Death by Diversity

Observers of the last general election will surely remember the encounter between Gordon Brown and a woman by the name of Gillian Duffy, a voter from some Lancashire constituency or other, a person of no importance at all; just an ordinary individual.  Still, she had her fifteen minutes of fame.  She spoke some unwelcome truths to the then Prime Minister.  She raised concerns over mass immigration, for which she was later dismissed as an ‘awful woman’ and a ‘bigot’ by Brown when he thought only his toadies were listening. 

Gillian Duffy became for a brief time everywoman, or everyperson,  a representative of thousands and thousands of ordinary voters who have effectively been disenfranchised, vote or not, by the political machine, by the social democratic oligarchy that dominates debate and dismisses each and every concern over immigration as ‘bigotry’ and ‘racism.’  The real issue is nothing of the kind; the real issue is numbers.  But it’s become a truth that dare not speak its name, or if it does speak its name – bang! bang!, you are dead. 

Douglas Murray is one of the few journalists for whom I have a particularly high regard.  He says what he thinks, a dangerous pastime in our liberally illiberal culture.  He said what he thinks about mass immigration in the latest issue of Standpoint (“A census that revealed our troubling future”).  His focus is the 2011 census, which does indeed show that we have a troubling future.  The census, and the comment that has followed its publication, shows something else I think: it shows that England, as a nation, is being systematically eroded, worn away, deliberately so, by the politicians, bureaucrats and pundits who govern our lives and dominate our media.

I often use the term England – wrongly, I’m occasionally reminded – to refer to the United Kingdom as a whole.  But here I really do mean England.  Wales, which I do not know that well, and Scotland, which I know very well indeed, have magnified their own distinct identities, just as England’s vanishes by degrees.  The arrogance of the liberal intelligentsia, you know, the Islington set, is quite stunning, the contempt for our past and our traditions palpable.  Murray mentions two of the usual suspects, liberal rent-a-mouths wheeled out on television discussion shows – Bonnie Greer and Will Self, the former who appeared on Newsnight, the latter on Question Time. 

So, Greer speaks – “There is always this failsafe, spoken or unspoken, that there is a British identity.  That’s always interesting to me.  I think it one of the geniuses of the British – of being British – is that there isn’t this sort of rock-solid definition of identity that an American has.”

She obviously is referring to the English, as I think few will dispute that the Scots, Welsh and Irish have a fairly rock-solid definition of identity.  The argument that the English allegedly do not is a justification for mass immigration, the more the merrier, all in the name of multiculturalism and diversity.  One of the most alarming facts from the census is that native English people are now in a minority in London, the nation’s capital.  Boris Johnson, the mayor, says that we need to “stop moaning about the dam burst.”  Yes, that’s right; let’s just drown.  In 23 out of the 33 London Boroughs ‘white Britons’ are now in a minority.  A spokesman for the National Statistics Office apparently hailed this as a victory for ‘diversity.’  As Murray rightly asks, what exactly are the limits of diversity?  When there are no white Londoners at all? 

Then there is that self-satisfied prig Will Self, the grand ayatollah of soft soap leftism, mouthing away shop-soiled clichés on Newsnight.  The audience was packed with the usual debating fodder (does the BBC keep these people in permanent reserve?), that ‘cross section’ of the English public who clap at every right on remark, sorry, left on remark.  In the wake of the census he said “Up to the Suez crisis...most people’s conception of what being British involved was basically going overseas and subjugating black and brown people and taking their stuff and the fruits of their labours.  That was the core part of British identity, was the British empire. [sic]. Now the various members of the political class have tried to revive the idea quite recently without much success?” 

Do you have any idea what he is on about because, quite frankly, I don’t?  Anyway, his view is in complete contrast to that of George Orwell, who had far more direct experience of Empire than Self will ever have.  Most English people ignored the Empire, Orwell wrote more than once; it wasn’t something that impacted directly on their lives.  The Self argument is essentially that England must be punished for its past ‘crimes’.  The Empire, you see, strikes back in mass immigration.  The Newsnight audience went in to orgasmic hysteria over his platitudes – “The people who line up on the opposition to the immigration line of the argument are usually racists...with an antipathy to people, particularly with black and brown skins.” 

Back we go to Gillian Duffy and her kind, the people who simply don’t matter, the people who are not ‘representative’ enough ever to be included in a Newsnight audience, the people who can be scorned and ignored as their nation is literally swept from under them by the dam burst.  These are the people that Self and the other metropolitan literati can disregard; these are the people who can be damned as racist with the usual self-satisfied smugness of those who know that they are always right. 

I value the tolerance of the English people, one of the defining characteristics of an identity that we are not supposed to have.  But tolerance can be too tolerant.  Is there any other nation in the world that would allow itself to be treated like this, to be told that mass immigration is a necessary corrective for past wrongs?  The implication is that the end of England should be celebrated in the name of diversity. 

We are not and never have been a nation of migrants, another lie perpetrated by the likes of Greer and Self.  Until fairly recently in history our identity as a people was solid and unremarkable.  The mass migration of the French Huguenots in the late seventeenth century, for example, was a fraction of a fraction compared with today’s figures.  Orwell could write about the English in a wholly uncontroversial way.  He couldn’t now; few could.  Perhaps we should call, before it is too late, for our country to wake up.  Either that or face death by diversity.  

Cow Girl Takes a Test

Now that we know this country is bulging with new immigrants, citizenship and what exactly it means to be British has become rather the flavour of the moment.  Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has commissioned a test for those who want to make a home in England’s green and pleasant land, requiring them to know quite a lot about the land of hope and glory!    British?  Know the Bard…or you’re barred, declared the Sun in its inimitable fashion.

The New Statesman’s Mehdii Hasan has clear views on the subject.  He wonders who has the right to define what is relevant to British “culture and history.”  This man who thinks that non-believers, meaning non-Muslims, are unreflective people of no intelligence, like cattle, is raising objections to the document on which the test will be based.  He describes Life in the United Kingdom: a Journey to Citizenship as a “deeply disturbing.” 

I’ve not read it myself, but according to Mehdi it “rewrites British colonial history and presents a skewed and reactionary view of the past.”  Consider the following passage, he says;

For many indigenous peoples in Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and elsewhere, the British Empire often brought more regular, acceptable and impartial systems of law and order than many had experienced under their own rulers, or under alien rulers other than Europeans . . . Public health, peace and access to education can mean more to ordinary people than precisely who are their rulers.

Oh dear, how dire.  The thing is it just so happens to be true, but one dare not say anything in favour of Empire, at least not in the pages of the Holy New Statesman.  That’s bad enough but it gets worse.  The test is a weapon, you see, in the battle to cut net migration, rather than a battle for greater community cohesion.  It has to be; Mehdi has spoken.  Would that include cohesion for cattle, I wonder? 

In writing his piece Mighty Mehdi decided to take the existing online practice test paper, helpfully supplied by the Home Office (www.ukcitizenshiptest.co.uk).  Go ahead; be a devil!  (Non-Brits have a get out of jail free card.)  I was a devil, I am a devil.  I decided to follow in his path and every other member of the New Statesman editorial team.  How could I not, after being told that they all failed, including the Mighty One! 

There are twenty-four questions in all, with a pass set at eighteen correct, that’s a 75% hurdle.  People are given lots of time to ponder their answers, the whole thing timed at forty-five minutes. 

Now, you’re really anxious to know how I got on, are you not?  I won’t keep you in suspense.  I got twenty-two out of the twenty-four right, a pass mark of 92%, and it took me all of two minutes and eighteen seconds!  I failed on two – the number of teenagers in the UK and the percentage of people who define themselves as Muslim, pure guesses in both cases.  OK, OK, I’m mooing loudly, an egotistical pleasure that, on this occasion, I simply cannot resist. 

So, I’m safe.  Mehdi and the New Statesman crew will have to surrender their passports and pay a £50.00 fee to be allowed to take the test again.  I would not allow them that loophole. Send the whole pack to pastures new, anywhere off my meadows!  I, in the meantime, will ruminate in contentment, unreflective cow that I am.  :-)

Life on Airstrip One

Democracy and civil liberty are constructs built on one essential foundation – a society that is culturally homogenous. That is to say, there has to be a set of core civic values, things that we can share in our individuality, things that define who we are as a people and as a nation. A respect for the rights and privacy of the citizen come high here.

Alas, such respect is being challenged by the very people we elect to uphold it, demonstrated by the recent proposal to monitor the emails and phone calls of all private citizens, something I touched on in Big Brother might just watch you. We have a government of appeasers, an attitude of mind born of fear - the fear of the minority; fear of what they might think; fear of what they might do. We have a government that would make criminals of us all rather than name the criminals.

The sad truth is our social fabric has all but been destroyed by the lie of multiculturalism, a lie sold by successive administrations. Multiculturalism, of course, is the corollary of mass immigration. The Tiber may not have foamed – yet – with much blood, but Enoch Powell was right when he said that we must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to have permitted an influx of migrants on an unprecedented scale, a movement of peoples not seen since the last days of the Roman Empire.

My thoughts here have been spurred by a recent article in the Telegraph by Ed West (The case for liberalism in one country). In this he makes reference to John Stuart Mill’s Representative Government, a classic of nineteenth century liberalism. I read this some years ago, though I have forgotten most of its content. But there is one key passage that is now fixed forever in my mind;

Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling…each fears more injury to itself from other nationalities, than from the common arbiter, the State. Their mutual antipathies are generally much stronger than their jealousy of government.

Just imagine the likes of Nick Clegg or any of the sad ghosts of contemporary liberalism saying that! It’s something Powell might have made use of, though, alongside Virgil.

Diversity has become the shibboleth that has united the whole political class ever since the time Powell was sacked from the Tory shadow cabinet for showing more honesty than is wise in politics. Thereafter a numbing silence settled on the whole question of mass immigration, a consensus that was no consensus.

I wrote above that we have a government of appeasers, fearful of the minority. People were rightly shocked by the recent mass surveillance proposals but, as West emphasises, what was absent from the debate was the extent to which the snooper state is the direct consequence of mass immigration. The sad truth is that, with the rise of Islamic radicalism, the snooping is never going to go away.

Although the political class in general is responsible for the damage done to this country, the government of Tony Blair carries a particularly heavy burden of blame. I think it will take decades to assess the true legacy of the whole cancerous New Labour project, more treasonable than is possible to conceive, short of a Quisling occupation.

Unrestricted immigration went hand in hand with the war on terror and the appeasement of religious minorities. Il-conceived wars abroad, supposedly designed to fight terror, brought terror to our doorstep. We are far more at risk now from jihadists in London then we ever were in Kabul or Baghdad. The anti-terror legislation introduced by the last government did more damage to our national freedoms than the Taliban or al-Qaeda ever could. All this and the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, a direct challenge to freedom of speech, legislation that has seen people prosecuted for expressing a point of view.

West makes one core observation;

The British end of the war on terror, and the appalling loss of British lives in Afghanistan, is a product of mass immigration, but such is the way that the sacred cow of diversity must be protected that people would rather accept any course than one that confronted this fact.

When wealthy, globe-trotting liberals espouse the cause of universalism they often describe it in terms of air travel and airports, a world of vibrant, diverse, cross-cultural pollination. Which is great, for the few wealthy enough to use business class. For the rest of us society has become exactly like an airport – endless security checks, CCTV, government snooping, armed police and all-powerful officials who will arrest you for an inappropriate remark. For our own safety, of course.

Yes, life in an airport, that just about sums up the truth of modern England. Perhaps that ancient name should go. Orwell was right; this really is Airstrip One.

Death Crosses the Rio Grande

We have a serious problem with mass immigration in England. The United States, I know, has similar difficulties, with migration across the Rio Grande now at alarming levels.

Naturally enough, this kind of thing produces a backlash, especially in times of economic difficulties, a time when there are too many people chasing too few jobs. This is certainly the case in England. There is also, I have to say, an additional fear: namely, that we are allowing in too many people with traditions inimical to our way of life. Right across Europe there are concerns over the growth of Islamic fundamentalism.

That’s not something that affects the States, at least not to the same degree. But there is another alien tradition, I recently discovered, serving to deepen anxieties about immigration, going beyond concerns over mere numbers. It’s not just people who are coming in: Death is there also, riding on their backs – “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”

It’s not some nebulous concept I have in mind, not some apocalyptic revelation; no it’s Santa Muerte – Saint Death -, the patron saint of Mexico’s drugs cartels. Illegal immigration may very well fuel xenophobia but, let’s be frank, death cults have a tendency to fuel it even more.

Santa Muerte is fairly typical of the religious syncretism found right across Latin America, combining Catholic with pagan traditions. The trouble is that this gruesome spectre, with its toothy grin and scythe, has the loyalty of a particularly vicious tribe of devotees, the pushers of a new kind of murderous Juggernaut.

The fear is real enough: that Mexico’s vicious drugs war is pouring over the border, not in part but in whole, a war that in a mere five year period has been responsible for some 35,000 fatalities. This is bad enough but the death cult gives the whole thing an even more alarming gloss. Santa Muerte is following the main narcotic routes throughout the US, from Arizona to New York. She was there in a tunnel discovered a few weeks ago, a tunnel some six hundred feet long running right under the border, looked over by a shrine to the saint.

People have every reason to feel worried by this phenomenon, a sign of a deeper malaise. By their very nature gangs are territorial and fissiparous, drug gangs more than most, but the Santa Muerte cult provides them with a perverse cultic and iconic focus, a possible basis for cooperation and unity. Writing of this in the Daily Telegraph Tim Stanley said;

The goal of these groups is to undermine democracy and govern autonomous secret societies through family, blood and religion. It’s a global trend. The Lord’s Resistance Army that slaughtered and raped its way across Uganda from 1987 to 2007 was led by a man who claimed to channel the Holy Spirit. Perhaps the culprit behind this apocalyptic criminality was the death of Communism, which deprived thugs and thieves of a secular ideology to justify their actions. Organisations like FARC and the Real IRA converted overnight to pushing drugs. But in Mexico, family and religion filled the vacuum left by the failure of socialism.

The assumption in Europe, particularly in the pages of the hyper-liberal Guardian, is that American fears over Hispanic immigration has been brought on by racism, nothing more, and that the country is on the threshold of a new Jim Crow era, a time when racial apartheid was law. But the truth, for once, really is pure and simple: mass immigration, coupled with the importation of malign foreign cults, represents a serious threat to American civic and political culture.

As the country faces a threat from without it also faces a new threat from within, brought on by a loss of confidence and direction, shown in the wave of populist, anti-business hysteria sweeping across the land, a canker spreading outwards from New York, given encouragement even so far as the Obama House. It’s worth reflecting on this, as we here in England also face a threat from an informal alliance between jihadists and anarchists. Santa Muerte, it would seem, has a long reach