How ethnic diversity is London compared to NYC ?
It's a different mix, and very hard to call which is more diverse.
Banking is extremely diverse in London, turn up to a Wilmott finance focus, and you see more diversity than in most firms politically correct recruitment brochures.
London has more people from the Indian subcontinent, fewer people with African origins than NY. More Russians, Poles & French, about the same Italians. The Chinese tend to be HK/Sg rather than PRC or Taiwan.
Huge numbers of E.Europeans, (Russia, Poland, etc), typically the Russians are in banking and the higher end of organised crime, the Poles more in midskill jobs like plumbing and catering.
From the perspective of the most recent French presidential election, London was something like France's 4/5th largest city.
A big difference is that there is far greater mixing, and although there are areas with higher %s of a given group, they are a lot less defined and concentrated than NY.
London has a huge concentration of non-whites in the big cities, enough that during the 1970s, my brothers children thought that the coloured people they saw on the TV were dressing up, since we lived 30 miles from London. 30 miles in a different direction, the local bus company said it had no problems running a service over Christmas, but has real issues during Ramadan.
To some Americans. that is an important difference. There are now about the same number of Moslems attending prayers on a Friday as Protestant/Anglicans on a Sunday.
Since observant Christians are much older, and relatively few kids take it up, those who study this stuff expect Islam to become the single biggest religion in terms of observance in the UK, within 5 years, some claim it has already happened, since the Church of England has a serious ethic deficit and is widely believed to be lying about its numbers.
Of course, 60-70% of Brits call themselves Christians if asked (though that is going down as literacy rates improve), but they don't actually do anything about it.
Tony Blair was known to be a Christian, but when asked if he ever prayed with George Bush, flatly refused to answer. At another point where religion came up, not only did he refuse to talk about it, he sent his 2nd most important spin doctor to say "we don't do God", and again refuse to answer. As Blair said on the record when he left office "if you say you're a Christian, people think you're some kind of nutter".
He then became a Catholic...
One sad issue is that the greatest creator of well paid jobs in the world, is right next to the areas of London which are as poor as parts of E.Europe. These are mostly coloured and failed whites, enough that I've been working on a scheme to help suck the smart kids out.
Racist violence is of course a problem everywhere but a skinhead attacking Asians in Britain is taking a serious risk with his life, since they are very likely to fight back. Almost all murders of coloured people are by other coloured people, and no I'm not sure whether that counts as good or bad. In that sense it's like NY., except of course that you are quite literally 100 times less likely to be shot in London than NY.
The stats that Wolf cites are of course shameful, but a point has to be made, that the competition varies by subject. Kids with immigrant parents like I was are vastly more likely to do sciences, maths and engineering. If you look at kids studying languages or media studies they are mostly white and female. Some cohorts doing dimwit subjects are entirely white, a few are entirely white and female, though that "purity" is now very rare simply because more than twice as many people go to university now.
One top maths course ended up with no "home" students at all at one point.
There are however mixed results, most Asian/Chinese kids are rather more likely than white ones to achieve a given level of education, but some like Bangladeshis don't. Partly this is because they are "helped" more, ie low expectations and too much respect for their culture.
It's now the case that about 25% of British citizens have at least one parent not born there, and in London it is much higher, and if you include workers, not just citizens, higher still.
In London, it is mildly unusual to be served food or beer by a Brit.
There is a standard joke, true for many years:
Two Brits are abroad, and really don't get on with the local food, and long for what they eat at home.
But salvation is at hand, "an English restaurant !" they cry, and tuck in to a meal starting with poppadums, and moving on to a curry so hot it glows in the dark.
Such is the prevalence of Indian food in England that food innovations have actually started flowing back to India.
Wolf is right that senior state positions are all held by people who look and talk like me.
(so that's all right then). Although we have a nominally socialist party, it has fewer people in positions of power than the last Apartheid regime in S.Africa.
In another financial forum I got lots of shit for pointing out that British retail banking is run by racist morons. I've met them, if you ever want to refute the idea of white supremacy, meet a British retail banker.
But investment banking is not like this at all. I've been to many meetings at banks where the only bog standard white Brit there was me. Turn up at a Wilmott Finance Focus,
