In da city

London life is very different to what you see on screens

Photo by Nikhil on Unsplash

Recently, following a single complaint, a TfL video telling men not to harass women has been pulled, because it features a black person doing the harassing. So continues our Orwellian, inverted looking glass universe that the political and media class like to promulgate.

I have some knowledge of what things are like on the streets of London, having lived there between 1990 and 2008. I saw a lot of bad stuff. And for a time I wrote it down in a notebook. So I thought I’d reproduce it here. And since 2008, thanks to the Uniparty, London has got even less white British, has seen masses more people come in from often violent, war-torn countries, and has seen certain types of criminal and anti-social behaviour go higher still.

Here are brief descriptions of things I saw. Not everything is deeply terrible, but I think each incident is a little bit revealing about the low-level difficulties involved in letting large numbers of foreigners from ‘developing countries’ settle in the capital of England.

• Walking towards Willesden Green station, I saw a black man jump on a black woman and start hitting her

• On the Jubilee Line at Finchley Road station, two Asian men, I think from different countries, started having a big fight with one another while one of their women looked on

• One day my landlady in Leytonstone lost her house keys in town. She was afraid what would happen next. That evening a group of black youths turned up and tried to get in, using the keys. I put the double lock on and shouted that I was calling the police

• When I used to walk through Camden Town, there was a black drug dealer literally every few metres. A police officer once told me at a party that they’d try to get rid of them but they’d just return a couple of days later

• In Soho one evening a large group of young blacks were ‘piling’ a crowd of drinkers outside a bar, running into them at speed. They had their facial expressions of aggression/confusion/innocence/grievance/stupidity that I became familiar with

• In a Clapham supermarket a young black man, who I recognised from having a passenger assistance role at Balham Tube station, aggressively spat at me “What you looking at me for, man?”

• I was walking to Archway station one morning, when right in front of me a black youth on his bike grabbed a bag off a young fella and rode off at speed

• During the minute’s silence me and my work colleagues observed adjacent to Oxford Street following the 7/7 bombings, only three people near us talked through it: a black man on his phone, and two Muslim women loudly talking to one another

• Having arrived at Mile End Tube literally two minutes earlier, my girlfriend and I witnessed a cluster of black people having a wild altercation in the street

• At Willesden Green station I caught the tail-end of some sort of altercation between a white middle-aged man and two black youths. They were sly and smug, he was angry, having had something done to him. He uttered racial epithets. He said something about his family having fought in the War

• A black man was sitting on the Tube late at night, eating food, dropping chicken bones on the floor. A white man (not me) said he shouldn’t be doing that. The black man just goofily grinned, I’m not sure he understood

• When me and friends played six-a-side football at Swiss Cottage, a large number of threatening black boys would always hang round the pitch and try to get on the pitch

• When with my then girlfriend’s family, I unwisely said we should get a minicab from Clapham Junction to our Balham house. We had some heavy luggage. At the end of the trip, the Asian driver, whose English was poor, aggressively demanded more money because of this. He was extremely threatening

• Approaching Charing Cross station one evening, I witnessed a big, mad, pitched battle on the street between Asians and black boys

• Every fare evader I ever saw on the Tube, except one, was black

This list is anything but exhaustive.

Many friends also told me of many unpleasant incidents they witnessed involving non-whites. There were a lot. It was like a tax on living in London.

I can hear the cries now: “Sure, you saw all this, but what about all the bad stuff you saw involving white Brits? And you were there 18 years, of course you saw lots of awful things!” To which I’d reply something like: yes, of course I saw whites doing naughty things (including myself!), but never to the degree that I saw non-whites doing things, more nasty things, more violent things, more alien things I hadn’t seen before I lived in London, or after, when I moved to less diverse climes.

Second bit of throat-clearing: in London I also met and liked many non-white people, including the flatmate I lived with for four years. He was an offspring of Ugandan Asian immigrants who fled Idi Amin. No doubt the badly behaved non-whites I came into contact with were among the worst of their kind, but my point stands: all the most disturbing incidents I witnessed over 18 years, and eventually forced me to flee the capital, involved non-whites. That is surely worthy of note. And it’s the exact opposite of what is presented by the media and advertising (I remember one of Ken Livingstone’s ‘anti-mugging’ posters, with a white guy behind bars).

In the years after leaving London, something strange happened on its streets. The criminality, anti-social behaviour and racial problems ceased.

Of course they didn’t.

But what changed was my perception, as guided by the media. Which made me realise that if you don’t actually experience the reality yourself, and are not properly informed about it by a media and political class in damage-limitation mode, then you really don’t know what’s going on.

Perhaps someone living in London now is compiling a similar list to mine - before deciding it’s time to leave the city too.