Dear Sir/Madam,

In response to your recent articles and today’s leader on David Blunkett’s use of the word “swamping” (Guardian leader; Blunkett deeper in 'swamp' row; Row erupts over Blunkett's 'swamped' comment; Floods, inundation, and other unspeakable words):

I was born in the London suburb of Wembley (Brent) shortly after the war, where I grew up and lived until I was 24, when I moved to the continent (Germany). I’ve been back regularly to visit my family and will shortly be moving back for good – at least, that is my intention.

However, I won’t be moving back to the suburb where I was born and grew up, since all of my relatives, along with most of the other indigenous population moved away over the years as they felt more and more uncomfortable with the ever increasing numbers of immigrants. When I go back there now it is like entering a foreign country - more like Asia than Europe. A couple of years ago I visited the primary school I once attended and I found myself looking for white faces among the children in the playground. There were one or two. But the vast majority were clearly recognisable as the children of immigrants. I learned later from official sources that most of them did not speak English at home.

I will probably be classified as a racist for even noticing – let alone commenting – on the above.

But I am not a racist. I am proud that my father spent 6 years of his life fighting and helping to defeat European fascism. However, the loss of my home, the familiar area where I was born and brought up, to a foreign race and culture I find very painful, which makes me angry - not towards the immigrants, who were just trying to do the best for themselves and their families, but to towards the British politicians who allowed - indeed, encouraged - it to happen.

Over the years I also experienced the pain and distress that the huge influx* of immigrants and the resulting over-alienation caused to my parents and others like them. Particularly distressful was the fact that when they expressed their feeling to representatives of the political parties they were told that they were being “racist”. They suffered in silence, and - to their credit - didn’t vote for the National Front. (*one might justifiably refer to an increase in immigrant population from less than 5 to more than 50 percent as "inundation" or swamping", but in true Orwell'esque fashion, the use of such words is forbidden by the Guardians of Political Correctness).

They had nothing against the immigrants as individuals – the ones they got to know personally they liked – put there were too many – far too many – of them. They were nice enough, but they were still foreign: they looked foreign, behaved foreign and spoke foreign. That made them feel more and more uncomfortable, until eventually they moved away, to a part of London were there were not – yet – so many immigrants.

The trouble, I think, is that we are still suffering from the trauma of Nazi Germany’s insane and criminal use of race to classify people (with Germans as the supposed master race and others at various levels of inferiority), so that now we are terrified of attributing any significance at all to differences of race or culture.

It is not a question of whether one race or culture is better than another. The fact is that most of us belong to a particular race and culture, with which we cannot help but identify.

Viewed objectively, I know that my family is no better than other families, but it is MY family, the one that I belong to, with which I have the most in common and with which I identify; to me personally, subjectively, it is the best and most important family in the world. I have very similar feelings in respect to race and culture.

It is a mistake to apply New World standards on immigration and race relations to the Old World. America is a “Nation of Immigrants”! Apart from a tiny proportion of native Americans, most of those now living in North America, whether of European, African or Asian decent, are relatively recent immigrants. And the same applies to a greater or lesser extent to the whole American continent, as well as to Australia and New Zealand. But it does not apply to most of the rest of the world, which has long-standing, dominant, indigenous populations with their own cultures and histories.

A “black” or “Asian” European has a different status to a “black” or “Asian” American, just as a whites in Asia or sub-Saharan Africa have a different status to the indigenous peoples there.

Although there is no such thing as racial purity, until very recently the mixing that took place was of closely related and located peoples (Celts and Germans, for example), so that within one or two generations the distinctions disappeared. The situation now is very different, with immigrants coming from distant continents with very different racial, cultural and historical backgrounds. To expect them to merge with and become indistinguishable from the indigenous population is absurd. They remain clearly recognisable, racially if not culturally, as immigrants, or as the children of immigrants.

In America, immigration is not such a problem, because they are all immigrants. Elsewhere, especially on the scale currently occurring in Europe, it is a problem, one that urgently needs to be addressed, instead of being denied in the mistaken belief of combating racism.

Rather than combating racism, the Guardian is helping to create a huge potential for future racial and cultural conflict.

Having failed so miserably to create the socialist dream of a classless society, the leftwing - in alliance with capitalists who are only interested in the “colour” of your money – is now hard at work creating multi-racial/multi-cultural society. The result, I fear, will be centuries of needless conflict.