via spiked-online:
“Demographically, London has changed enormously in recent years, but it has become tantamount to a speechcrime to say anything critical about these developments. . . . What is really bizarre about the attacks on Cleese is that his critics actually agree with him that London is no longer fundamentally an English city, only they express it in a different way. Consider London mayor Sadiq Khan. He said Cleese sounded like Basil Fawlty with his comments on London. ‘[D]iversity is our greatest strength’, said Khan, and London is proud to be a ‘global hub’. This is fundamentally what Cleese himself was saying: that London has become globalised, ‘diverse’, post-English. . . . There has been a pretty transparent effort on the part of the London mayor, and of various New Labour technocrats before him, to use the issues of immigration and diversity to socially re-engineer London, away from being a city of people and of values and towards being a kind of advert for diversity. Away from being a national capital and towards being a symbol of the post-nationhood, post-borders, post-common values ideology that excites the new fluid elites but leaves most other people cold.”
h/t GR