Picked this up on Chortle:

John Cleese has claimed London is ‘no longer an English city’.

In an interview on Australian TV, the Fawlty Towers star said the ‘parent [ie British] culture’ had all-but vanished from the streets of the capital.

Interviewed to promote a show at Sydney Opera House, 71-year-old Cleese was asked about last month’s riots. He replied: ‘I’m not sure what’s going on in Britain… I don’t know what’s going on in London.

‘Because London is no longer an English city, and that’s how they got the Olympics. I mean, they said, “We’re the most cosmopolitan city on Earth,” but it doesn’t feel English.

‘I had a Californian friend come over two months ago, walk down the Kings Road and said to me, “Well where are all the English people?” And, I mean, I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you’re left thinking, “Well, what’s going on?”

“What’s going on?” indeed, having different cultures all intermixed in a city a lovely dream, but it’s just that.  My experience of these “cosmopolitan” cities is just a bunch of closed communities in different parts of a city who are all as equally intolerant of one another as they are dismissive of the “parent culture” which made this country the kind of place they wanted to come to in the first fucking place!


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