place and/or give any convincing argument to back his claim that diversity is a good thing.

This is a big problem on the left. We just assume everyone should agree with us just on the strength of our moral righteousness and as a result fail to do the mundane work of developing convincing arguments for the average voter on the basics. Whether multiculturalism and diversity are inherently good things are basic points that are not universally accepted, no matter how much you call people fascists for not being settled on that fact. We must prove why beyond the self righteous ‘good and bad’ argument. The existence of the political spectrum proves that moral absolutism is a falsehood.

I will take it upon myself to help comrade Owen, with the power vested in me as an immigrant, granddaughter of refugees, bearer of a heavy accent and a dubious complexion, because I agree with Suela: the British political class gets squeamish when they talk about immigration. In fact, they’d rather not address the issues head-on at all. This has not led to a more progressive voter base. On the contrary, it has led to more voters feeling gaslit and seeking shelter in GB news and the Sun to hear people speak without performing cognitive jiu-jitsu to articulate a coherent political position.

Is diversity good? Sometimes. Not always.

Diversity is a fact of life. You share a planet with other people. They are not all related to you, luckily or else that’d be a health hazard, so you have to find a way to make peace with the smell of goat curry emanating from your neighbour’s window when all you can stomach is a can of Heinz on a slice of Kingsmill.

You might complain that you were here, in the UK, first, and why should you accept that your neighbourhood changes so drastically? I understand, as a person who has been raised on summers in an idealic Greek village on an island, where community and customs are strong, I am not looking forward to what globalisation could do to the social and cultural fabric of my motherland (look what you hooligans have done to Malia). Not that other cultures are necessarily worse (though I will get back to that). But simply because to maintain a strong culture (the thing British lefties love so much about foreigners) you need strong community cohesion. Humans are not wired to do that when they don’t speak the same language as each other and don’t pray to the same God. It is also more difficult to sell to people the need for higher taxes and the welfare state if you have not created the conditions for them to feel sympathy and solidarity with their neighbours. Their neighbours simply having a pulse won’t cut it, sorry I don’t make the rules.

Alas, the tides of history are such that you ended up in a country that is rich and where goods made on the backs of others flow freely. You can’t force those others to conform to your exact way of life- that’s fascism, remember and you want to be better than that. But you also can’t want the labour of those others but not their sweat and tears. You can’t be okay with children in the other side of the world working on your Zara blouse till their fingers bleed, but get upset when they grow up and decide they too want to shop at the same Oxford Circus flagship store as you. You can’t hold it against them when they risk everything to come here, even if it’s not always war and famine that pushed them. Sometimes it is the same drive that pushed you to climb that soulless Canary Wharf ladder, to never have to shop at Zara again, to be too good for it.

It is also not the pungent smell of exotic food that is your real grievance. Your problem is you live in this shit flat, with no windows in the bathroom, your kitchen is too small and gas too expensive for you to eat anything other than microwaved beans on toast. You already find it hard to breathe from the mould and the pollution on the highway outside your bedroom. Your window is broken but your landlord won’t cough up the contractor's fee to fix it. What are you gonna do anyway? Move? Be his guest, he has 25 viewers lined up and ready to pay more than you. So you hold your nose, as you smell the Nigerian mother’s home cooked meal from above, bitter, that your own mother is a 5-hour, 65 quid train ride away. Suella tells you if your neighbour went back to where she came from there’d be more space for you, fresh air, casseroles of fish pie bubbling gloriously in an AGA. You believe her. Not many things left for you to believe in these days.

My mother likes to remind me that allowing me to move to London was the worst decision of her life. It was never hers to make, but she’s a typical Greek mother and lives to bicker. In her mind, my life here is a betrayal and an abandonment of her and her culture and values. She is not wrong. Migrating is a selfish act. The person benefiting the most from me migrating is myself. I did not fill some important worker quota by moving here. If anything I occupied some very competitive and highly desirable jobs. Do you know how many British politics grads want to work as speechwriters in Parliament? All of them, if they are being honest. And what benefit does the country get from me now? You get shitposting on my instagram, and Substack posts of me violating unspoken British laws of social manners by kissing and telling on two English men.

Which brings me back to the point of some cultures being better than others. While there is no arbiter of truth when it comes to exactly what each culture entails on every aspect of life, every immigrant will tell you that when they move to another country they see that some cultural norms are better than others. Better, meaning more effective or pleasant or moral (!) even. For example, holding the door for someone is a nice British cultural norm I like to take back home with me. Being stingy with food and emotions is one I will never embrace.

Corruption is an interesting one. While certainly corruption exists in all cultures ask any immigrant from the Mediterranean, the Balkans or other, often less affluent, countries and if they have an ounce of self-awareness they will admit that corruption is more engrained and accepted in their countries.

My eye caught this BBC investigation into an industry-approved security staff training programme where the trainers tell participants to lie and cheat and let untrained staff pass the normal 6-day course by giving away the answers. Put me on a cross and burn me like a witch but this is an excellent example of multiculturalism. I could see that happening in Greece, easily. I would be a lot more surprised to see it happening in London carried out by British people. British cultural norms are simply not permissive of that kind of behaviour.

Tolerance is another aspect of British culture that is not found as generously in other countries. You have your racists here, sure, Owen tried very hard to reveal them in his Tory conference voxpops. But go to China or Japan and you will see a complete denial that racism is a problem.

In my motherland, Greece, I’d struggle to mentally map the path that an immigrant like myself would be able to follow to get her foot in the door of local politics without any connection to the country or pre-existing professional network. In the UK it sure took me a lot of grifting to elbow my way into the Labour Party but it is a testament to the open-mindedness of the British political class that someone who sounds like I do (tragically fresh off the boat) was offered not one but three speechwriter jobs in Parliament, for front-bench MPs nonetheless.

People who were born and raised here take it for granted, I don’t because I’ve seen the alternative and the UK is so much better, just so. much. better. To all the Albanian teenagers glued on TikTok, clinging to the back of lorries, dreaming of London’s endless bounty that first lit up their faces on their iPhones. Your bet is right, the juice is worth the squeeze. Not for the imaginary welfare benefits, who the fuck risks their life for £67.20 a week?? Are you mad, no, no, you are here for the high life. I am too. One way or another we all find it. The Brits are right to be worried, yes, but you are allowed to dream and hope too.

I don’t know man, were I born anywhere else, knowing what I know, believing what I believe, that being an immigrant is a selfish act that often benefits the person migrating the most (but not when we are talking about geriatric countries in need of young hands (*cough cough*). Would I still come?  I would climb through barbed wire and walk on hot coals to reach the white cliffs of Dover. I would risk my life for that freedom, over and over again. I am not pro-open borders, I think it’s lazy, ignorant policy, but I am a romantic and recently found myself nodding when Varoufakis said of Lord Byron: he didn’t need a passport to come to Greece, to fight and die alongside us for our independence.

candid footage of me drafting my Substack entries

Immigration as a thorny policy issue is here to stay- as am I. Is that a net positive? Time will tell.

My dry cleaner has returned my silk dress and they couldn’t remove the blood stains (my own blood, the boys are safe, as men often are). Having said all that about multiculturalism and blending in and having ruined a gorgeous dress, if I could go back in time, would I do anything different?

No, I’d write the blog anyway. A diarist got to diary.

I’d also still move here, no matter Brexit and the economic decline, no matter my spoiling of the cultural fabric.

If the two English boys end up becoming Tory MPs to deport me, I had it coming.

LINKS

• Comedians Only Care About Comedy, by James Parker, The Atlantic

  “There’s no should in comedy. Louis C.K. will do what he wants. A bonus side effect of reading Comedy Book, of reading about all these comedians and their processes, was that I was cured, finally, of my sentimental attachment to the idea of the stand-up as truth-telling philosophe. Comedians love comedy. They love it more than anything else: more than truth, or people, or the vision of a more just society. That’s what makes them comedians. It’s a gift, a faulty chip, or a quirk of evolution. As Steve Harvey put it, talking to Jerry Seinfeld: “Tragedy strikes. I got news for you. We have the jokes that night.” Comedy goes where the pain is—yours, mine, the comedian’s, the world’s—straight to it, because that’s where the laughs are; because the laughs are pain, transmuted. Simple as that. Comedy has no responsibility. It never will. And we need it like air.”

• Connecting with people more easily, bySASHA CHAPIN

  “This makes the process sound dramatic, but, often, the small steps along the way aren’t that dramatic. You can be vulnerable by exposing a tiny bit of your personality, or being silly, or self-deprecating just a little bit. Some small gesture that says: I’m not interested in being a flawless person, and I’m willing to risk offending you or making things awkward. And, moreover: I am going to be stupid, so it’s also okay for you to be stupid.”

• HOW TO RE-READ, On losing the plot, by Joseph Epstein

  “Vladimir Nabokov, himself among the subtlest of modern novelists, thought that, if identify one must while reading a novel, the one best to identify with is the novel’s author. Nabokov meant that the most sophisticated reading of a novel entails wondering why the novelist has done what he has, worrying about his manipulating his plot successfully, trying to determine how his mind works—in other words, putting yourself in the place of the novelist.”

• Ruthless Cosmopolitans, Jewish Review of Books, By Adam Kirsch

  “James Boswell knew that the first qualification for being friends with a great writer is a thick skin. In his biography of Samuel Johnson, Boswell writes that the first time he met his literary idol, Johnson mocked him for being Scottish. The young man swallowed the insult: “Had not my ardour been uncommonly strong, and my resolution uncommonly persevering,” he admitted, “so rough a reception might have deterred me for ever from making any further attempts.””

That’s all folks! I am off to Liverpool now for Labour Conference! It’s gonna be a spicy one!

Kisses,

Stella