Is it the end of racism?
In a speech today the communities secretary John Denham will say that ethnic minorities are no longer automatically disadvantaged in Britain, but that disadvantage is more linked to poverty, class and identity.
New trends are emerging linked to the way that race and class together shape people’s lives and this makes the situation much more complex. That does not mean that we should reduce our efforts to tackle racism and promote race equality but we must avoid a one dimensional debate that assumes all minority ethnic people are disadvantaged.
This should be welcomed and I’ve been arguing for a multi-dimensional approach for years, one of the reasons why I opposed ethnic minority shortlists. Class is indeed one of the primary factors affecting minorities, especially in education where middle class boys of Indian and African backgrounds do better than working class kids from white, Caribbean and Bangladeshi backgrounds.
To say that a person’s race affects their opportunities in society less than factors such as class and gender is now, I think, to state the obvious. In a way it is also a welcome development because it shows our society has become much more progressive on race issues: though it’s still a problem that how much a child’s parents earn still matters.
I can predict some comments and headlines on the right: ‘see, it shows why multiculturalism and political correctness should be ditched and Richard Littlejohn spoketh the gospel‘ etc.
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Shooting at immigrants: an Italian tragedy
Last week the Southern Italian region of Calabria (’the toe of the boot’) became the theatre of a depressing anti-immigrant witchhunt eerily reminiscent of last century’s Ku Klux Klan violence in the US.
First off, the background. Like in most of Europe, fruit-picking is carried out by immigrants, except that in the South of Italy, those are largely underpaid and illegal – under the ruthless watch of the local mafia (n’drangheta), one of the most powerful groups of organised crime in the country.
Reports suggest that up to twenty thousand illegal immigrants in the region are paid £20 for a 12 or 14-hour working day minus a £5 ‘fee’ handed to their gangmasters for transport and “protection”.
They live in appalling conditions, amassed in rat-infested warehouses with no light and poor sanitation and with nothing to do but work and sleep – effectively becoming profit fodder for the n’drangheta. Every morning they are rounded up together, packed into rusty trucks and driven to orange or olive groves.
Last month, a report by Italian daily la Repubblica highlighted a ticking bomb, comparing the migrants’ living conditions to concentration camps. “About seven hundred of them live jam-packed into a derelict paper mill”, wrote reporter Carlo Ciavoni.
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How can Rod Liddle be stopped becoming Indy editor?
Since the Guardian revealed on Friday afternoon that Rod Liddle was seen as Alexander Lebedev’s main choice as editor, there has been a flurry of emails and tweets in horror.
It’s not absolutely certain Lebedev will take over the Indy, and neither is it certain Liddle will be appointed. But more than one writer/journalist at the newspaper has been in touch with me saying it is a serious prospect and they are very worried.
A Facebook group entitled ‘If Rod Liddle becomes editor of The Independent, I will not buy it again‘ has started – and accumulated over 1,400 followers in a short space of time. I tweeted the same on Friday – I’d never buy it again nor link to it if Liddle becomes editor.
The Indy is Britain’s only other progressive/liberal/left newspaper. Rod Liddle is the anti-thesis of all that (quotes by Liddle at the end).
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Does socialism really cause racism?
contribution by Left Outside
Last month DK’s quote of the day from Charlotte Gore and her post inspired by Hayek’s Road To Serfdom.
It may be that the socialists are the most vocal anti-racists, but it is they who’ve created the economic conditions in which racism thrives. It’s they who’ve created a country with a growing obsession with stopping “foreigners” taking advantage of our welfare state, and it’s they who’ve spent the last 100 years telling everyone that Free Trade (which includes free movement of people) is a bad and terrible thing, it’s they who’ve told everyone that the job of the state is to pick sides and pick winners…. and they’re acting surprised, shocked and outraged when people who see themselves as losers in the current system want to use the state for their own purposes?
What exactly did they think would happen? I mean, really? The only way to stop National Socialism in the UK is to stop socialism.
For DK and Charlotte this is one of key critiques of even fairly mild state intervention. In my view it is a totally fallacious one. What Charlotte Gore, and DK, suggest is that once states (read: Socialists) have created even a modest welfare state they have set the scene for conflicts because they have been seen to pick sides and the creation of an “other” becomes central to politics.
We will look at 4 countries – US, UK, Australia and Germany - because they are the ones I have information for and because I think they provide a reasonably adequate sample. Of course, I would prefer to do more but I don’t have the resources or the time at the moment.
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The supposed criminality of black people
There’s a paradox raised by the reaction to “Rod” Liddle’s mostly incorrect claim that “the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community.”
The paradox is this. When it comes to tax, the right are keen to stress that people respond to incentives. And yet when it comes to crime they seem coy about incentives, and prefer to talk about “multiculturalism“ or genes.
The paradox is especially strong because economic theory is much clearer on the link between poverty and crime than between tax rates and tax revenue.
This is because in the case of taxes, the income and substitution effects work in opposite ways. The substitution effect causes people to prefer leisure over work when taxes rise, whilst the income effect causes them to want to work more to recoup lost income. However, with crime the two work in the same direction. The income effect causes a poor person to turn to crime to raise money, whilst the substitution effect means the unemployed have more time with which to commit crime, and lower penalties – no danger of losing one‘s job – for doing so.
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Preventing terrorism at home
A late contender for post of the year, this superb treatise on local racism, the decay and depression of outer-city housing estates and with it the potential for extremism, also contains a paragraph that gives me heart that permanently pulling up the tabloids on their bullshit, however many times you repeat yourself, is worth it:
The impulse to segregate was compounded by the messages that seemed to reinforce the idea that the treatment in Southmead reflected the mood and views of the rest of Britain. “Hundreds of thousands of migrants here for handouts, says senior judge“. “Britain paying migrants £1,700 to return home BEFORE they’ve even got here” “The violent new breed of migrants who will let nothing stop them coming to Britain“.
These headlines were just three of many that were printed in the Mail, a right-wing daily during my time in Southmead. I don’t usually take much notice of the headlines in the Sun and the Mail unless they are truly shocking, but in Southmead the headlines seemed to have an impact on the treatment we received. The level of low-level hostility from adults seemed to be directly linked to the content of the headlines. More outright hostility from younger adults and children followed a day or so later.
Do go and read the whole thing.
What to do about boggle-eyed Spectator bores?
Boggle-eyed Spectator bore Rod Liddle, who is one of many who seems to believe that both lies and bigoted boo-hoo are now legitimate weapons in the great battle against the awful liberal elitists, wrote that:
The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.
It looks like the bugle has been blown, and every cheap, nasty bullshitter in the land has acknowledged its message… With the Tories almost certain to triumph at the next election, anyone who’s spent the last decade masquerading as a basically decent human being should now rip off their masks and show the world their hideous deformities.
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Even Dan Hannan opposes the ban on minarets
Is it still committing heresy to link favourably to right wing Tory MEP Daniel Hannan? Ah well, I was never going to be invited to the Cool Kids’ table anyway:
The decision by Swiss voters to outlaw the construction of minarets strikes me as regrettable on three grounds.
First, it is at odds with that other guiding Swiss principle, localism: issues of this kind ought surely to be settled town by town, or at least canton by canton, not by a national ban.
Second, it is disproportionate. There may be arguments against the erection of a particular minaret by a particular mosque – but to drag a constitutional amendment into the field of planning law is using a pneumatic drill to crack a nut.
Third, it suggests that Western democracies have a problem, not with jihadi fruitcakes, but with Muslims per se – which is, of course, precisely the argument of the jihadi fruitcakes.
Hannan’s last point is surely the most important. Whilst there may have been a few Swiss voters who voted for the ban solely out of aesthetic antipathy, I suspect they were somewhat outnumbered by people who voted because they are suspicious, wary or even scared of their Muslim countrymen.
If a number of amateur bloggers can speculate that fear of Muslims led to this vote, you can be pretty sure that Swiss Muslims have gotten the message, too. And therein lies the problem; othering often leads to more marginalisation, segregation, exclusion, distrust and bitterness than existed before. Those are pretty ripe conditions for political and religious extremism to fester, and so the proponents of the ban are actually succeeding in compounding a problem they supposedly wish to reduce. So they’re either dishonest or deeply daft.
I’m not going to claim that there’s some silver bullet for achieving greater social & cultural integration, and I’m not going to pass myself off as any kind of expert about extinguishing militant theism. But I do know that neither of those aims are going to be achieved by winning small-minded & petty restrictions on what religious buildings look like.
Against the ban on minarets
contribution by Left Outside
Swiss voters have supported a referendum proposal to ban the building of minarets. More than 57% of voters and 22 out of 26 cantons – or provinces – voted in favour of the ban.
In Switzerland a referendum on any new piece of legislation can be held if the sponsor collects 100,000 signatures from the citizenship in the 18 months following its introduction. The opposition Swiss People’s Party have earned the ire of the Government by introducing the Bill to ban Minarets this way. There democratic credentials of this referendum seem clear, after all this was no close run thing, more than 57% of voters and 22 out of 26 cantons voted “yes.”
Yet despite all this, banning one particular sort of building seems spectacularly undemocratic. When it is accompanied by a rise in Islamophobic violence, it seems down right authoritarian.
Guthrum over at Old Holborn is managing to do a great disservice to Libertarians everywhere by holding up this as an example of democracy in process.
Bizarrely he concludes with “The people told the Government, not the other way round” when in fact what has happened is the “the people told some other people to stop doing “that”.” Moreover, they told them to do it by co-opting the massive repressive potential of the state.
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The divine mission of UKIP’s new leader
Congratulations to Lord Pearson, newly elected leader of the UK Independence Party. He has already hit the headlines this morning by revealing that the party offered to disband, or stand down for this General Election at least, if David Cameron had pledged a retrospective referendum on Lisbon, which is quite an interesting day one secret plot revelation for a leader just elected by his members.
Though little known on the left, Pearson is admired and liked by several Tory Eurosceptics, as Iain Dale and Tim Montgomerie testify.
The most interesting profile of Pearson that I have seen was an admiring profile God’s Eurosceptic, published in the Sunday Telegraph back in 1997 when he was first promoting a private members’ Bill to get Britain out of Europe.
Lord Pearson certainly does “do God” – and claims a personal connection with the Almighty which is more direct than any political leader, certainly since Gladstone, after a religious experience in which he believes a messenger from God appeared to him while he was being operated on to have varicose veins removed in 1977.
Pearson says that the experience has led him to dedicate his life to the fight against evil – represented by the European Union, bureaucracy, socialism and Islamism.
Pearson believes that Ukip should highlight Islamic fundamentalism as just as important a threat to the British way of life as the European Union. (Did the forthcoming UKIP result on Friday influence David Cameron’s unexpected decision to raise Islamism and Hizb-ut-Tahir’s alleged involvement in schools at PMQs on Wednesday?)
Pearson has already sought to give a high profile to the issue, bringing Geert Wilders to Parliament. But Pearson has seemed somewhat confused in insisting he makes a distinction between Muslims and Islamists, which was certainly not easy to discern in his recent comments about comparative birthrates which are very much of the ‘Enoch was right’ school, evoking very directly Powell’s fear of an alien element having ‘the whip hand’ in Britain.
Lord Pearson’s own outspoken views about Islam were recorded in Washington DC last month. Asked how much time Britain had before losing control of its cultural identity he said: “What is going to decide the answer to that is the birthrate. The fact that Muslims are breeding ten times faster than us. I do not know at what point they reach such a number that we are no longer able to resist the rest of their demands . . . but if we do not do something now within the next year or two we have in effect lost.”
He later insisted that his remark was directed at Islamists. “One is talking about the violent end of the spectrum,” he said.
Friends and foes might agree that we may be hearing a lot more from Lord Pearson.
The Truth about Immigration
When New Labour’s election strategists sat down to look over the results of the 2005 general election, in which the party lost more seats than they expected, they quickly came to two very clear conclusions.
One was that middle-class opposition to the war in Iraq had spawned a protest vote from which the Liberal Democrats had been the main beneficiaries and had cost them a number of marginal seat. The other was that working class antipathy towards immigration was costing the party votes in its traditional heartlands.
Six weeks later, the government joined the race to the bottom on immigration in earnest with the publication of a new Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill, which become law in 2006, restricting the right of appeal against refusal of entry that had previously been afforded to students, dependants and visitors to only human rights and discrimination grounds and imposing fines on employers who employ migrant workers who lack the necessary paperwork, i.e. entry clearance, leave to remain and/or a work permit.
The Conservatives may have spawned the mantra that ‘it’s not racist to talk about immigration’ but it was New Labour who gave it legitimacy.
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A Straight White Men’s Officer at SOAS..?
London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was established in 1916 as the School of Oriental Studies, with the specific remit of training future colonial administrators in the language and culture of the people they were destined to rule.
Nearly a century later, at this institution founded on racist, patriarchal principles, straight white males account for less than 20 percent of the SOAS student body – a fact that has prompted calls for them to be recognised as a minority group by the students’ union, and granted their own exclusive welfare strategy. On Thursday 19th November, as part of their Diversity Week, SOAS will debate whether or not to appoint a ‘Straight White Men’s Officer’.
University life often comes as a shock to the privileged sons of this country. Higher education is the time in their lives when young men are most likely to experience minority status; white men may dominate the world of work, top-level management, politics, administration, the arts, culture, the military and the media, but as undergraduates they make up only 36 percent of the student population. White males are also less likely to graduate with a first or upper second class degree and find immediate employment than their female classmates, where by contrast, less than thirty years ago, white males appeared to dominate every mixed-gender campus. At university, unlike in other environments, straight, white young men cannot pretend that they represent the standard for normal humanity – instead, they are required to confront their roles as members of a privileged minority on the world stage. Nowhere is this sea-change more evident than at SOAS. continue reading… »
The Right’s confusion on challenging the BNP
David Blackburn writes for the Spectator’s CoffeeHouse blog that the BNP is, No longer a racist party, but a party of racists, in response to the news that BNP membership looks to vote overwhelmingly in favour of allowing non-whites to join the party.
David is highly confused. This is because he says:
The Spectator has maintained that the party’s domestic policies are inspired by racial supremacist ideology and that its economic policies are like Dagenham – that is, three stops beyond Barking.
Yes, I’ll agree with that. The party’s domestic policies are indeed inspired by a racial supremacist ideology. Which is why people should avoid following those policies right? Except, he does on to say centrist parties “must engage with (and I mean engage with, not shout down)” BNP policies. What a muddle. ‘Engage’ is a mealy-mouthed word that usually means ‘follow’.
Earlier this year Tim Montgomerie at ConHome said:
but I do think part of any anti-BNP strategy means addressing popular concerns about immigration, access to housing and championing people’s patriotic instincts… while ALWAYS attacking their racism.
They’ve banned Christmas! Sort of!
contribution by 5 chinese crackers
They didn’t actually. Last year, the Observer reported on 2 November that Oxford City Council had banned all reference to Christmas in its WinterLight Festival (which was nonsense).
This year, it wasn’t until the 13th that the Times managed ‘Christmas lights switch-on ceremony renamed ‘Winter White Night’‘. Guess what? It’s nonsense!
Okay, Dundee Council really have named the night the Christmas lights get switched on ‘Winter Light Night’ (not ‘white’, see), but according to the Times:
Christmas will not be Christmas in Dundee this year. All references to the religious holiday have been dropped from the switching-on ceremony for the city’s festive lights
Sounds familiar. In fact, it sounds almost exactly the same as last year’s nonsense about Oxford.
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Population growth: Are you pro-cancer?
It is documented that the human condition is generally compassionate and generous. Ask a person for their seat in a subway (where there is no predefined right to a seat) and half the time they’ll give it to you, even if you give no reason.
However put in to the mix a sense of ownership and expectation for ones own outcome and we become much more selfish. Jump the queue and expect evil stares, the odd comment, and the person you’ve cut in front of to get abusive.
This is the problem with population growth in the UK. When trying to find something to blame there really is a simple choice in front of you.
You either put your gaze on those that have just as much right to be in the position you are, or those you perceive are “jumping the queue”; this is why the stance of anti-immigration is the natural position for a population to take when faced with problems caused by population growth.
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Immigration and next-door neighbours
The house next to mine is up for rent. But I have no say over who the tenant should be. Is this right?
I’m prompted to ask by Martin Wolf’s argument for immigration controls.
He points out that immigrants add to congestion. But if next door is rented out to a three-car family, I’ll suffer from extra congestion. Why do supporters of immigration controls think I should have no say over this, and yet should be able to control the numbers of people moving into areas I never visit?
Wolf goes on:
Diversity brings social benefits. But it also brings costs. These costs arise from declining trust and erosion of a sense of shared values. Such costs are likely to be particularly high when immigrants congregate in communities that reject some values of the wider community, not least over the role of women in society.
Now, leave aside the dog whistle he’s blowing here.
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Offensive Language?
Its been yet another one of those in weeks in which the use of ‘offensive’ language has been making headlines in both the press and with at least one prominent blogger.
The story that captured the media’s attention was, of course, Pierre Lellouche’s description of the Conservative Party’s attitude towards the European Union:
“They have one line and they just repeat one line. It is a very bizarre sense of autism,”
Curiously that comment failed to generate any real sense of outrage in the one place you might have expected it to – the Daily Mail seems to have been far too preoccupied with laying into Cameron for backing away from a referendum on Europe to indulge in the usual round of sneering at the ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ leaving the field open, for once, to someone with a genuine reason for taking offence, Charlotte Moore, to frame the debate in terms of whether its acceptable to use the term ‘autism’ as a casual insult.
Elsewhere, the Press Complaints Commission decided that its okay to refer Iain Dale as an ‘overtly gay Tory blogger’ in a ruling that leaves me wondering whether Iain’s mistake might have been to complain under clause 12 of the PCC’ Code (discrimination) rather than under clause 1 (accuracy). While Iain makes no secret of his sexual orientation I wouldn’t have said that he was ‘overtly gay’, not in the commonly understood sense of the term, which implies that someone is camping it up to the point that their sexual orientation is blatantly obvious. ‘Honestly’ is, strictly speaking, a synonym of ‘overtly’ but colloquially the two words carry very different connotations in the same way that acknowledging that homosexuality is part of the normal spectrum of human sexual behaviour is a very different thing to promoting homosexuality, despite some people having a marked propensity for conflating the two.
Iain also points the way to another interesting article on language, offence and disability, by Ian Birrell, in which the bone of contention is the use of ‘retard’ and ‘retarded’ as casual insults. That article is, again, written from the perspective of the parent of a child/children with a disability and carries all the more weight for it. continue reading… »
Confessions of a leftwing Islamophobe
To describe someone as an ‘Islamophobe’ is effectively to brand them an ugly and virulent racist, which is no small accusation for one leftist to throw at another. Yet that sort of thing seems par for the course on the major British far left blogs.
Lenin’s Tomb, for example, has no problem in carrying an article under the title ‘Tatchell and pink-veiled Islamophobia’, just in case anyone was unaware that the leading green left activist is a bit of a Nancy Boy on the quiet.
Now Socialist Unity has taken up the theme, with a guest post by one Barry Kade, which we must presume to be a pseudonym. His contribution, ‘The intersections between homophobia and Islamophobia’, is pegged on the recent smears against Tatchell by a number of academics, who have accused him of ‘gay imperialism’. The mind boggles.
I could make any number of tasteless jokes at this point, but will restrict myself to the observation that Tatchell’s detractors are probably not insinuating that he has fused the state and finance capital to facilitate the export of surplus cottaging venues. Go back and read some Lenin, guys.
Don’t believe your eyes
Two different comments on different subjects reveal a common error in thinking about social affairs.
First, in response to my claim that much of the gender pay gap is due to women having children, Toto says: “you didn't consult any childless women before writing this, did you?” You’re damn right, I didn’t.
Second, a commenter on a post by DK says:
Both commenters make the same mistake – they think we can trust the evidence of our own eyes. We can’t.
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The Kaminski questions Cameron didn’t answer
David Cameron yesterday said of the man the Conservatives have chosen to lead their new European grouping, Michal Kaminski:
“I see this as a totally politically-driven campaign and particular nonsense.
“In terms of Michal Kaminski, who I have met, he is not a homophobe, he’s not a racist, he’s not an anti-semite. When he came to the Conservative conference the one event I know of he had lunch with the Israeli ambassador.
But there remain many serious and contested questions about Kaminski.
Does David Cameron think Michal Kaminski told the truth about his political history when questioned about it before and after becoming leader of the ECR? If not, why not?
Following our earlier post, here is a recap on just some of the claims made since becoming leader of the ECR which have fallen apart.
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» How bad is the feline obesity crisis?
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civic cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
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