“Happy Brexit Day”
Aka we hate you and think we now have licence to persecute and shame you.
“Happy Brexit Day” notices telling residents “we do not tolerate” people speaking languages other than English have been posted at a block of flats.
Who’s we, one wonders. Whatever damn fool wrote that notice is not the “we” of everyone living in that block of flats.
A resident of Winchester Tower in Norwich first spotted them at 06:00 GMT on Friday, as first reported in the Eastern Daily Press.
The man, who does not want to be named, has reported the signs – which he said were on every floor – to the police.
Full text:
As we finally have our great country back we feel there is one rule that needs to be made clear to Winchester Tower residents.
We do not tolerate people speaking other languages than English in the flats.
We are now our own country again and the Queens English is the spoken tongue here.
If you do want to speak whatever is the mother tongue of the country you came from then we suggest you return to that place and return your flat to the council so they can let British people live here and we can return to what was normality before you infected this once great island.
Its a simple choice obey the rule of the majority or leave.
You won’t have long till our government will implement rules that will put British first. So, best evolve or leave.
God save the Queen, her government and all true patriots.
I think “we can return to what was normality before you infected this once great island” is a particularly striking detail.
Comments
54 responses to “We”
So Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Manx and Cornish would be okay then? I wouldn’t want to share Winchester Tower with an oik that doesn’t know how to use apostrophes.
Nooooo, the oik specified English. Also prattled about British but then oik doesn’t seem very alert to such distinctions.
This is so over-the-top I’m wondering if (hoping) it was put out by someone very disgruntled over Brexit.
I’m imagining the oik as BBC Radio Norwich’s fictional DJ Alan Partridge. If you haven’t watched the Steve Coogan sitcom, I highly recommend ‘I’m Alan Partridge’ from the late 90s.
Sastra, my thoughts exactly. It’s possible it’s real, but if I had to bet, I think it’s more likely to be satire.
(We need some code so we know whether to laugh or be outraged by stuff like this. Something that wouldn’t be obvious but could be quickly figured out if there were doubt, such as the alphabetic distance between the first letters in the second and fourth sentences being a certain number.)
Satire or perhaps a hoax. Unfortunately such hoaxes are all too common.
I wasn’t aware that Brexit was a decision decided by a clear majority. The Tories implementing it sure as hell weren’t elected by one (as I recall)
On the other hand, it could be the work of someone who was gruntled.
Am I the only one to notice
Seems someone is a tad confused about the languages they permit.
It’s worth pointing out that while the brexit vote outnumbered the remain vote, a large number of registered voters didn’t bother to vote. The brexit vote was only about 37% of that population. Worse, there were also people eligible to register for voting but had not done so, and so in total, the brexit vote total was only about 34% of the voting age population.
One third of UK adults have determined the course of action for all of the UK for subsequent generations, and looking back at the process we see a systemic breakdown of UK political competence.
It’s also worth noting that the Brexit referendum was carried out without anyone at all having the slightest idea what they were voting for or what the consequences either way might be. Presumably, then, the vast majority of those who voted did so on the basis of gut feeling. There is not the slightest doubt that many of these feelings were racist ones.
The media have somehow pretended to lose sight of the fact that the vote was almost entirely about racism and the result was a triumph for racists. Immediately after the vote, racists felt encouraged and legitimised and racist attacks spiked. Race-related attacks and hate crimes have continued to increase.
So with respect, Sastra and Skeletor, you’re quite wrong. I see and hear attitudes and language like those in the notice every single day. This particular notice might or might not be legit, but I can assure you that it is overwhelmingly more likely to be that than satire. And it’s only the beginning.
@Blood Knight:
It was a majority, but only barely. And it was a referendum that was not legally binding in the first place. Why we insisted on going through with it once we’d started to realise how fucked we were going to be as a result is beyond me.
Brexit was a gamble by David Cameron which backfired spectacularly, dooming us all.
“The Queen’s English”? That’s what everyone will be speaking from now on?
One looks forward to it.
It doesn’t say which queen. I’m going to use Elizabethan English at all times.
latsot, ¿Porqué no hables el Inglés de la Reina Caterina?
Also, Queens English… I know it’s just an artifact of limited literacy, but it is amusing considering how English is spoken in Queens (NY).
And also:
https://i.insider.com/58a35b6e6e09a897008b6f27?width=2500&format=jpeg&auto=webp
Ah, Skeletor at his skeletorising again. It’s all harmless, really!
Papito, fascinating map!
OB, maybe the “we” is the Royal “we” of the Queens (sic) English.
If it is”satire” then it is the kind of humor that causes considerable splash damage. Not cool. If a hoax then it is cruel. Although cruelty seems to be right now.
Personally, I think it’s real. It’s not at all inconsistent with things I’ve heard from friends of mine who are of Indian subcontinent or Afro-Caribbean ancestry.
Aargh. HTML fail.
Although cruelty seems to be
en vogueright now.Ok, still got it wrong. You take my point.
Hell, it’s not even ‘just’ racism–a white French friend and I took a cab somewhere recently and I was absolutely mortified at what she had to hear from the driver. She just shrank further and further back into her seat as we travelled. It’s an absolute fucking disgrace. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if she decided to leave, just because of the way she’s being treated here.
That’s why I generally include xenophobia along with racism when I’m applying adjectives to Trump and his plans and his “base.”
I remember a friend of mine who came from Ghana, and spent quite a bit of time in the UK. He contended that the UK was more racist than the US; and he was living in Oklahoma, which has very southern attitudes without actually being considered part of the south.
I didn’t believe it at the time; I’m starting to get it.
iknklast, I have lived in the South for a dozen years now (currently Atlanta), and the “southern attitude” isn’t as racist as you’d think, it’s pretty chill here. I passed more confederate battle flags in Pennsylvania than anywhere I’ve been in the South, it was truly bizarre. Also gleaned from my travels I can say racism is more prevalent the further you get from urban areas throughout the US generally, and especially in California of all places.
I live in Memphis, which is southwest Tennessee, about 20 miles from the border with Mississippi. Memphis itself is ~70% African American, but out in the leafy suburbs it’s mostly white, the classic “white flight” syndrome. And Mississippi is… well, Mississippi. Racism as law and policy.
The hullaballoo over the removal of the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest (one of the founders of the KKK) for the 50th anniversary of the murder of Dr Martin Luther King Jr was astonishing. (They also took down a statue of Jefferson Davis outside City Hall). Memphis had to do some clever legal maneuvering to be able to take the statues down at all – there’s a law in Tennessee forbidding it on public land. Memphis sold the land to a charity for $1, it’s private land and the charity could have them hauled away.
I live in one of those leafy white suburbs and the posts on Nextdoor warning about strange black people in the neighborhood (one time it was actually a friend of mine who was visiting and got lost). So, yeah, I guess it depends where you live. Racism is certainly alive and well here.
Yes it’s still everywhere for sure, I remember the uproar about the removal of the confederate flag from the South Carolina capital courthouse a few years ago, and other things of course. But generally I think the civil rights movement still has a lot of momentum in the South, maybe more than elsewhere in the country. I am surprised to hear about the racism in the UK, but I’ve never been there.
twiliter, Oklahoma is not technically the South. It wasn’t even a state during the Civil War, and to the extent that the Native Americans allied with anyone, most of the tribes in Oklahoma tended to ally with the north. But…the attitude in Oklahoma is…well, that the south will rise again, sanity will be restored, and Obama should go back to Kenya. Confederate flags are everywhere (I see that in Nebraska, too, which was not a state either, but contributed to the Union war effort.
But if the south is as chill as you describe, then a lot of black people are lying to me.
OK is proximate to and probably a lot like Texas, which is included in the South depending on who you ask. But yes, I think people are pretty good to each other here, and no more racist than anywhere else, which is why I think it’s mostly a stereotype now that the South is more pronouncedly racist than anywhere else in the US. There are people here who think there is a lot of work yet to be done, which I would agree with, but it’s not the 60’s here anymore, there has been improvement.
I’ll say further that I do think it’s a stereotype after having lived here, but I also think the legacy is kept alive by those who have particular agendas. We can all learn the lessons of history, some choose not to. Why, I don’t know.
The PNW is far worse than say, Middle Tennessee of a decade ago. People that were racist in the way people up here are in TN were ostracized. Proper southern racism is a bit more genteel, whereas the screaming Trump cultist is all we’ve got up here.
California too. I lived there a lot longer so I had a lot of exposure, but generally speaking I saw a lot more racist attitudes expressed there. Not just blacks, all minorities. Lots of xenophobes in CA, of all places.
I live in Montgomery, AL. I think there are a lot of people in the South who want to be able to say it’s “just as bad everywhere”. There are a lot of people in the North (where I spent most of my life) who want to be able to say that racism is strictly a Southern problem. It is bad all over, but I think it’s fair to say it’s particularly bad in the South. I could point to numerous incidents, both by government officials and individuals; I can drive to Tuscaloosa or Birmingham and pass a number of Confederate flags on the way; and so on. It’s not a uniquely Southern problem, but “just as bad everywhere”, as some of my acquaintances insist, is a stretch.
Atlanta is a cosmopolitan major city (lovely place, I visit often). It’s sometimes said that Georgia is Alabama plus Atlanta. So it could be simply a perspective difference.
Thre’s racism everywhere. UK, NZ, Australia, US. The South of the US fetishises it in a way not many western countries do these days.
#SilentSham as just one example.
Roj Blake @ #9
That mistake is in OB’s quotation, but the photo of the original is “if you do want to speak ….”
And if the oik doesn’t want furrin languages spoken in Great Britain, better take out the Danish, Norse, Norman French, etc, and go back to Anglo-Saxon. Oh, but Latin was the language of government, administration, law, and religion.
Pace Sastra & Skeletor, it really does not matter whether it was or was not a hoax. That is a red herring, which I’m afraid I am not surprised Skeletor seized on so rapaciously and with such an unfunny attempt at humour. Whatever the ‘intent’ involved, the result is that a number of people will have been hurt and upset amidst an atmosphere in Britain, where a puerile nationalism affects not only a large number of English people and the Brexit party with the little Union Jacks they like waving, but the British government itself, and people are shouted at publicly by ‘true patriots’ for speaking a language that is not English,
@35, I can only assume any true Briton will want to return to the original neolithic tongue, not that new fangled Germanic hybrid spoken by the Angles and the Saxons! Even the Celtic languages pre-dating the Roman invasion are after all European imports.
Hmmm, given we’re not sure about the original neolithic, we might just have to resort to Celtic. I’m sure no-one will have a problem with a spot of indo-european.
Rob, maybe they should just settle for grunts? A growl or two?
It would certainly be in line with the thought process.
Roj Blake…read the note, not the transcript, they misquoted it in more than one place.
Tim Harris of course it matters if it’s a hoax. It sounds like you’re already lining up your defence in case the police discover a “left wing activist” is to blame…
I lived in Germany until I was 19 and the first thing I noticed when I moved back to the UK was how pleased people are with their casual racism. It was a real eye-opener. I’ve been asked if I thought “Hitler had a point” (because I was presumed German I suppose?)
It seems to be a weird sort of reasoning where “we” defeated those evil Nazis therefore “we” are the good guys and get a free pass for anything that doesn’t go as far as concentration camps and gas chambers. As if it was compassion for the people the Nazis were murdering that made other nations go to war with Germany in the first place.
Rob,
It’s likely that the only remaining descendant of the pre-Indo-European languages is Basque, so perhaps it’s time to make Britain Basque again.
Roj @ 9 and maddog @ 34 – ARGH sorry I did indeed introduce a mistake into the letter to join the mistakes of the letter’s author. I transcribed it in case not everyone could read the image…along with copying the bits another source transcribed so maybe that source introduced the mistake…but probably not, probably I did. SORRY.
Fixed now, in case anyone looks for it and is confused.
By the way, in case the author of the screed is reading this, “mother tongue” is a term that linguists have mostly abandoned, because of the inherent sexism in that term. In my grad school days the term of art was “L1”, but I’m not sure if that’s still the case.
Linguists and people in general, I think. It has an old-fashioned air to it, plus it’s a cliché, plus it’s just dopy.
WaM, excellent! Basque It is. Perhaps the baitfish can adopt Basque cuisine while they’re at it. Two wins.
I’ve always used “native speaker”. Is that wrong?
No, I don’t think so. I tend to flinch away from using it myself because “native” has those regrettable overtones, but I think the pairing is the clearest way of saying it.
Last I heard, “native speaker” has fallen out of favor, at least among some scholars, because it’s a tricky construct to define. (For example, if you’re born in the US to parents from Honduras who speak Spanish at home, but your daycare is in English, your playmates speak English, the TV is in English, etc., are you a native speaker of Spanish? English? Both? Neither?)
In language education there’s a tendency to use “home language(s)” and these days to talk about kids as “multilingual learners”.
Or you could be born to parents who speak Navajo or Yupik at home. Significantly more “native speakers” than the latecomers.
Thank you WaM, interesting and useful.
Ah, polysemy.
(Another small point: if you take “native speaker” too literally, no one can be described as such, as no one is born speaking a language.)
I think, Dubious, you should read what I wrote a little more carefully and a little less dubiously. Were it a ‘left-wing activitist’, I should consider the posting of that little screed just as abhorrent as if written by a ‘right-wing activist’ – in fact, probably more so.