"Daniel Titley" wrote in message
news:1148381127.714908.283550@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com...
> On the other hand, all those people were white, English-speaking
> protestants.
Well they were all white right enough but the question was about minority
communities. That is not dependent on being non white. The fact of the
matter is that the indiginous minority communities in the UK were white!
They may have been English speaking but again the lingua franca in Scotland
is English. There are probably no Gaelic monoglots over pre-school age, and
virtually all the much more numerous Scots speakers can turn to the closely
related Scottish Standard English at will. I imagine it's pretty unlikely
that Ramsay MacDonald, born when he was, as an illigitimate son of a farm
Labourer in Lossiemouth, couldn't communicate in or easily follow the local
Scots dialect.
They are all Protestants it's true but not all of them were Church of
England which is the Established Church in the most populous by far portion
of Great Britain. Balfour, Campbell Bannerman, Bonar Law and MacDonald were
all Presbyterians and belonged to Churches who are opposed to the idea of
the Monarch's spiritual role. To this day when she crosses the border into
Scotland the monarch is suspended from being Head of the Church of England
and becomes another lay member of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland.
Considering the connections between the monarchy and at least the English
bit of the UK state, then it's amazing how many non-Anglican PMs there have
been. Lloyd George and James Callaghan were Baptists; Grafton and
Chamberlain were Unitarians; Harold Wilson was a Congregationalist and
Margaret Thatcher is a Methodist.
Although Charles Edward Stuart and his father were Roman Catholics, the bulk
of the Scottish Jacobite Rebels in the 45 were Episcopalians. Yet only a
decade and a half after the defeat of the said rebellion the majority
English population of Great Britain saw a Scottish Episcopalian in the
position which was later to be known as Prime Minister.
To see the general acceptance shown by the British population then just look
at the leaders of the major parties in the last election. We have already
gone over Blair's Scottish and Irish credentials. Charles Kennedy the leader
of the Lib Dems at the time is a Scottish Catholic. Michael Howard, the then
leader of the Tory Party, was born in Wales to a Rumanian Jewish family -
and his deputy Michael Ancram is another Scottish Catholic!
Allan
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