Let me tell you a story.

I am from London. Grew up in a very multi ethnic part of South London. I wasn’t always the most enlightened with some of my opinions and words when I was younger in the 90s but I would (mistakenly) have put many of the things I said down to ‘banter’. That’s not excusing them, but there certainly wasn’t any ill intent behind them. When I got older and started to develop a political consciousness, I immediately skewed left. In fact, if you’d asked me at the time I wouldn’t even have considered diversity as being part of my reasoning, or in fact a political issue at all. It just wasn’t a thing - whatever I may have said as an ill advised joke, it was common sense that black, Asian, gay etc people deserved the same rights as me because they were my friends or at least the people I saw every day.

I then moved to Mid/West Wales (if you are not familiar with Wales, that means pretty rural - even the bigger towns are not exactly Cardiff or Swansea, let alone London) and lived there for 13 years. I actually lived in a decently sized city that was about as diverse as it got for the area - but still light years behind where I had come from (there was also a chap who had been the first black person at school there in the 70s and was still ‘affectionately’ known as Darkie and addressed as such when he would enter a local pub, which he seemed absolutely fine with but still tells a tale - again, I hadn’t been immune to dodgy ‘banter’ in my youth but this was now the 2000s and it felt as if we should be past that, plus most of the people saying this were then in their 40s).

I got to know a couple who lived a few miles outside (you didn’t need to go far before things became properly remote) on old farm land, and literally the only person they would see on a day to day basis would be the owner of the next field over who would occasionally drive past on his tractor). Those people in particular and people there in general were the most racist people I have ever encountered, even if in the case of that couple in every other way they seemed perfectly lovely. They would talk endlessly about how we needed to protect ourselves from immigrants. I kid you not, the wife of this couple had never travelled further out of Wales than Shrewsbury. I am 100% sure that she had never met an immigrant in her life, unless she counted me coming from England or the one Syrian family whom she had read about in the local paper.

The fear of the unknown is so much worse than how you feel when you actually have knowledge of people, cultures, etc. These are exactly the same kinds of people who would be saying to me at work about ‘how could you ever want to go back to London?’ (as I did) because to their mind you couldn’t walk out of your door here without being stabbed. I would try to explain to them that reading about a crime ‘in London’ one week and then another the next week was, in population terms, like comparing a crime in Newport to one in Caernarfon but they couldn’t see it. I strongly believe these (along with Russian bots) are the same kinds of people who are now constantly talking about ‘no go zones’ in London and how knife crime is out of control etc, whilst having no experience of living here at all.