Well to be honest he should have put his foot down and refused to answer such questions, he's a sportsman not a politician, especially to someone like Piers Morgan who will spare no effort in creating a scandal.
Let's be frank, Freddie is working class from Preston, a place where race issues are never far away and racially motivated violence (both ways) are never far away, he probably didn't have the most enlightened upbringing and this really smells like a stitch up to me, what did you expect him to say? Though the rap music comment is frankly hilariously conservative, like there are no white metal groups promoting violence?
As an asian who grew up in northern England in a very middle class area where there were very few other asians I learnt from a young age how to tell what people's views were on race even if they said something quite different, and I think it can they can be broadly put into a few categories.
On one extreme we have council estate BNP breeding ground types, the ones who make you fear for your safety and call you **** openly. I always pity people like this because I think they've had little chance to become anything else.
Then you have 'Old people from a different time' a lot of people raised at the end of empire didn't think anything of using terms like wogs, n*****s or pakis, but they don't actually have any real malice behind it, I don't really have too many problems with that because my grandparents are the same, they call black people 'Kalas' and muslims 'Sabis' without any real venom. My best friend (an old money type english bloke, all his family except him went to Charter House or Eton) and I love taking the piss out of this stuff and our conversations are littered with racial slurs, he recently got pissed and put a sign on his door saying no n-words or dogs allowed (as a joke, we do stuff like that)...he lives in hampstead...he frantically took it down in the morning. I was once told by a retired British Army Major (at my school no less) that I wasn't half bad for a darkie, my teacher was horrified but I thought it was fantastic.
Then we have what unfortunately is probably the general public, people who will be candid with you at the work place or even socially, but will actually think deep down that british jobs should be for british (white) people and that you should **** off back to India or wherever, it's really not hard to tell, and often pretty depressing when you realise people are like this. You can always see from how they react to you within a group of people, or how they try and compete against you.
Then we have the people who aren't racist at all and have been well raised, but who just aren't that used to hanging around with different races and don't know too much about their cultures, always a pleasure meeting people like this.
Past this we have the super integrated multi culturalists, the people who genuinely don't seem to see skin colour or ethnicity, I must admit I'm not always totally comfortable around people like this because I'm just not used to it, a good friend of mine from Uni was like this and it really took me by suprise at first because I had noticed how segregated my uni was.
I don't think class has as much to do with it as people think, it's more to do with how you're raised. Education will play a big part but it's really upto the parents.
I suppose I'm a bit unusual in the UK in that I was raised with very old school Indian values but I didn't grow up with that many asian friends (bar one guy who's just like me), I'm always very annoyed when I meet people who basically grew up in asian ghettos, it's not their fault in a way but they make no effort to make white friends and basically have no interest in integration. Frankly I can totally understand this sort of behaviour irritating british residents, why come over if you have no intention of integrating? Similarly if you come over to this country and the first place you live is burnley or blackburn, you're probably not going to be too keen on integration, but when people teach their kids to be the same it makes me really really angry, it gives them no chance at living a really normal life in the UK and cripples them socially and as a result professionally.
Honestly I don't think the UK is successful as a multicultural society, how many Asians hang around with white friends as adults and vice versa? The same goes with basically any ethnicity. It makes me feel very priviliged to have friends from all races and backgrounds.
P.S. call centres piss me off for a few reasons, they call at unreasonable hours, but most of all because they misrepresent themselves, it makes me really angry when they call themselves John or Rachel when they're clearly a Rahul or Kalyani, it's frankly insulting and degrading that they have to do this, just be honest, when I can be bothered I call people up on this and ask them where they're calling from, as it's often Bangalore it can lead to some interesting conversations (my family is almost all in Bangalore).
Am sitting within four Scots and laughing at this.
