QUOTE OF THE MONTH

‘Kindness, tolerance and love of order become snobbery, woolliness and love of the past. Effortless ease becomes the ease of not making any effort to do anything. Gentlemanly intuitive wisdom becomes the inability to make up one’s mind. Doing the decent thing comes to mean that there should be no sharp clash of attitudes, no disagreeable new beliefs, that might disturb someone. The sense of fairness becomes a belief that competition is unfair; it might benefit some new person, but it might also harm some old person.’

Donald Horne [writer and academic] writing in the late 1960s about Britain’s decline.

IMMIGRATION

Below is the copy of a recent article from the Daily Telegraph:


Unchecked immigration is putting Britons out of work
By David Green

Employment and unemployment are both up by nearly a quarter of a million. How can this be, when normally an increase in unemployment means a fall in the total number in work? Immigration, mainly from new EU members, is the main reason.

Should we worry about the wear and tear on the social fabric and pressure on public services that immigration brings? Or should we share Gordon Brown's view that immigration benefits the economy? Immigration produces both winners and losers, and I will argue that the losers deserve better.

This week's labour market statistics show that the number of people in work increased by 240,000 in the 12 months to June 2006 and that, over the same period, unemployment was up by 243,000. Immigration figures are always a long way behind and the latest statistics are for 2004, when net migration into the United Kingdom was 223,000.

The increase was mainly due to the number of people arriving with the intention of staying here for more than a year. The gross number of such arrivals was 582,000, the highest recorded. However, these figures do not fully reflect the increase in migration from the 10 countries that joined the EU in May 2004.

According to the Home Office Accession Monitoring Report, there were 392,000 applicants to the worker registration scheme from May 2004 to March 2006. More than 80 per cent were aged between 18 and 34 and came here to work, with some 97 per cent in full-time work. Worker registrations are not a measure of net migration, because we do not know how many have gone back, but it is the best figure we have.

The top 10 occupations of the EU migrant workers were low-skilled. More than one third were factory operatives, 10 per cent packers, nine per cent catering assistants, nine per cent warehouse operatives, followed by cleaners, farm workers, waiters, domestic workers, care assistants and sales assistants. The people feeling the impact of their competition in the labour market work in those sectors.

Whenever academic studies of the effect on wages of immigration have been carried out, the evidence has been that an increase in the supply of unskilled labour leads to a fall in wages for the low paid. For example, a study of the impact of migration into America between 1979 and 1995, by George Borjas of Harvard, concluded that immigration had reduced the wages of unskilled workers (those without American high-school diplomas) by five percentage points.

Mr Brown is keen on immigration, because he thinks it helps the economy. In particular, it keeps wage inflation down and thus helps to limit overall inflation. Without this dampening effect, the Chancellor's profligate spending, quite apart from his wasting of nearly ££2 billion on tax credit fraud, would undoubtedly have fuelled higher inflation.

But he ought to reflect on the impact of immigration on his own welfare policy. Soon after Labour came to power, the guiding principle of welfare policy was said to be "work for those who can, security for those who cannot".

Labour ministers have usually insisted that the best way to escape poverty is to have a job. So it is, but if the Government expects people to work their way out of poverty, should it not avoid making their task even harder?

Consider an 18-year-old, born with few advantages, perhaps with poor parents and no significant educational qualifications, but keen to find a job. Surely one aim of a welfare policy should be to ensure that anyone who is willing to work can flourish.

Among the hallmarks of a decent society is the possibility that the least fortunate can realistically hope for success through sheer hard work. In a society in which everyone matters, the pattern of disadvantage should not be exactly replicated from one generation to the next.

Governments are very far from being able to control all the factors that make for high or low wages, but they can control immigration, and allowing unfettered migration to drive down the wages of hard-working people is offering them a shabby reward for their efforts.

And where are the trade unions? It seems that their leaders have been captured by cosmopolitanism and care more for the purity of their internationalist credentials than for the daily bread of their members.

But the Government's betrayal of the poor does not stop at driving down wages. The net inflow of migrants in 2004 was the equivalent of adding the population of a city such as Nottingham, and the unprecedented influx of newcomers from overseas has inevitably had an impact on the availability of housing.

Over the past few years, average prices of new homes for first-time buyers have increased sharply, often putting home ownership out of their reach. According to a Halifax survey, the average house price rose from about ££86,000 in 2001 to ££177,000 today. Immigration is not the only cause, and the tendency to live in smaller households has played its part, but no honest voice denies that immigration is a major factor. Moreover, immigration can be controlled, whereas the rate of family breakdown and the desire to live alone are not so easily influenced by the Government.

Between 1996 and 2004, net international migration has averaged 140,000 a year, when the Government's household projections, which are used to estimate the demand for housing, were based on 65,000 per year.

As the respected think-tank Migration Watch UK has shown, using the Government's own figures, over the same period the housing stock fell short of household formation by 370,000 and about 70 per cent of this shortfall was the result of additional immigration. There has been an impact on social housing, too.

Between 1997 and 2005, 167,000 additional social and local authority homes were built. So far I have mentioned only immigration, but, over that same period, 216,000 people were given asylum or exceptional leave to remain. This figure alone exceeds the number of social homes constructed.

If we picture ourselves as members of a free society organised for the common good, some obligations follow. We willingly pay taxes to ensure that no one who falls on hard times will go unaided, so long as they have done their best to be self-reliant.

But if we expect people who may never earn more than a modest income to work hard if they can, are they not entitled in their turn to ask for a fair chance? Allowing an unchecked flow of workers from overseas is harmful to the members of society who can least afford it, and a more measured system of control is long overdue.

David Green is director of the think-tank Civitas

LONDONISTAN

‘Londonistan is - among other things - a state of mind that has spread well beyond the capital and, even after the London bombings, still has British society firmly in its grip. It is not a transient phenomenon but has deep roots inside British culture, and has been created by the confluence of two lethal developments.

The first was the arrival in Britain of large numbers of Muslims, first from Asia and then from Arab countries, where Islam had been systematically radicalised by a political agenda promoting the conquest and Islamization of the West. The second development, which was critical, was that British society presented a moral and philosophical vacuum that was ripe for colonisation by predatory Islamism.

Britain has become a decadent society, weakened by alarming tendencies towards social and cultural suicide. Turning upon itself, it has progressively attacked or undermined the values, laws and traditions that make it a nation, creating a space that in turn has been exploited by radical Islamism. It has thus absorbed much of the inverted and irrational thinking that is undermining not only its own society and the values that underpin freedom and democracy, but also the alliance with America and the struggle to defend the free world ...

Jihadi Islamism, whatever its historical or theological antecedents, has become today the dominant strain within the Islamic world, that its aims if not its methods are supported by an alarming number of Muslims in Britain, and that, to date, no Muslim representative institutions have arisen to challenge it.

In Britain, hundreds of thousands of Muslims lead law-abiding lives and merely want to prosper and raise their families in peace. Nevertheless, moderation among the majority appears to be a highly relative concept considering their widespread hostility to Israel and the Jews, for example, or the way in which the very concept of Islamic terrorism or other wrongdoing is automatically denied. More fundamentally still, many do not accept the terms on which minorities must relate to the majority culture in a liberal democracy. Instead of acknowledging that Muslim values must give way wherever they conflict with the majority culture, they believe that the majority should instead defer to Islamic values and allow Muslims to effectively autonomous development.

The attempt to establish this separate Muslim identity is growing more and more intense, with persistent pressure for official recognition of Islamic family law, rise of a de facto parallel Islamic legal system not recognised by the state, demands for highly politicised Islamic dress codes, prayer meetings or halal food to be provided by schools or other institutions, and so on. No other minority attempts to impose its values on the host society like this. Behind it lies the premise that Islamic values trump British ones, and that Muslims in Britain are necessarily hostile to the values of the society of which they are citizens - a premise with which many British Muslims themselves would not agree.

Since even “moderate” Muslim representative institutions in Britain convey such a message, it is therefore hardly surprising that so many young Muslims are easy prey for radical Islamism and the call to violent jihad from the internet, or the Muslim Brotherhood or other extremist imams who have infiltrated many Muslim institutions and leadership positions in Britain.

And there is little to counter such influence because of a fundamental loss of national self-belief throughout the institutions of British society. Driven by postcolonial guilt and, with the loss of empire, the collapse of a world role, Britain’s elites have come to believe that the country’s identity and values are by definition racist, nationalistic and discriminatory. Far from transmitting or celebrating the country’s fundamental values, therefore, they have tried to transform a national culture into a multicultural society, both in terms of the composition of the country and the values it embodies.

Mass immigration has been encouraged on the twin premises that economic dynamism depends on immigrants and that a monoculture is a bad thing. In some places, the concentration of Muslim immigrant communities has changed the face of British cities. It is, however, considered racist to say so in “multicultural” Britain, where the majoritarian culture is viewed as illegitimate and the nation as a source of shame. Instead, all minorities are deemed to have equal status with the majority and any attempt to impose majoritarian values is held to be discriminatory. Schools have ceased to transmit to successive generations either the values or the story of the nation, delivering instead the message that truth is an illusion and that the nation and its values are whatever anyone wants them to be. In the multicultural classroom, every culture appears to be taught except Britain’s indigenous one. Concern not to offend minority sensibilities has reached the risible point where piggy banks have been banished from British banks in case Muslims might be offended.

Britain has become a largely post-Christian society, where traditional morality has been systematically undermined and replaced by an “anything goes” culture in which autonomous decisions about codes of behaviour have become interchangeable rights. With everyone’s lifestyle now said to be of equal value, the very idea of moral norms is frowned upon as a vehicle for discrimination and prejudice. Judaism and Christianity, the creeds that formed the bedrock of Western civilisation, have been pushed aside and their place filled by a plethora of paranormal activities and cults. So prisoners are now allowed to practise paganism in their cells, using both wine and wands; and a Royal Navy sailor was given the legal right to carry out Satanic rituals and worship the devil aboard the frigate HMS Cumberland.

The outcome has been the creation of a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets. At an abstract level, such moral relativism destroyed the notion of objectivity, so that truth and lies were stood on their heads. This opened the way for the moral inversion of “victim culture”, which holds that since minorities are oppressed by the majority they cannot be held responsible for what happens to them. As a result, a climate of intimidation developed in which minorities could demand special treatment and denounce anyone who objected as a bigot. Minority wrongdoing was thus excused and the blame shifted instead onto the majority. This allowed British Muslims, who consider themselves to be pre-eminently victims of Western culture, to turn reason and justice on their heads by blaming any wrongdoing of Muslims on others.

This communal state of denial continued even after the London bombings. Muslim leaders condemned these attacks - but also said that since they were “un-Islamic”, the bombers could not have been real Muslims. In additions, since Muslims regard Western values as an assault on Islamic principles, they routinely present their own aggression as legitimate self-defence. This moral inversion has been internalised so completely that the more Islamic terrorism there is, the more hysterically British Muslims insist that they are under attack by “Islamophobes” and a hostile West. Any attempt by British society to defend itself or its values, either through antiterrorist laws or the reaffirmation of the supremacy of Western values, is therefore denounced as Islamophobia. Even the use of the term “Islamic terrorism” is regarded as “Islamophobic”.

Such deception and intimidation have worked. So profound is the fear of being branded racist among British liberals, so completely do they subscribe to the multicultural victim culture, that the obvious examples of illogicality, untruths and paranoia in much Muslim discourse have never been challenged. Instead of attacking Islamic extremism, British liberals attacked Islamophobia. Instead of defending Britain against its attackers, they turned their rhetorical guns upon their own nation. Whenever suicide bombers struck, whether in Iraq, Israel or on the London Tube, the reaction of many in Britain’s morally compromised culture - where one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter - was to blame not the fanatical ideology that spawned such inhuman acts, but invasion , oppression or discrimination against Muslims by America, Israel and Britain.

Much of the ideology of radical individualism was imported into Britain from America during the decades after World War II. The kind of feminism that hated men and marriage, educational doctrines that destroyed teaching and knowledge in favour of “child-centred” autonomy, the ideology of racism which laid down that prejudice was confined to people with power - all these destructive ideas and more originated in the United States. Today, the culture wars rage unabated in America, where such thinking has become the orthodoxy in the universities and the media just as it has in Britain. But in the US there has, as least, been a counteroffensive. The grip of the left-wing intelligentsia has been loosened by the growth of conservative think tanks and publishing houses, talk radio and now the internet bloggers. In Britian, by contrast, there has been no equivalent institutional challenge to the hegemony of the left and its stranglehold on the universities, media, civil service, and other key institutions. In the United States, at least there are wars over culture; in Britain, there has been a rout.’

Melanie Phillips, writing in the Introduction of her book Londonistan.

The ideology to which Melanie Phillips refers to in the final paragraph above is more commonly known as political correctness.

The Islamic terrorism, of which we have just witnessed a further attempted example, is not simply the product of a few mad mullahs who radicalised a few Muslims who, for reasons unexplained are/were supposedly particularly vulnerable [a favoured phrase of the do-gooders] to such radicalisation.

The mad mullah theory will not wash.

Underlying the present ongoing crisis and culture war is the onslaught of political correctness, and the supine response of the British ruling class in general and the Tory party in particular.

That is why we need a new party to represent English interests and put a stop to political correctness once and for all.

UK DK

At the turn of the last century, Britain was the most powerful nation on earth. The British Empire, on which the sun never set, ruled a quarter of the world’s population and was the greatest empire the world had ever seen.

Today, Tony Blair has just taken off on his summer holidays - delayed while he sort of did something about the latest crisis in the Middle East.

‘Yo, Blair’ was how George Bush greeted the British prime minister at a recent international conference. And despite all Phony Tony’s sucking up, with his gift of a sweater, the US president was not minded to agree to Phony Tony getting involved in trying to initiate peace talks.

President Bush was not minded to lose much sleep over the plight of Hezbollah and was more than happy for the Israelis to do as they wished.

Of course there was subsequently a press conference with George Bush and Tony Blair standing side by side - allowing Tony Blair to grandstand.

Since then, the UN have told Britain in plain language to stay out and the current peace talks, which look set to fail, have been driven by the US and France.

So this is what Britain has sunk to. The measure of its power is now whether or not the British prime minister will be allowed to share a press conference with the US president.