Not so long ago, Pam Dumbleton would have been roasted alive. There’d have been booing and cries of ‘racist!’. There she was in the middle of a particularly combative episode of BBC1’s Question Time the other day, and she was not merely raising the issue of immigration. She was lamenting it.
What’s more, she was sitting in the front row of the Broadway Theatre in Barking, one of Britain’s most ethnically diverse communities.
‘Isn’t it time the Government listened to the people about the effect immigration is having in changing our communities?’ asked the 69-year-old retired office administrator. ‘We are now the complete minority.’
By ‘we’, she meant members of the British-born white working class who are, indeed, now a minority in this bit of London’s East End, according to the Government’s latest statistics.
And that demographic shift is accelerating. Two-thirds of schoolchildren in the Borough of Barking and Dagenham now are from an ethnic minority; at one primary school near Pam’s council estate, the figure is 94 per cent, while less than a quarter speak English as a first language.
Source-Dailym
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