I’ve been to London a lot over the years and I’ve noticed black cabs have changed the last couple years. It used to always be a native Londoner who passed the knowledge and got access to driving black cab. But recently I’ve had some black cabs with immigrants - this would never be the case historically. So I think they all see the writing on the wall here.
The cab drivers are still true londoners who have passed the knowledge.
What has changed is how acceptable it is to be racist on hacker news and conflate native-londoner with whiteness. Or to conflate being being a true londoner with this xenophobic concept of nativeness.
So many of us londoners are non-white with London native parents who are non-white and in London that doesn't get questioned. You can't imagine how much it hurts to have outsiders come and try and tell us we are different and don't belong just because of our skin colour.
I think they’ve really let up on it recently. Have had a few rides where the driver was clueless and had to punch it into a GPS. Never happened to me previously.
