I wonder how many of you that happily slag the City off, have ancestors who actually come from Birmingham or actually moved here when the Industrial Revolution started.
I'm from Smethwick I know not technically Birmingham, but I have lived here all my life apart from a year on the Yew Tree Estate just outside Walsall (and what a experience that was).
Frankly all I'm seeing here are racist comments from a couple of people. Birmingham has always attracted immigrants, from people from the countryside coming into the City during the Industrial Revolution to find work, the Irish for a lot of the 19th and 20thC, my dad being one of them, and then the immigrants from the West Indies and Asia after WW2.
If my dad hadn't
immigrated here , I wouldn't be here. Simple as that.
Thankfully, he brought me up not to see a person's colour, to see the person. I went to schools that were full of black and Asian kids in the 70's and guess what, we played out in the street together, went to school.together, some of us to watch WBA together in the time of our wonderful Three Degrees. We socialised together and some of my mates even ended up together.
Society evolves, my generation were the first to grow up together and in the whole, none of us have done too badly, I personally lived next door to a black family who had 4 sons, every single one of them have got good jobs and fantastic families, not all black people or Muslim people are bad, many just try to live their lives peacefully and normally.
Yes, we have a problem with drugs, guns and violence, what big city doesnt? But I also think there's a lot of good in our old city and that a lot of kids get tarred with the same brush, same as my generation did and I'm sure it a lot of you are really honest, you did too. Theres always been violence between gangs, Peaky Blinders anyone? Then the teddy boys, mods and rockers, skinheads and mods, it's always happened. I sometimes think it's a case of rose coloured glasses with some people. I'm as guilty of that as anyone else I suppose, looking back to my teen years in the 80's, but unlike some, I can see that most youngsters want what we all want, a quiet life.
I'm happy here and wouldn't ever want to move away.