All of this but with a few corrections: in England we DO have grammar schools, they’re just very rare and pretty much confined to a small region in Southeast England.
Also, when a British person talks about “Asians” (or British Asians), they mean people of South Asian descent (i.e. Indians, Pakistanis, etc), rather than East Asian descent like in the US and Australia. South Asians are the largest ethnic minority in Britain (5% of the UK’s population), whereas East Asians are incredibly rare over here (and tend to refer to themselves as “British Chinese” – there are even fewer people of Japanese or Korean descent here than there are (Hong Kong) Chinese, who make up 0.5% of the population).
The acronym “BAME” gets used for non-white people over here, and stands for “Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic”, where “Asian” means South Asian, and “Minority Ethnic” includes all other minority ethnicities – such as Chinese, Turkish, Middle Eastern, etc. Hispanic/Mexican/Latino people are so rare it’s unlikely you’ll meet any, even in the big cities.
And yes, we are ruder. Like the Australians, it’s not unheard of to call someone a “cunt” in a joking way (although it’s usually used as an insult, and is not a gendered slur over here like it is in the US).
London is very very racially diverse, but outside of the cities, the UK really isn’t. My husband grew up in a part of the English countryside that’s like 99% white (probably even 100% white). Whenever we visit, I am literally the only brown face there.
Also, I feel like gay culture in London is quite different to what Tumblr often portrays LGBT culture as? Homophobia still exists, like it does everywhere, but in my experience, many gay and lesbian people in London are quite openly gay/lesbian – whether that’s out and about or at work or whatever.
Foreign holidays are reasonably common. The vast majority of Brits will have been abroad (i.e. outside the UK) at least once in their lives, even if it’s just to Europe (and in Britain, we think of “Europe” as the mainland part of the continent where they don’t speak English as a first language. Americans tend to refer to Brits as “Europeans”, but we generally don’t tend to see ourselves as Europeans ourselves… although the Brexit vote in 2016 changed some of that in some people’s minds).
Also, social class is much, much, much more a thing over here than it is in many other (every other?) countries in the world. Social class in Britain is not just about wealth and aristocracy – although it used to be – but social class markers that people will pick up on (and immediately use to figure out which social class you belong to) will include your accent, what type of school you went to, what kind of food you eat, what kind of leisure hobbies you have, even down to how you dress. And yes, this even applies – to some extent – to those of us who are non-white or have immigrant parents.
