In The Barber’s Chair

I went to my ‘ethnic minority’ Greek Cypriot barber (who born in the UK, talks like a Cockney and thinks of himself as Greek only when The Sun declares that the Greeks are the best lovers in the world or when the Greek football team wins the European Nations Cup). In the waiting line we all sit in silence reading whatever is at hand (books on the SAS and the ancient world, GQ magazine, The Sun newspaper).

In the chair we are interviewed by the barber. The man in the hot seat is white, middle class, well spoken. The talk is of riots.

So far there have been no riots in London like those that have been reported in the UK media in France and not reported in the UK media in Denmark. I heard callers say on Vanessa Feltz’s phone-in that it couldn’t happen here, that we are ‘too multi-cultural’. Maybe we are too integrated in London (which is what the caller meant to say, perhaps) for one race to turn against another or for one religion to take up arms against the law.

The man in the hot seat thinks it’s inevitable though. He says we are treating the immigrants as second-class citizens although he provided no evidence. The barber says there are too many immigrants here and he says that the problem is not that they are immigrants (his parents were immigrants after all) but that these immigrants (muslim) do not want even to integrate let alone to assimilate. He says there are a million muslims in the UK. ‘A million,’ he said, cranking up the incredulity, ‘A million!’

Then I was in the chair. Andrew told me about Hannibal crossing the Alps because we do history rather than current affairs.

I wasn’t really focussed on the Hannibal story. I was thinking about the man before me. His assumption was that it was inevitable, yet he expressed no indignation at that. He seemed to me to be suggesting that we ‘have it coming’, as the barber might say. And I can’t help thinking that this clearly educated man had accepted this threat, believed it was justified and that what we should be doing is bending over even further forwards to accommodate the threat and not repel it.