The Stages of Adjustment

The stages to adjustment are, approximately: Shock, Anger, Denial,
and eventually..... Adjustment

It is not clear where we are as a society at the moment, but it looks like denial.  

During this stage it is to be expected that things will be rocky.  It is the most dangerous stage because there is a real possibility that unnecessary damage can be inflicted on oneself by cannoning around randomly.  Yet none of this was un-foreseeable. 

Indeed, Peter Hain (saints preserve us) foresaw it, as was noted on this very blog in February 2014.  He wrote:

It goes beyond Europe and even beyond immigration. Some of it is plain bigotry. A lot of it is deep, deep antagonism to the political class, of which all the major parties are part. Under New Labour – and it has still not been wiped away - there has been a big disillusionment with us as a party among white working class traditional Labour supporters.”

Had the BBC been doing its proper job as the broadcaster in the national interest, it would have been picking up this thread.  Instead, it did then as it does now, and tries to patronize the subject away. 

In its current frenzy to prove that it was right and everything is going to be horrible, and how dare you squalid little oiks challenge our might and refuse to watch our crummy Top Gear after we've paid a fortune for an aging DJ and an affable American, the BBC has forgotten one thing:

The BBC's own pension is in that stock market.  

I am not suggesting the BBC babbles like a lunatic PR trying to talk up duff products. But I am suggesting that it might want to have a drink of water, wash its tear-stained face, and start remembering that it is Us it is answerable to. 

That includes apologising to people who were told that this was just a little local difficulty, no big deal, they should just ignore it and shout 'raaaycist' as that would make the problem go away. 

Both sides of the referendum decision have been served poorly by the partisanship of the state broadcaster we all so expensively maintain. 

You're not from round here, are you?

The EU had a wonderful vision at its heart; peaceful co-existence.    The shorthand for this is 'multiculturalism'.   Everybody would celebrate everyone else's unique features.

But if you repeatedly remind people that they are foreign all you are telling them is that they will never reach the level of acceptance at which the differences are irelevant, unremarked.   It also reminds everybody else that Sanjay, Errol, and Nikita are foreign, even when all three of them have been born here, as were their parents and grandparents. 

It does not matter how well intended one is.  If you point out the differences between people, especially unbidden, all it does is 'other' the person, excluding them by example.  It does not matter how much you celebrate the differences.  That they are different is thereby underlined, even when for all pratical purposes, they are the same as anybody else. 

Thus multiculturalism creates instability.  It magnifies small variations which should be rendered insignificant by time, cutting them like fresh letters in stone:

 "You are not One of Us".