Verbal

True for certain kinds of BBC programming - far fewer than you might think - but not MOTD. At the BBC, careers (behind the camera) can be made or broken by ratings - the regular inquests with execs can be brutal. The running order is set by two criteria: regional 'balance' (MOTD is broadcast from Salford after all - a monument to the BBC's colossally expensive ambition to prove that it's not London-and-south-east-centred) and quite straightforward journalistic judgement about the 'best stories'.

Not that many. I've been unreliably informed that the team will include Ospina, Chambers, Diaby, Rosicky, Wilshere, Alexis and Podolski. Assuming that's halfway right, Arsenal are hardly going to be pushovers even if we field our strongest team.

Just as the Scottish independence vote was always going to be No, so the vote on leaving Europe will be No - and for much the same reasons. Faced with the hard economic realities, and corporate threats to head out of town, the pro-Europe margin of victory will be substantial. So rest easy, on dry sheets.

And this is based on what exactly?

No it doesn't! And the article you link to says precisely the opposite - you really must read it. For example: This is typical of your incoherence. You make a point, someone challenges it, so you slide onto another completely separate (and just as tenuous) point. So to try and introduce some clarity here, super prime buyers from Russia and Arabia (and China and the US and Europe and....) are (a) not buying poor people's houses; and (b) are not gentrifying other parts of London. Gentrifiers have been around since forever in London (Notting Hill was once cheap as chips) and are far from simply those displaced from around the King's Road. They're often outliers of various kinds (artists, bohos, school catchment chasers, etc., etc.) And as the article actually says if you'd read, can often have a beneficial social effect. Mushing up gentrifiers, the poor and super-prime buyers in one sweeping generalisation is beyond nonsense. So for the last time: it is government policies that have redistributed wealth from poor to rich that have caused the exodus of the poor (low-paid and unemployed) from London. Rich foreigners buying office space (what?!) and Mayfair mansions (which have ALWAYS been out of reach to us mortals) have no effect on the poor. And back we go to simpleton economics, and the knee-jerk proposition that if you make London poorer you'll make the rest of the country richer. Given the vast subsidies flowing from London to the rest of the UK, the hobbling of London will impoverish the rest of the UK: lose/lose. I'll leave it there, because this isn't the thread for it. Looking forward to a YES vote tonight.

A little? You think government policies on taxation, housing (including the sustained erosion of social housing, especially in London), benefits and health have only a LITTLE bearing on the exodus of the poor from London? You think that the relentless redistribution of wealth from poor to rich through government policy over the last 40 years, and accelerated by the credit crunch, has only a LITTLE to do with it? You think that the failure to build even a fraction of the housing needed, in London especially, has only a LITTLE to do with this exclusion? Again - and it's slightly incredible that this needs saying again - oligarchs and sheiks, and low-paid and unemployed people, do not compete for the same properties! Furthermore, the 'super-prime' market exists in a world of its own in London. (It's actually been falling heavily this year, which has had no bearing on London prices generally). No wonder the Scots want out.

The poor have been in the process of being washed out of London since the 1980s, when Thatcher sold off council housing, and up to the present day, with various wonderful measures including the spare room tax, having forced poor people to the edges of the city and beyond. The poor are decidedly not making way for the 'Russian oligarchs and Arab sheiks' - this is xenophobic, playing-to-the-gallery nonsense. At no point in London's modern history would the two sets have been competing for the same property! So we have to look much more closely to home to find the reasons for these exclusions. UK government welfare, health and housing policies are driving this.

Excellent post.

An entertaining fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless. And ultimately redundant. I personally would like to see a Yes vote, but there's no way there'll be one.

A word and concept only invented in the Enlightenment - ie. after 1707.

Most of it after the Union of 1707 - including the entire Scottish Enlightenment.

Scotland IS a major financial centre. So much so that it, rather than the City, was the catalyst of the UK credit crunch that started in 2007. HBOS and RBS were the largest banks to be bailed out by the Bank of England. We're still a good few £billion out of pocket on that caper. So by the measure of failure on an epic, capitalism-destroying scale, Scotland is already major league. Right up there with the worst.

In what way, exactly, are Jews in Golders Green/Stamford Hill 'unintegrated'? What do Jews have to do to please you? Eat pork and work on Saturdays? In what way, exactly, are Sikhs in Southall 'unintegrated'? what do Sikhs have to do to please you? What 'confrontations' have you seen between Sikhs and Muslims in Southall? (While problems come up from time to time, your implication of chronic inter-communal strife is preposterous, and it suggests you've never set foot in the place). What exactly does Islamified' mean? (And please - don't give the 'mosque+halal butchers' equation. It reads and sounds stupid). As, given the thread topic, you're also presumably tying 'Islamification' (i.e. brown people who have the absolute nerve to go to a mosque every now and then, and buy halal meat) with ISIS murderers, please explain the connection. Blaming whole immigrant communities for a few deluded ****wit death cultists is hardly fair is it?. There are at most 500 death cultists, some of them from immigrant communities of various national backgrounds (by no means all Pakistani) and some drawn from British converts. The vast majority of ISIS are Iraqi (ex-Saddam supporters in the main), Syrian and Chechen. How many 'unintegrated' British Pakistanis contribute hugely to British life, with their energy and creativity? Quite a few more than 500 I would suggest.

You've just listed areas and towns with brown people in them. Hounslow, for example, is predominantly Sikh. Does the presence of a gurdwara there make it 'Sikhified'? Do buildings for brown people's religious worship or dietary needs make you afraid? Would you like to include 'Jewified' areas like Golders Green, with those damned synagogues and kosher butchers?

Which 'large parts' are these? And how are they 'Islamified'?

Where is this presently happening?

Quite. The fact there's still some seepage going on says it all really. It's been more than a little weird watching a bunch of grown (presumably) men acting like jilted adolescents for post after post after post. Much work for Koeman to do to get the right blend, but the window has closed as it opened, with some terrific signings.

The Saudis - actually a mix of state support and shadowy private funders - have a great deal to gain, at least in their eyes. The country is flanked or in close proximity to Iran, Iraq and Syria - all Shia (or in Syria's case an alewife version of it). Were it not for the oil, Wahhabism would be seen more clearly in the West for what it really is - an extreme, conservative, archaic form of Sunni Islam, of which Salafism (the shared ideology of Al Qaeda and ISIS) is just a yet more extreme version. The Saudis are using ISIS to try to drive the Shia governments in Iraq and Syria into submission, and curtail the influence of Iran. It's a proxy war - creating religious armies to fight their battles for them. It's not an uncommon tactic: the Pakistani secret service, the ISI, created the Taliban with a similar objective - to hamper Indian influence in Afghanistan by funding Salafist insurgents to defeat large religious and ethnic minorities who might have been sympathetic to India (and to India's blandishments). The Pakistan army fights a proxy war against India with Salafist insurgents in Kashmir - mostly because it is so useless as a military force (much more effective as a property owner, bizarrely). Iran also does it with Hezbollah and, to some degree, Hamas. So this is a religious war within Islam - one the Saudis are desperate not to lose. As the 'defenders of the faith' (with the two most important monuments in Islam), the Saudis are terrified of Shia encroachment, even on lesser stages like Bahrain and Kurdistan. And actually, it's a war that has virtually nothing to do with the West, much as we like to terrify ourselves with the non-existent prospect of a Caliphate in Whitehall.

Actually, your background is irrelevant. From what you say, your grandfather was a Sindhi – either that or a Mohajir. That’s far removed from the backgrounds the majority of Pakistanis in Britain. If you don’t believe me, try a little test (I dare you). Catch a flight to Karachi, where you say your grandfather is from, and look around you. You’ll see an awful lot of people looking nothing like British Pakistanis – including, interestingly, black Pakistanis, as well as some with blue eyes and blonde hair (largely among the substantial Pushtun refugee population). The vast majority of British Pakistanis – over 75% - have their family origins in a tiny area of Kashmir, in the villages around the city of Mirpur. Why did they end up here? Because a giant dam (at Mangla) displaced them, and the British government at the time, under pressure to secure cheap labour for northern mills, etc., offered some of these displaced villagers employment. These villagers were ill-educated, from a religiously highly conservative area (this is Kashmir after all, the source of so much tension – even in the news today – between Pakistan and India), and with rigidly patriarchal family structures designed to protect what little wealth was around (in which what we call incest – first-cousin marriages – is rife). So think about it: these villagers settling in northern British towns were moving from East to West, from a war zone to a peaceful country, from rural to urban, and from a culture of religious conservatism to secular liberalism. Some head snap! How does this all connect to the abuse we’ve learned about? If, having got as far as Karachi, you travel on to Mirpur, you’re in for a colossal surprise. Almost of all of what’s called ‘Azad’ (‘free’) Kashmir is still dirt poor. Even the few cars around are amount to a vintage parade of 1970s Toyotas and Nissans. The exception is Mirpur. There’s still plenty of poverty there – but also some stunning mansions. These are owned by families with members in Britain. Even a taxi driver in the UK, sending small ‘remittances’ back to Kashmir, can afford the life of Riley for his family back in Kashmir. The problem is that when you overlay this wealth with the cultural background of British Mirpuris, it establishes the preconditions for the kinds of appalling abuse we’ve heard about in Rotherham, Bradford, Burnley, Luton and even Oxford. Family pressures are still on marrying within the family to preserve wealth – but now with much higher stakes (no one wants to divide up the family mansion). This means pressure on young men only to marry women cousins, and pressure on young women to commit to marriages which many resist and a few find themselves in forced marriages. There’s yet another layer to this: immigration. The originally small numbers of Mirpuri migrants have been able to grow substantially in the UK, partly because these tight, rigidly controlled family structures have enabled the movement of extended family members across borders. The flip side of all this is a powerful, drummed-in message that denigrates non-Kashmiri girls and women - in this case, young white-British girls. Think of the ferocious cultural pressure it takes to make marrying your cousin attractive! So non-Kashmiri girls are trash, uncultured, worthless…etc., ad nauseum. These pressures are exerted directly by the families and reinforced by so-called ‘elders’ – actually self-appointed Imams (always men of course) whose duel role is to maintain community cohesion and represent a united front to outsiders (including police). This is at least part of the backdrop of this frightening abuse. The answer, I’m afraid, is the integration of the fiercely isolationist elements (often dominant ones) in the Kashmiri communities. We should all, however, be careful of generalising too much – there are plenty of young British Pakistanis in these cities who rebel against these strictures, do not abuse women, and who lead exemplary lives. The girls who’ve suffered are the primary victims here – but these liberalising Pakistanis are collateral damage in the backlash represented by certain posters on this thread. Oh, and the gangster stuff? Are you still on that guff?

Tell me about it. But we all have our crosses to bear.

Both of them?

Link?

The whole science of ursine intelligence has just suffered a severe setback.

Dear God. So many missing heads these days - heading (sorry) in all directions - the club is turning into an Elizabethan tragedy.

Consortium 11 is a bit of an author.