[GiRTh]

Originally Posted by Livia

Now we're paying for ethnic minorities whose practices are so backward they allow cousins to marry and have damaged children. Guess who picks up the tab?

This post has thrown me a bit. I agreed with the earlier point that unemployed people tend to benefit most from the NHS — that’s just how a universal system works, and it’s generally seen as the fairest way to run one. What I can’t quite follow is how the conversation jumped from that to talking about “ethnic minorities” and supposedly “backward” cultures, especially when the post isn’t even about immigrants or illegal immigration, but about long‑established communities within the country.

I mentioned in the immigration thread that I’m the son of immigrants, and I genuinely believe they’ve contributed a huge amount to this country. It might sound like a strange analogy, but food is one of the clearest examples. Thirty years ago, you couldn’t get a cappuccino in your local pub; now you can probably find one within a five‑minute walk. Someone brought that here. Chicken Tikka Masala — a dish born from South Asian immigration — is now the nation’s favourite. Even my own cupboard is full of things like olive oil, chilli sauces, paprika, and basmati rice, none of which were standard household items a few decades ago.

The country has absorbed all of this without much resistance, and our everyday lives are better for it. Yet the same anxieties about the people who introduced these things keep resurfacing. The culture changes are embraced; the communities behind them are still treated with suspicion. That’s the part I’m struggling with.