Irna Qureshi’s Belter of a Blog discusses the surprising similarity of Pakistani and Yorkshire attitudes to land, and the even weirder way people chose to divide up their living space in exactly the same fashion on each side of the ethnic divide, at least until they moved out to somewhere that wasn’t built with a natural front parlour-tek-your-shoes-off-lad-it’s-Sunday.
I remember delivering Sunwin House appliances to homes like that – depending on the size and awkwardness of the drop, you might get away with going through the back door into the kitchen, but if it was a fridge freezer it might be impossible to avoid using the front door into someone’s zenana, under disapproving eyes. The decor would always be almost surreally different to the rest of the house or indeed anything you might expect from outside, sometimes astonishingly rich. Not that different from the next drop’s barely used front room and don’t-you-be-marking-the-paintwork-with-us-new-Hotpoint-son.
A lot of people imagine that xenophobic press nonsense is fundamentally British, or even English. Stefan Niggemeier examines how Bild Zeitung essentially invented the idea that Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants to Germany might not get child benefit, or only on conditions, and the serious German papers ran with the story without making their own inquiries.
AVPS is pleased with Ed Miliband’s emerging tendency to wrap left-wing content in the rhetoric of concern about immigration.
Phil Edwards discusses the feedback loop between public concern and policy-marketing, and, er, Bryan Caplan.
Midway through tabbing up some (most) of these links when I saw that last one – cheers! (The relevance of what right-Libertarians think about anything is left as an exercise for the reader.)