Category Archives: English

Emma West has her trial delayed yet again

The trial of Emma West on two racially aggravated public order offences has been put back to 5 September to allow further medical reports ( http://www.thisiscroydontoday.co.uk/Trial-alleged-YouTube-tram-racist-Emma-West-moved/story-16543355-detail/story.html). Her trial was meant to take place on 17^th July but a request for a further adjournment was granted on 13 July.

I have been unable to discover whether the prosecution or the defence asked for the further adjournment, but whichever it is the delay is extraordinary . Ms West pleaded Not Guilty on 17 February and her trial was originally scheduled for 11 June (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-17073198).

The 11 June date was missed when the first adjournment was granted because of a wish for extra medical reports. That was surprising enough , because there had been four months between Ms West’s plea of Not Guilty and the request for the adjournment, ample time to get any medical reports. If the 5 September date is kept six months will have passed since the Not Guilty plea.

The further delay suggests the authorities or her own lawyers are trying to wear Emma West down by extending the wait so that she will eventually plead guilty out of fear or exhaustion. The authorities are always terrified of a full trial on such charges because it reveals the naked repression of the British elite and gives a public voice for dissent from the politically correct narrative of multiculturalism. As for the defence, English lawyers these days are almost always loth to put up any defence which challenges such charges on the grounds of the right to free expression or offers a justification for dissent from the politically correct narrative.

The only other reason for such a delay I can think of is that the authorities hope to force her to plead guilty by preparing social service reports which say she is not a fit mother and these take rather a long time to acquire . If so, they could get the reports and then either give her a choice of keeping her children by pleading guilty (and by admitting her crime proving she is a fit mother who will not hand on racist attitudes because she has “seen the pc light”) or continue to plead Not Guilty and lose her children.

There has been very little on the web about this further delay and the only media report I could find is the Croydon Advertiser one quoted in the opening paragraph.

The gratuitous denigration of things English – the reign of Elizabeth I

Robert Henderson

Allan Massie, a Scot be it noted, decided to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II with a deprecating piece on her great predecessor and namesake, Elizabeth I designed to pour cold water on the idea that hers was a glorious reign. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/9307110/Lets-not-overlook-the-gory-details-of-Gloriana.html). He complains of the general treatment of Catholics, the use of torture on Catholic priests and those who harboured them, nudges the reader to consider the likes of Francis Drake to be hovering on or going over edge of piracy and in best liberal bigot fashion invokes the ultimate condemnation of English adventurers of the time by dwelling on Sir John Hawkins’ involvement in the slave trade. In addition, Massie belittles the defeat of the Armada and Elizabethan military exploits on the continent, bemoans English involvement in Ireland and stands aghast as he considers the Earl of Essex’s execution of one in ten of his army after they failed to press hard enough in battle. As for the great intellectual glory of the reign, the sudden flowering of literature symbolised by Shakespeare, this is dismissed as being a mere tailpiece to the Elizabethan age.

Massie, a professional historian so he has no excuse, has committed the cardinal sin of historians by projecting the moral values and customs of his own time into the past. For a meaningful judgement Elizabeth’s reign has to be judged against the general behaviour of European powers of the time and that comparison , ironically, shows Gloriana’s England’s to be considerably nearer to what Massie would doubtless consider civilised values than any other state in Europe.

There were no terrible wars of religion as there were in France ; no Inquisition as there was in Spain.; no burning of those deemed heretics as there was under Mary Tudor. Torture was used in Elizabeth’s England, and in the reigns which immediately followed, but sparingly and only for cases which had national importance, normally involving treason, such as those involved in the Gunpowder Plot which took place only two years after Elizabeth’s death . On the continent it was a commonplace of judicial process. English law, by the standards of the time, was generally remarkably fair, not least because of the widespread use of juries. Those who gasp with horror at Essex’s execution of his troops should bear in mind that in the First World War several hundred British soldiers were shot for behaviour such as desertion and failing to go forward when ordered over the top.

In Elizabeth’s reign the first national legislation anywhere in the world to provide help to the needy was passed, a legislative series which began in 1563 and culminated in the Poor Law of 1601. This legislation put a duty on every parish to levy money to support the poor and made it a requirement to provide work for those needing to call on the subsistence provided by the Poor Law. Educational opportunities, whilst far from universal, increased substantially. Despite , by pre-industrial standards, very high inflation and the inevitable bad harvests, which included a series of poor years in the late 1590s, the population grew substantially, possibly by as much as a third from 3 to 4 million (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/tudors/poverty_01.shtml). London expanded to be the largest city in Europe by the end of the Elizabeth’s reign with an estimated population of 200,000 by 1600 (http://www.londononline.co.uk/factfile/historical/ ).

It was also in Elizabeth’s reign that Parliament began to take on aspects of modernity as opposition to Royal practices and policies were made unambiguously not on the sole ground that the monarch was ill-advised, the traditional ground of complaint, but simply because of what we would now call ideological differences between the growing Puritan group and the still newly minted Anglicanism. This laid the foundations for the evolution of Parliament from being little more than a petitioning and tax raising assembly to what eventually became parliamentary government with the monarch at the will of Parliament not Parliament at the will of the monarch, an evolution which was to take several centuries more to be complete. That Parliament was already seen as being central to the process of government by the end of Elizabeth’s reign is shown by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. That the conspirators thought blowing up Parliament was a necessary act or even just the most effective way of reducing England to a state of headless misrule speaks volumes.

The importance of the English Parliament under Elizabeth cannot be overstated because it is from the English Parliament that all modern assemblies take their inspiration. There were many mediaeval assemblies in Europe, but by the end of the 16^th Century most of them had been rendered obsolete through disuse and the few meaningful assemblies which remained had not moved nor ever did move to Parliamentary government. It was only in the English Parliament that the step to placing executive power within Parliament and away from the monarch occurred. Had the English Parliament been suppressed by, for example, the conquest of England by Phillip II or the early Stuarts’ adherence to the doctrine of the Divine Right of kings, it is difficult to see how representative government could have arisen because the seventeenth century was the century of absolute monarchs, or as near absolute as it was possible to get. These were rulers who were utterly opposed to the idea of sharing power. Consequently, if England had not made the jump to representative government it is most improbable any other country would have done so. Monarchies would have probably been overthrown in time, but they would have been almost certainly been replaced by dictatorships not elected governments.

Elizabeth’s reign was also a time of great artistic and considerable intellectual achievement. The development of the theatre and poetry may have come in the last 12 years or so of her time, but their legacy was seen in the 35 years running up to the Civil War. Music, particularly in the form of the madrigal, flourished. William Gilbert examined magnetism in a manner which was essentially scientific in the modern sense, arguably the first example of such research. Francis Bacon, the progenitor of the scientific method, spent most of his life as an Elizabethan having been born in 1561.

Catholics were rightly seen to be a fifth column. Most English Catholics did not actively seek to commit treason, but they had varying degrees of sympathy with those who did, whether it was the hiding of priests or a secret wish to see a foreign Catholic monarch on the throne. Not only that, but all English Catholics had by definition an allegiance to a foreign power (the papacy) which was hostile to England under a Protestant monarch. Throughout Elizabeth’s reign popes funded and generally encouraged, both morally and materially, Catholics in England to subvert the laws against Roman Catholicism and for much of the reign the papacy was actively working for her overthrow. No pope was more enthusiastic in this behaviour than Pius V who in 1570 published the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis which declared Elizabeth I a heretic and a false Queen and released Elizabeth’s subjects from their allegiance to her.

Those who plotted to reintroduce Catholicism to England were unambiguous traitors. They did not simply seek to overthrow the existing monarch, but to entice a foreign Catholic king to invade and seize the throne with the primary purpose, in their eyes, of enforcing the return of Catholicism.

Elizabeth’s reign took place in the context of a world in which England had to guard against many enemies from the counter-revolutionary forces on the continent to the threat of Scotland attacking England when she was distracted by continental matters or still Catholic Ireland being used as a sidedoor for the invasion of England by continental powers . The most forbidding threat came from Spain, the greatest power in Europe at the time. Phillip II’s marriage to Mary I gave Phillip a permanent interest in England – he tried to marry Elizabeth and considered a plan to use his departure from England for Spain in 1559 following Mary’s death as cover to land troops as he sailed down the Channel (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/tudors/adams_armada_01.shtml )- and , quite reasonably, placed in English minds the idea of a constant threat of Spanish invasion of England and its enforced reconversion to Catholicism – in 1584 Philip II of Spain signed the Treaty of Joinville with the French Catholic League, with the aim of eradicating Protestantism. Attacks on Spanish treasure ships can reasonably be seen not as simple piracy but as acts of war engendered by the Spanish threat. In addition, the claim of Spanish and Portuguese ownership of the New World was really no more than a self-arrogated exclusion zone created by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 and the English attacks on Spanish ships and New World settlements were in response to this exclusion. (It is important to understand that the scramble for overseas colonies by European powers was driven as much by the fear that monarchies such as Spain and France would become too powerful in relation to the monarchies which did not have colonies as by a desire to simply conquer new territory or personal gain).

Massie’s dismissal of the defeat of the Armada as a victory for the elements rather than the Elizabethan navy is distinctly odd. He overlooks the fact that before the Spanish were sunk by the weather the English navy had prevented the Spanish from clearing the Channel of English warships in readiness for the embarkation of the Spanish invasion troops who were waiting at Dunkirk. Massie also makes no mention of the raid on Cadiz in 1587 by Drake which probably delayed the Armada for a year giving the English time to prepare against the intended invasion.

As for English military continental adventures, there were failures, but the most important contributions of England to the battle between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation was her financing of Protestant powers on the continent, most notably the United Provinces, and the very fact of England remaining unconquered, the latter being of immense importance because the Protestant states on the continent were weak and fragmented and England was by far the most important Protestant power of the time. If England had fallen to Spain, it is doubtful whether Protestantism could have survived, if it had survived at all, as more than a family of persecuted sects.

The casting of John Hawkins as beyond the Pale because he was a slave trader clankingly misunderstands the mentality of the age. Forms of legal unfreedom, ranging from full blown chattel slavery to indentured labour (which could be for years particularly in the case of apprenticeships), were common throughout Europe. Moreover, the poor who were not formally legally restrained in their freedom were under severe economic restraints to do what they were told and take what work they could get. Slavery was not seen as an unmitigated , unforgivable evil. It is also worth bearing in mind that although serfdom was never formally abolished in England, by Elizabethan times it had practically vanished through a process of conversion of the land worked for themselves by serfs to land held by copyhold tenancies. The reverse took place in central and Eastern Europe where feudal burdens became more stringent and widespread in the sixteenth century and even France retained serfdom in some places, most notably, Burgundy and Franche-Comté, until the Revolution in 1789 and seigneurial privileges which required freemen holding land of the seigneur to have a relationship which in practice was not so different from that of the serf.

The great triumph of Elizabeth’s reign was that both she and Protestantism survived. This meant that England was never again in thrall to a foreign power until Edward Heath and his fellow conspirators signed away Britain’s sovereignty by accepting the Treaty of Rome in 1972 and entangling Britain within the coils of what is now the EU. It was not that Protestantism was in itself superior to Catholicism, rather that in embracing Protestantism the question of divided loyalties between monarch and papacy was removed.

It is true that the idea of Gloriana was propaganda both during the reign itself and in the Victorian period most notably in the hands of the historian J A Froude painted too sunlit a picture. But the reign was of immense importance in creating the England that became writ so large on the history of the next four centuries. If it had not been Elizabeth who came to the throne in 1558 the odds are that Phillip II would have conquered England. Had she not reigned for so long Protestantism would not have become the irrevocable religion of England. If she had not called Parliament regularly it would not have laid the ground for eventual Parliamentary government and any other monarch would almost certainly have emasculated the Commons. The existence of behaviour which offends Mr Massie’s twenty-first liberal bigot sensitivities is irrelevant.

Helping Boris Johnson to understand why foreigners “get all the jobs”

Mr Boris Johnson

Mayor of London

Greater London Authority

City Hall

The Queen’s Walk

More London

London SE1 2AA

Telephone: 020 7983 4100

Minicom: 020 7983 4458

Fax: 020 7983 4057

Email: mayor@london.gov.uk

17 5 2012

Dear Mr Johnson ,

Shortly after you were re-elected as Mayor you made a promise to conduct “an honest and unflinching” investigation “ into why London jobs are overwhelming going to foreigners (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9249748/Why-do-foreigners-get-all-the-jobs-asks-Boris-Johnson.html). Let me explain why it is happening.

1. Loss of control of Britain’s borders. Britain has given away control over its borders through membership of the EU, the signing of treaties relating to the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Convention on Refugees and the passing of the Human Rights Act. Regain control of our borders and the problem is solved, because then foreigners can be excluded from British jobs.

2. The costs and control of workers. British Employers find foreign workers are cheaper to employ (see 3), easier to control and less difficult to lay off.

3. Immigrants generally have less responsibilities than Britons. The rapidly rising property prices and rents and falling wages often make it impossible for a Briton who has social obligations such as a family to support to take those jobs because they do not provide the means to support a family. Most of the immigrants who have come in in recent years, especially those from Eastern Europe, are young men with no obligations beyond supporting themselves. They are able , even on the minimum wage (many are working cash in hand and pay no tax and National Insurance) , to save a few thousand per year and that money in their own country is worth multiples of what it is worth in Britain. Accordingly, immigrant workers can work for a few years in Britain and save enough to buy a property in their own country. (Give Britons the chance to go abroad and earn enough to buy a house in Britain and you will be trampled in the rush). In short, there is not a level playing field between British and foreign workers.

4. Illegal immigrants. A substantial proportion of the jobs, especially the low and unskilled, are going to illegal immigrants who are even more vulnerable to demands from employers . As a retired Inland Revenue officer I can vouch from my personal experience that there are huge numbers of illegal immigrants working in London.

5. Foreign gangmasters . Where gangmasters and their ilk are used they are often foreign and only recruit people of their own nationality, race, religion or culture.

6. Foreign companies and multinationals in Britain bring in their own people . (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/9111116/30000-foreign-workers-entered-UK-under-transfer-schemes.html)

7. Companies run by ethnic minorities in Britain. They have a strong tendency to bring in from abroad people of their own ethnic background. Especially strong instances of this are the London Rag Trade and ethnic restaurants.

6. Employment by word of mouth – When foreign workers gain a foothold in a business they recommend people they know for jobs there or encourage their friends and acquaintances to apply for jobs. Being foreign, the people they recommend will normally be other foreigners, especially those of their own nationality. It does not take long for a place of work to become largely or wholly foreign staffed with this type of recruitment.

Sometimes the employer colludes with the foreign staff to exclude Britons, for example, Pret a Manger, who have next to no rank-and-file British staff working in London use as part of their selection process a vote by the staff of a shop where a potential trainee has had a trial as to whether the trialist should be taken on. It does not take too much imagination to suspect that foreign workers will work for other foreign workers if there is a choice between them and a Briton. (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/article-24030067-why-cant-a-brit-get-a-job-at-pret.do)

8. Corrupt practices. Agencies which supply foreign workers and the British people doing the hiring enter into a corrupt arrangement whereby the Britons ensure foreigners are recruited and receive a kickback for that from the agencies who supply the labour. The agency supplying the foreign workers gains through the fees for finding and supplying the foreign staff paid by the employing company. Public service organisations and large companies are especially vulnerable because of the numbers of staff they employ. ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2094103/UK-unemployment-As-British-jobless-toll-soars-bosses-recruit-thousands-Romania.html)

Phone-ins, social networking and the individual experience of those around us tell the same story: there are very large numbers of Britons desperate for work, often any work, who just cannot find any. Again and again people who are articulate and sincere tell of how they have tried for dozens, sometimes hundreds of jobs without getting even an interview. Many of those looking for work are graduates.

Media reports of employers getting large numbers of applicants for even menial jobs are a regular feature( http://www.londonlovesbusiness.com/25-people-chase-every-job-in-some-areas-of-london/423.article). Many new graduates are finding that they have been sold a pup about the increased employability of those with a degree and are lucky to find any sort of job. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jan/26/fifth-graduates-unemployed-ons).

The claims by British employers that they are employing foreign workers because they cannot find suitable people is hard to credit. Even if there was a problem with the attitude of young Britons, for which I see no evidence as a general problem, it would not explain why older workers with a good work history are being overlooked. In particular, it is implausible that foreign workers are better equipped for jobs dealing with the public because experience tells any Briton living in London that many foreigners employed in such jobs have wholly inadequate English and a lack of knowledge about British culture.

During the Blair/Brown bubble years there may have been an element of Britons being unwilling to do some of the menial low paid jobs, but in our present dire financial straits that cannot be the case now even for low-skilled workers.

As for people not being prepared to do run-of-the-mill jobs for all of their lives, this is what used to happen routinely and, indeed, many people continue to do just that today. Nor is this something restricted to the unskilled. Any skilled craftsman – a builder, plumber or carpenter – or someone with a skill such as HGV driving will do the same basic job all their lives unless they choose to go to another form of employment. The fact they are skilled does not necessarily make the job intrinsically interesting , although it will be better paid generally than those in a low or unskilled employment. It is also a mistake to imagine that skilled jobs which are non-manual are generally fulfilling or prestigious. A country solicitor dealing largely with farm leases and conveyancing or a an accountant spending most of their time preparing final accounts are scarcely enjoying working lives of wild excitement . The truth is most jobs, regardless of their skill level, are not intrinsically interesting to the people who do them, the interest in working arising from the money reward and the social interaction which comes with the work.

Nor is it true that unskilled and low-skilled jobs are diminishing. The large majority of jobs today, require little or no specialised training. Very few retail jobs involve a detailed knowledge of the product; driving a vehicle other than an HGV comes with the possession of an ordinary driving licence; undertaking a routine clerical task can be done almost immediately by someone who is literate.

The existence of low-skilled or unskilled work has a positive benefit beyond the work itself. It provides a means of independent living for the least able. In Britain the average IQ is 100. Because of the way that IQ is distributed – in a good approximation of normal distribution – 10% of the population has an IQ of 80 or lower. An IQ of 80 is thought by most experts in the field of intelligence testing to be the point at which an individual begins to struggle to live an independent life in an advanced industrial society such as Britain. Without low-skilled and unskilled work the low IQ individual is left with no means to live an in independent life. That means in all probability a heavy dependency on benefits with a likelihood of antisocial behaviour because they cannot live a life of normal social responsibility. Full employment is a social good which goes far beyond the overt material product of the employment.

The first responsibility of a government in a democracy must by definition be to promote the well-being of its citizens above those of foreigners. The most fundamental part of that duty is to ensure as far as is humanly possible that jobs are available to its citizens which capable of supporting a person in a normal life, including raising a family. To think of the world as a single marketplace with labour, goods and services drawn from wherever is cheapest or most immediately available, is to reduce Britain to no more than a residence of convenience which can be used for the purposes of the individual without any concern for Britain as a society.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Henderson

The really radical thing for the Tory Party to do – appeal to the English

The one-time Deputy Chairman and leader paymaster of the Tory Party Lord Ashcroft was pushing the pc bandwagon merrily along at a great rate of knots in the Sunday Telegraph of 29 April. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/9234157/Lord-Ashcroft-Conservative-party-must-disprove-fears-that-it-only-looks-after-its-own.html). In it he urged the Tories to “reach out to ethnic minorities”. Here is a sample:

“…the Tories’ unpopularity among black and Asian voters is not simply a matter of class and geography. For many, though by no means all, there is an extra barrier directly related to ethnic background. If Labour helped their families to establish themselves in Britain and passed laws to help ensure they were treated equally, the Conservatives, they felt, had been none too keen on their presence in the first place.

Enoch Powell was often mentioned in evidence. The failure, on the Conservatives’ watch, properly to investigate the murder of Stephen Lawrence was also cited, as were other incidents.

Most thought the Conservatives had changed in recent years. But many – particularly people from a black Caribbean background – felt the Tories were still indifferent or even hostile towards them. Some felt the Tories, and David Cameron in particular, had unfairly blamed minorities for last summer’s riots. Many thought Conservative policies hit minority communities especially hard, and the Tories seemed unaware or unconcerned about their impact.

Ethnic-minority voters (perhaps uniquely) think the Conservatives have kept their promise to toughen immigration laws. Some saw this as a good thing. But they saw that since the Government could not restrict migration from within the EU, greater controls were being placed on immigration from outside Europe, most of which originated from Africa or South Asia. This made the distinction between EU and non-EU immigration look like different treatment of white and non-white immigration.”

Why did Ashcroft want the Tory Party to “reach out”. Simply because it was costing the Party seats – I did search for a moral as well as this venal motive in the article but was unable to find one. But even at the venal level Ashcroft is baring up a very misleading tree. The most the Tories could gain from persuading ethnic minorities to vote for them in large numbers – a most improbable eventuality – would be a small number of seats, not least because ethnic minorities are overwhelmingly seats which are naturally labour regardless of the ethnic minority share of the electorate.

The really radical thing for the Tories to do would be to appeal to the majority, namely, the English. I have sent the Sunday Telegraph this letter:

Sir,

Lord Ashcroft (29 April) urges the Tory Party to appeal to ethnic minorities – a small proportion of the country – to gain a few extra seats. I suggest that the Tories appeal to the large majority whose interests are neglected, namely, the English, to gain many extra seats.

The Tories should stand on a platform of an English parliament; an end to the massive subsidies to the Celtic Fringe; the recovery of our sovereignty through leaving the EU; the end of mass immigration; the maintenance of strong defence forces designed to defend Britain not the New World Order; a pledge to get involved in no new foreign escapades driven by the USA or the EU; the cessation of foreign Aid; an end to the green agenda which is costing billions a year; sensible policies to promote food and energy security and the stripping of every vestige of political correctness out of British life.

That should do the trick.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Henderson

The Archers – an everyday story of simple politically correct folk part 2

Robert Henderson

Ambridge is becoming even more diverse. The “dual heritage” daughter of the white vicar who was married to a black Jamaican (now dead) and is now married to a Hindu is being given much more prominence. She has acquired a boyfriend Carl, who has just made his Archers debut. Carl is black. Not that you would know this from any reference to his race because direct mention of the race of a character is never permitted in Ambridge. But although no mention of race is permitted , the producers of the Archers want listeners to know when any member of an ethnic minority appears . In the case of Asians this can easily be done with the names. Blacks are more problematic because many of them have British names. To identify them they use someone with an unmistakably black voice, whether that be black South African as in the case of Kate Aldridge’s husband or black British . As he is black Carl is of course represented as immensely handsome, intelligent, witty and polite, as all ethnic minority figures are in Ambridge. Well, that is what the crazed feminists who control the Archers tell you. The actor’s performance is rather different, Carl being as mobile and characterful as a block of teak.

We have also just been prepared for the introduction of another Asian, nickname Ifky, who will be coming to coach the younger members of Ambridge cricket club

Young Jamie Perks approached the vet Alastair, who is captain of the Ambridge cricket team, and lamented that he is not sure he will be able to come every week to cricket practice run by Ifky because of his girlfriend. Alastair sympathised saying, well, it is a regular commitment which would mean Jamie could not be with the girlfriend one day a week, assuming that the girlfriend objects on those grounds. In the real world that would be the case, but in the politically correct fantasy of the Archers the girlfriend was annoyed about the practice because -wait for it – she wanted to play as well and could not understand why it was only for boys.

A later conversation about Ifky produced the following gem:

Linda Snell “Where’s he from?”

Alastair: “Darrington”

Linda Snell: “No I meant ….er…er.. no it doesn’t matter”.

Ifky has yet to have a speaking part but has appeared in virtual form. Being from an ethnic minority he is of course also immensely handsome, so much so that not only have all the women and girls in Ambridge flooded to cricket practice to gaze upon his God-like countenance, but the only two gays in the village, Adam and Ian, have come along to openly ogle him.

There is also the possibility that the Albanian care home worker Elona will bring her relatives over in the not too far distant future. She has a partner in an Englishman Darren who, guess what, has just come out of prison after he “got in with the wrong sort”.

I can’t help wondering how long it will be before the native English inhabitants in the village will qualify for ethnic minority status.

There is one strange omission from the ever more politically correct village. There are no lesbians. Time for some girl-on-girl action shurely ? (ed).

The English white working-class and the British elite – From the salt of the earth to the scum of the earth

Robert Henderson

1. How it used to be

Thirty years ago the Labour Party primary client base was the white working-class, while the Tories still had remnants of the heightened sense of social responsibility towards the poor created by two world wars. Fast forward to 2006 and the white working-class are treated by the entire British political elite as a dangerous, almost subhuman species.

The mixture of contempt, fear and hatred which the white working-class now draws from the political class is echoed by the elite generally, indeed by not just the elite but the middleclass as a whole. Where once the white working-class were next to uninsultable publicly, sneering references to “chavs” and “chav culture” are now commonplace in the mainstream media where they pass with barely a critical public word, while ethnic minorities seemingly have licence to publicly insult the white working-class with impunity, vide the Coronation Street episode in January 2006 where a male Asian character accused his sister of behaving like “poor white trash”.

What caused this immense change in the status of the white working-class? There were three direct primary engines of change. The first was the success of Thatcher and her ideology, the second a critical point was reached in post war mass immigration, the third Britain’s membership of the EU and other restrictive treaties which tainted her sovereignty.

2. Globalism and laissez faire economics

When Margaret Thatcher became Tory Leader in 1975 the neo-paternalist stance the party had adopted since the smashing Labour victory of 1945 was changed to one of laissez faire non-interventionism, with its an inherent disdain for public provision and service. Thatcher threw away the protectionism which had sustained the white working-class, allowed much of British industry, especially heavy industry, to go to the wall, and privatised the nationalised industries. Unemployment, already at a post-war high at the end of the Callaghan government, rose dramatically to around 3 million. The unions were then weak enough to successfully attack with severe legal restraints on strikes and a ban on secondary picketing.

Unemployment has remained high since the early 1980s – the current official employment figures are bad enough taken at face value (around 2.7m by the international Labour survey method) – but in reality it is probably considerably higher – there are 2-3 million on long term sick benefit now compared with around 600,000 in the early 1980s ago. Common-sense says the country cannot in 2012 have four or five times the number of seriously incapacitated people it had 30-odd years ago. This high unemployment has kept the white working-class largely quiescent and the unions emasculated.

Thatcher also threw away the post-war consensus that the white working-class was admirable, or at least deserving of special consideration because of their disadvantaged social circumstances. Thatcherite Tories were only interested in the working-class insofar as its members were willing to buy into the narrow aspirational template which Thatcher promoted. If you were working-class and wanted to buy your council flat and were happy to gobble up the shares of privatised national industries, the Tories approved of you; if you wanted to maintain traditional working-class employments and communities, you were a soldier in the ranks of the enemy.

Labour did not immediately cast off the white working-class as clients. That took 18 years of opposition. Through four election defeats Labour gradually jettisoned all that they stood for in their cynical quest for a way back to power. The end result was a supposedly Labour Government headed by Blair which became, quite bizarrely, even more fanatically committed to “free markets” and “free trade” than the Tories.

3. Immigration reaching a critical level

By 1979 immigration had swollen the population of blacks and Asians in Britain to a point where their numbers were significant enough to pose a serious threat to British society if racial conflict got out of hand.

Until the end of the 1970s the official line on immigrants from all the mainstream parties was they must assimilate. Towards the end of the decade it was obvious to even the most fervent advocate of integration that assimilation was not happening. Rather, large populations of various ethnicities were stubbornly continuing to form ghettoes in the major British towns and cities and were attempting to lives which as far as possible replicated those of their ancestral countries.

To avoid having to admit what a disaster immigration had been, the British liberal left adopted an ideology to fit the facts of what was happening. That ideology was multiculturalism, a creed which rested on the fantasy that a coherent society could be produced by allowing every ethnic group in Britain to retain its separate identity. Indeed, the multiculturalists did more than say we should allow such a development, they positively encouraged ethnic minorities to remain separate. The kindest interpretation of their behaviour is that these were people enthusiastically pouring paraffin onto a fire in an attempt to put it out.

But the multiculturalists were faced by a most awkward fact. The white working-class was and always had been resolutely opposed to mass post-war immigration. Not only that but they were willing to say so publicly – the dockers had marched with Enoch Powell. Therefore, the liberal left had to do two things to prevent the white working-class from expressing their discontent both with the immigration which had occurred and with the new policy of multiculturalism , in which the native British culture was to have no privileged place but was to be merely one amongst many competing cultures. Worse, in practice the native culture (or cultures if you prefer) was not even to be allowed to compete because to do so would be to give the native population a public voice and a focus for their discontent.

The Labour Party at the parliamentary level was generally willing to espouse the new ideology uncritically because it fitted with their internationalist rhetoric. It also helped that the immigrants overwhelmingly voted Labour and were neatly consolidated in ghettos in the larger towns and cities where their votes were likely to elect Labour candidates more often than not.

Of course there was the seemingly ticklish problem for the multiculturalists of Labour being out of power for 18 years. In practice it did not matter, for it was not only the overt liberal left who embraced multiculturalism. Whatever their rhetoric, in practice,

the Tories climbed on the multiculturalist bandwagon quickly enough. Thatcher had spoken not long before being elected in 1979 of Britain being “swamped” by immigrants. But once in office she did nothing and the position continued to worsen, not least because she signed the Single European Act in 1985 which granted any person legally resident in another EU state the right to work in Britain. And of course throughout the 18 years of Tory office, people with the “right” multiculturalist views controlled the media, academia and increasingly the civil service. They were always on hand, both behind the scenes and publicly, to ensure the Tory Government did not actually do anything to disturb the multiculturalist programme.

Worse was to follow. In opposition the Tories followed the course of the Labour Party. Three election defeats in a row persuaded them elect as leader David Cameron, a man who adopted the same strategy for the Tories as Blair had pursued when he dumped everything Labour stood for. Cameron quickly got rid of everything which was considered “Old Tory” . This included wholeheartedly embracing multiculturalism. The electoral circle on immigration was formally closed. There is no major party to vote for if you do not want further mass immigration.

The silencing of the white working-class voice on immigration was achieved by a number of means over the past quarter century. Most potent was the mixture of legal threats such as the various Race Relations Acts and associated legislation such as the Public Order Act of 1986 and the religious exclusion of anti-immigration views from the mainstream media. British culture was gradually relegated to a less prominent place in schools. Pupils were taught, if they were taught anything about the past, of white wickedness. The Atlantic slave trade was represented as the greatest crime of history, the British Empire nothing more than a cruel invasion and subjugation of defenceless peoples. Any sign of publicly expressed native English pride was jumped on from everyone from politicians to teachers and denounced as xenophobia at best and racism as worst.

It did not take long for anyone who was not a supporter of multiculturalism to be beyond the liberal elite Pale. By 2006 multiculturalism had been formally embedded into public life through a mixture of ideological sharing amongst the elite and their auxiliaries and the law, most notably in recent years by the Race Relations (Amendment Act) of 2000 which effectively places an obligation on all employers who receive public funding to demonstrate that they are not being discriminatory.

The contemptuous mentality of those who currently permit and advocate mass immigration to Britain is epitomised by a speech in 2006 to business leaders by the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King:

“If the increased demand for labour generates its own supply in the form of migrant labour then the link between demand and prices is broken. Indeed, in an economy that can call on unlimited supplies of migrant labour, the concept of output gap becomes meaningless….The UK is not in that extreme position, but the inflow of migrant labour, especially in the past year or so from Eastern Europe, has probably lead to diminution of inflationary pressure in the labour market,relative to previous experience.

“The Home Office estimates that around 120,000 workers entered the UK from the new member countries of the European Union between March 2004 and March 2005. Without this influx to fill the skills gap in a tight labour market, it is likely earnings would have risen at a faster rate, putting pressure on employers, and, ultimately, inflation”.’ Daily Telegraph 14 6 2006.

There you have the elite view of the day: human beings are to be treated purely as factor of production along with land and capital. No greater contempt for the masses, including the white working-class, can be held.

4. The EU and other treaties

Whatever their public words, both the Tory and Labour parties were generally nationalist in their behaviour until well after the second world war. Traditional Tories were nationalists by conviction, while even the Labour left were in practice protective of the nation state because they strongly opposed the importation of cheap goods and cheap labour. British membership of the EU (then the EEC) from 1973 onwards changed the rules of the game for both parties.

The Treaty of Rome made Britain generally subordinate to a foreign authority. It was not like a normal treaty such as that of NATO which is formed simply for a particular limited purpose and which can be ended or withdrawn from cleanly. The Treaty of Rome was a full blown political project with the specific aim of creating a supranational political entity. Even when Britain joined, the EU’s powers to interfere with British political decisions were substantial, although nothing like as extensive as they are in 2012. It simply was not possible to be a wholehearted nationalist any more. That undermined traditional Toryism and paved the way for Thatcherism, which was predicated on the individual rather than the community.

For the Labour Party learning to love the EU took a long time. Their 1983 manifesto advocated withdrawing because the EU was viewed as a capitalist club. But as the Party painfully lurched towards accepting the globalist market-led creed, there came the realisation on the left that both globalism generally and membership of the EU were wonderful promoters of internationalism. They did not deliver the internationalism which the left had traditionally sought, all brotherly love and material sharing, but they accomplished a central part of the internationalist dream, the destruction of nations. This realisation, together with the fear they would never hold power again drove Labour away from their practical nationalism.

As the years passed the entire political class also discovered general benefits from globalism and EU membership. Being in international clubs such as the EU and the WTO effectively destroyed democratic accountability. Any policy relevant to a treaty could be pushed through with the excuse that Britain was legally bound by treaty to do this. Membership of the EU in particular ensured that the excuse could be used over vast swathes of policy. This loss of democratic accountability removed the last vestiges of white working-class power because there was no mainstream Party with a chance of forming a government to speak or act for them. The white working-class might as well have stopped voting then for all the good it now did them.

5.Devolution and demonising the English

Up to 1997 the white working-class in the UK as a whole suffered much the same decline in prestige and strength. Blair’s victory in that year altered matters fundamentally. Primarily for the self-serving political reason that Labour normally depends heavily on Scots and Welsh MPs to achieve a working majority in the Commons, the Party adopted a policy of devolution for Scotland and Wales. (Northern Ireland was also brought into the devolution mix but for other reasons). It was one of the first major pieces of NuLabour manifesto-promised legislation to be enacted.

Devolution created a ticklish problem. How could it be that England, where more than 80% of the population of the UK resided and where even more than 80% of the UK’s GDP was generated, should have no national representation? Why did England not deserve its own political voice if Wales and Scotland and even tiny Northern Ireland did? Because there was no reasonable answer to that question Labour (and the liberal left generally) invented unreasonable ones: England was too big, there was no such thing as Englishness, the English had no desire for a parliament, such a parliament would only mean more politicians and expense and, most tellingly, the English could not be trusted with nationalism, a claim best translated as “The ruling liberal elite are determined at all costs to prevent the English having a voice because if they do they will look after their own interests which are currently being outrageously neglected”.

When I say ruling liberal elite I am of course including the entire political elite. A prime example of the cross-party agreement on the “dangers” of English nationalism came in a BBC Radio 4 programme Brits which went out on 10 January 2000. The then Home Secretary Jack Straw and the Tory leader of the moment William Hague appeared. This is what they said:

Straw: “[the English] are potentially very aggressive, very violent [and had in the past] used their propensity for violence to subjugate Ireland, Wales and Scotland”.

Hague:” English nationalism is the most dangerous form of nationalism that can arise in the United Kingdom, because England is four-fifths of the population of the UK…Once part of a united country or kingdom that is so predominant in size becomes nationalistic, then really the whole thing is under threat…”

The unresolved question of English devolution within an otherwise devolved UK led to a shift by politicians from the denigration of the white working-class generally to denigration of the English in general and the English white working-class in particular, the latter being commonly portrayed by politicians and the media as brutish people with the unspoken subtext “they cannot be trusted with power”. As most of the British white working-class are English, the white working-class were further marginalised.

Devolution also had a direct material effect on England and in particular the English poor. The amount spent per head on public services has for a long time grossly disadvantaged the English, viz:

According to official figures from the Treasury, 2010/11 projected average UK government spending per person was £10,212 in Scotland, compared to just £8,588 in England. Spending was also higher in Wales (£9,829) and Northern Ireland (£10,706). (http://tinyurl.com/cxmgwly)

The rate of increase of the per capita payments accelerated after devolution and consequently weakened public provision in England compared with the rest of the UK . That diminution of provision has struck most profoundly at the English white working-class.

6.The ethnic minority problem

Where do ethnic minorities stand in a devolved UK? German-born Labour MP Gisela Stuart writing in online magazine openDemocracy.net in December 005 described the problem, whilst also gaily insulting the English: “It as only been in the last five years or so that I have heard people in my constituency telling me ‘I am not British – I am English’. That worries me.

“British identity is based on and anchored in its political and legal institutions and this enables it to take in new entrants more easily than it would be if being a member of a nation were to be defined by blood.

“But a democratic polity will only work if citizens’ identification is with the community as a whole, or at least with the shared process, which overrides their loyalty to a segment.” (Quoted in Birmingham Mail 18 11 2005)

The problem for people such as Ms Stuart is that Britishness was destroyed by devolution. There is no longer a comfortable overarching label of British under which everyone can be placed. All that is left for the people of Britain to cling to are emotional ethnicities.

The situation is most acute in England because that is where the majority of ethnic minorities in the UK live. There is hard evidence that ethnic minorities in England routinely do not think of themselves as English. In 2005, the CRE commissioned from the research firm Ethnos a poll designed to discover how Britons identify themselves (http://www.cre.gov.uk/downloads/what_is_britishness.pdf). A couple of passages are particularly telling:

“In England, white English participants identified themselves as English first and British second, while ethnic minority participants perceived themselves as British. None identified as English, which they saw as meaning exclusively white people.”

“Britishness was associated with great historical and political achievements, but only amongst white participants (whether from England, Scotland or Wales), not those from ethnic minority backgrounds”.

This tells us two things: ethnic minorities in England routinely reject the idea of Englishness and ethnic minorities everywhere in the UK have no identification with Britain’s past. So much for Britishness.

7. Balkanising England

Recognising the danger that English nationalism represented to Labour’s domestic political hopes (and quite possibly to the EU’s wish to divide the UK into a series of regions), the Blair government attempted to create a political structure which would make an English Parliament next to impossible. Their method was to Balkanise the country through the creation of regional assemblies (the artificial regions chosen just happened to fit the regions into which the EU bureaucrats have decided England should be divided). But this plan fell over, at least for the foreseeable future, when a referendum to set up an assembly in the least artificial of the regions, the North-East, was humiliating by an overwhelming NO vote.

8. The gradual demoralisation of the white working class

If laissez faire economics, immigration reaching a critical level and international treaties were the immediate reasons why the white working-class has fallen so far from favour, the ground for their realisation was prepared during the thirty-five years which followed the Labour victory of 1945.

It is important not to be sentimental about the white working-class before their desertion by the British political class. Britain was far from being a peaceful society. Industrial relations were seriously fraught from the Eighteenth century onwards, long before nationalisation and the modern welfare state. Much crime went unreported because working class communities refused to report it. Vicious fights regularly took place in places such as the docks and the mines. There was considerable football hooliganism. Until the Irish Free State was founded, Irish nationalism was a constant running sore. Violent criminal gangs controlled places such as the Elephant and Castle and Brighton.

British education until after the second world war (and the Butler Act’s implementation) was seriously flawed, with most children leaving school at 14 having received no more than a primary education – only those who committed themselves to staying until 16 received secondary education. The general standard of education was not high, although, unlike now, the members of the political elite were frequently well educated.

There was also a great deal of abject poverty right up to 1939 with many working people living from wage packet to wage packet, often with the aid of a weekly trip to the local pawnbroker. There was only a rudimentary welfare state and to fall ill if you were poor was to place yourself at the mercy of the charity of others.

Despite these shortcomings, at the outbreak of the second world war working class society was much more coherent and secure than it is today. Most important was the fact that mainland Britain was racially and ethnically a very homogeneous society, even the ancestral cultural divisions between the English, Scots and Welsh were largely shadings within a single cultural spectrum rather than violently competing ethnicities. Across the water Ireland was a problem, but even there the divisions were political and religious rather than matters of profound ethnic difference. Such serious ethnic tension as there was resulted from the influx of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, but even there the persistent failure of Mosley’s Blackshirts to gain electoral support in the midst of the Depression tells its own story: vehement anti-semitism was not a widespread problem.

The homogeneity of Britain generated a sense of security because the mainland British at least did not have the distraction of chronic and serious ethnic strife. That sense of security was bolstered by the fact that each of the four home nations had their own territory which they dominated in terms of occupation of the land even if they did not formally control their territory. The white working-class generally did not feel threatened by people whom they felt had no place in Britain. Most felt, whatever their personal troubles, that at least they were secure in their own land.

Added to, and arguably arising from, this marvellous ethnic and territorial security were potent and well established social support mechanisms of the working class, viz:

1. Unions, including their large welfare role.

2. Co-Operative Societies – Harrods for the working class.

3. Friendly societies.

4. Homogeneous working-class communities which mutually supported their members.

5. Large scale manual employment for the working class.

That was the position at the end of WW2, and for a considerable time after 1945 the condition of the white working-class actually improved as a full blown welfare state, rising wages and very low employment significantly increased their security and advantage.

The 1944 Butler Education Act gave all British children the chance to go to a grammar school and even those who did not gain a grammar school place got an extra year of schooling, schooling which went beyond the primary level. It was a far from perfect educational system but it was a considerable improvement on what had gone before. Most importantly, for the first time it gave large numbers of white working-class children the chance of a first rate education and, for a significant minority, the chance to go to university.

Unions remained strong and both major political parties were committed to maintaining by protectionist measures the British economy, a fair slice of which was in any case nationalised. The white working-class were both the electoral bedrock of the Labour Party and courted by a Tory Party which realised it had to abide by the Attlee Government’s social reforms if it was to be elected (in the mid-fifties one of the proudest boasts of the Tory Government was that they had built 300,000 council houses in a year).

To this growing advantage was gradually added a de facto censorship of criticism of the white working-class. Throughout the period 1945 to 1975 there developed a pernicious habit amongst the British elite whereby public criticism of the white working-class became unacceptable in much the same way that over the past thirty years ethnic minorities have ceased to be publicly criticised.

Like any powerful class which is exempted from criticism the white working-class abused their position, or perhaps more correctly, allowed their elected representatives whether in politics or unions, to lead them into abusive ways. The unions were all too ready to call strikes, strikes which when they affected the nationalised industries had the power to cripple British life.

The unions had become too powerful and it was their extreme propensity for “industrial action” – strikes, working-to-rule, demarcation disputes and violent picketing – which began to break down the public silence over white working-class abuses. Gradually it became acceptable for politicians and the media to criticise the white working-class. They needed little prompting because politicians of all colours and mediafolk were more often than not were middleclass, and the middleclass had very little natural empathy with the white working-class, just as today politicians and the media have no natural empathy with the ethnic minorities who are their current client class.

By 1970 the white working-class was outwardly as secure as a class as they had ever been and would be again. But even at the seeming height of their class advantage they were weaker than they once had been, naturally weaker than ever before in fact because sociological rats had been gnawing away at their natural cohesion since 1945.

The mass post-war immigration began in the late 40s but it was not a major problem for the white working-class until the 1960s. More immediately damaging were the slum clearances which dominated the twenty five years after the War. These destroyed many working class communities by the simple expedient of dividing them up between different housing estates. The working class were still living together but they were no longer the tightly knit coherent communities which had existed for generations. Instead it was strangers living together and living together not in housing which allowed an easy social life to develop, but more often than not in high rise buildings which destroyed social intimacy.

Ironically the new welfare state damaged the white working-class because it weakened the informal traditional social supports deriving from a well established community (help from friends and extended family) and led to the decline of formal supports such as friendly societies and the co-operative movement.

9. Education subverted

In the 1960s came the disaster of comprehensive schools and progressive educational theory. Comprehensivisation took away the ladder by which the bright white working-class child progressed, the grammar schools. The secondary modern -technical school- grammar school established by the Butler Act was far from perfect because it left large numbers of children labelled as educational failures, but that which replaced it was far worse a system. Most comprehensives simply did not have the resources or the will to provide a grammar school level education for their brightest pupils.

Progressive educational theory caused a general diminution in educational standards through a combination of its “discovery” method of learning, ie, do not actually teach them anything, and a self-denying ordinance which forbade any criticism of a child’s work. Stir in the lunacy of producing school exams to be taken by children of all ability (GCSE) and the incontinent expansion of higher education from the late 1980s onwards, season with the quasi-commercialisation of schools and universities through money following the pupil or student, top with school examination boards becoming overtly commercial, and you have the recipe for the mess which is modern British education, where exam grades rise inexorably while performance moves just as remorselessly in the opposite direction.

The percentage of working-class children at university is actually lower in 2012 than it was forty years ago. Of course the numbers of children in higher education has expanded massively since the mid-sixties and in absolute numbers far more white working-class pupils go on to university in 2006 than 1966. But it counts for nothing. If more white working-class pupils may have GCSEs, A Levels and degrees now, the standard of the education they receive to gain such qualifications is so degraded from what it was forty years ago that the qualifications are next to worthless as guides to employers of a person’s ability and the education received while taking them fails to equip students for the world of work even at the basic level of literacy and numeracy.

Had the major sources of traditional white working-class employment not been largely destroyed in the 1980s and 1990s, comprehensive education would not be so dire in its consequences for the white working class, because they would still have been employed in secure jobs which do not require much education. Instead, millions are trapped in unemployment (admitted unemployment or disguised as ill, retired early or attending worthless courses in higher education) or in insecure and ill-paid jobs, stranded without the education to find decent, well-paid work.

Any society also has to take into account the fact that any population contains many people who are naturally poorly equipped to do anything other than unskilled jobs. Ten per cent of the British population has an IQ of 80 or less. An IQ of 80 is the level at which psychologists generally agree someone begins to struggle to cope with the demands of an advanced society such as Britain. Such people require jobs they can do. Immigrants take those jobs and depress wages. The white working-class are being left with less and less.

With their traditional employments largely destroyed, subject to a state educational system which leaves them ill-equipped for any job other than the unskilled, beset by cheap immigrant labour competing for unskilled jobs and crippled by the cost of housing, the white working-class are ever more dependent on public provision. That provision is becoming increasingly uncertain as immigrant demand for social provision multiplies, public spending soars to dangerous heights and Blair’s mania for introducing private money and companies into public provision runs riot.

What were once the public utilities – gas, electricity, water, the railways – are becoming dearer and dearer despite providing an increasingly poor service through a lack of investment in maintenance and the shedding of jobs (the government cannot do anything to subsidise utility prices because of our membership of the EU). The poorer you are the larger part of your income is taken by these vital products and services.

Benefits and the state pension are linked to the Retail Price Index (RPI) but this understates inflation substantially, primarily because the cost of housing, i.e. what it costs to buy a property, is not included (only average mortgage repayment costs and rents are). This understatement of inflation means that benefits and the state pension are gradually losing their value in real terms.

There are also many people for whom the basket of goods and services is unrepresentative. For example, 14% of the index is devoted to motoring expenses which means that the RPI figure is barely relevant to non-car owners. RPI also excludes from its spending pattern such inconvenient people as OAPs surviving on the state pension because they are not “typical”. Generally, the poorer you are, the less representative of your spending RPI will be.

Wages are also affected by official inflation figures because they are used as a benchmark for both public service and private industry wage increases. I say inflation figures because more than one index is used. The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) is the index used these days to give the headline rate of inflation. This is even less accurate a guide to the true rate of inflation than RPI because it excludes housing costs altogether. Where this figure is used to guide wage increases the real value of the wage decreases even more rapidly in real terms than benefits and the state pension.

Then there is taxation. The poorest people in work in the population pay by far – in direct and indirect taxes combined – the highest proportion of their income in tax of any part of the population.

10. How could the present position be remedied?

Britain needs to do four things. (1) withdraw from the EU and repudiate any other Treaty which prevents the country exercising her sovereignty over immigration and her economy. (2) Recognise that public provision is generally best supplied by the state directly providing it. (3) Substitute for the globalist ideology an unaggressive nationalist one which steers a middle course between protectionism and manic free trade and which clearly distinguishes between the status of citizens and foreigners. (4) End mass immigration.

The first two are essentially acts of domestic political will. Withdrawing from the EU and treaties such as the UN Convention on Refugees would doubtless cause a great deal of political huffing and puffing but would be unlikely to produce any profound ill-effects because the EU would still wish to trade with Britain and the UN is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Public services – by which I mean genuine public services such as the NHS and prisons – are essentially a domestic matter and should concern no one outside this country.

The last two are more problematic. Adopting an unaggressive nationalism and clearly distinguishing between the status of citizens and foreigners would be no difficulty in practice because those are decisions which have little practical effect on other nations, but what of our trading treaty relationships, especially our membership of the World Trade Organisation? If we remained within the WTO would that make a middle course between protectionism and free trade impossible?

The WTO in practice permits many protectionist measures – readers will recollect how the USA suddenly slapped tariffs on foreign steel a year or so back. There is a good deal of wriggle room which Britain could use to protect her domestic economy. For example, if another WTO member is doing something protectionist and getting away with it, and many are, then the WTO will scarcely be able to penalise Britain. If the worst comes to the worst and we had to leave the WTO, bilateral agreements with other countries could be made – Britain has too large an economy for other states en bloc to forgo the opportunity for trade.

11. The end of mass immigration

That leaves mass immigration which I shall deal with in some detail because it is the most dangerous threat to the welfare of both the white working-class and the native British population as a whole. The stopping of further mass immigration alone would do more for the white working-class than any other single action by government. It would tighten the labour market and improve their employment opportunities. That in turn would improve their status. The pressure on public services, transport and housing would be lessened making access to them cheaper and easier for the white working-class. More generally, the moral climate would change because the ending of mass immigration would signal that there is a clear distinction between the rights of British citizens and the rights of foreigners.

With control resumed over our borders through withdrawal from the EU and the repudiation of other treaties, there would be in principle no problem with stopping further mass immigration. But what about the economic effects? The liberal internationalists tell us that the woes of the world would come upon us should we do such a thing, although, like Lear threatening retribution, (“I shall do such things ….I know not what they are”) they are strangely unable to quite say what the woes will be. If reality, there would simply be a manageable period of economic and social reconstruction.

The immediate economic effect would be a redistribution of labour. Labour would move into those occupations which are essential and which cannot be provided at a distance, for example healthcare and education. We would discover how occupations rank in terms of utility. Wages would rise in those occupations which had most utility to attract staff from elsewhere.

Employers would respond to labour tightening by using labour more efficiently. Automation would increase and employers would change their attitude to the older person and the disabled.

Both employers and government would take vocational training more seriously. Government would provide incentives to employers to train their staff and increase the training of public service professionals such as doctors and dentists. Government would also be forced to tackle the mess which is our public education to ensure an adequately educated workforce.

Employers who could not find the labour to run their business in this country would have to accept they could not do so. No one has a right to engage in an enterprise regardless of the effects on the welfare of the community as a whole. Capital which cannot be used in this country can be invested abroad.

12. Would there be an unmanageable labour shortage?

The idea that Britain is short of labour for most purposes is demonstrably absurd. The official figure for those under the state retirement age who are economically inactive in the UK is 7 million. Clearly not all of those would be able or willing to work, but equally clearly a large proportion would be able and willing to work if the conditions were right, i.e., wages rose, employers became more accommodating and the benefits system was tightened as the number of opportunities for work rose.

The claim that the indigenous population will not do the jobs immigrants take is demonstrably false. In areas of the country with few immigrants native Britons do them willingly. In many instances where foreign workers are employed it is not because native Britons will not work. Take the case of the cockle-pickers who died in Morecombe Bay several years ago it was widely reported in the media that the Chinese cockle pickers clashed with British cockle pickers who resented them invading their territory. These Chinese were not filling jobs which were unfilled by the British but competing with the British for the work.

The experience of the cockle-pickers is found elsewhere, not least because employers, particularly gangmasters, are frequently immigrants. They generally prefer to employ people of their own ethnicity. The consequence is that the British are not found in some occupations in some places because the immigrant employers deliberately avoid recruiting them.

The other thing which prevents native Britons taking jobs in some parts of the country is the fact that the native Briton does not want to work for employers whose workforce is predominantly formed of immigrants or native-born ethnic minorities. Like every other people, native Britons do not wish to be forced to work in their own land in a employment where they are in the minority.

It is also important to remember that the menial jobs immigrants take are worth far more to them than a native Briton. If you earn as little as £250 a week net – many immigrants work cash in hand – and live in accommodation either supplied by an employer or in crowded accommodation for very little rent, you will probably still be able to save a a substantial amount, say, £2,000 pa.

If you come from China where wages even in the big cities are 50 pence an hour, you would earn œ1,000 pa for a 40 hour week. Working at a menial job in Britain allows you to save double the average Chinese big city annual wage in a year. That money remitted to China takes on the local purchasing power. The multiplier for Eastern Europeans is less but even there œ2,000 saved in a year would be a good professional salary in places such as Poland. Give native Britons the chance to save the equivalent of a British professional’s salary in a year doing a menial job and they will flock to the work and put up with basic living conditions. Of course, no such employments are on offer to Britons.

13. Conclusion

The crime of the post-war British elite of all political colours has been to destroy the social and economic structures which gave security and viability to white working-class society without replacing them with something else. The elite mashed their communities through slum clearance, thrust mass immigration into the areas in which the white working-class lived, destroyed through “free trade” the great industries which traditionally employed them and hamstrung the unions by a mixture of legislation, cheap foreign labour both at home and abroad and the creation of a perpetual “reserve army of labour” from the native population. At the same time the white working-class were deprived of the means to create new lives and social structures through a decent education. Whatever the white working-class are now, they are the product of decisions made by the British political elite since 1945.

I am not a sentimentalist who imagines that the ideal world would be one in which the white working class continued unchanged as noble “sons of toil” or that ” working-class culture” should be preserved in aspic. Had every white working-class person in the country been converted into part of the middleclass by an unforced process of improved education and rising wages I would have seen that as part of a natural sociological change. But that of course did not happen, probably in principle could never have happened in a country the size of Britain. The white working-class have been disenfranchised. The British middle class have been at best complicit in the attack on the white working-class and at worst have taken an eager and active part in it. For decades they thought themselves personally safe from the consequences of immigration and, later, imagined that they were immune from the effects of globalisation. They find themselves unable to buy houses because of the absurd prices They are beginning to learn the hard facts of sociological life: mass immigration and globalisation eventually affects all but the truly rich, a poetic justice but one which harms the country.

Can things change? For the first time in half a century British politicians (and the liberal elite generally) are beginning to display realism over the effects of immigration. This realism is coming from both the major Parties. Here is the Tory MP Julian Brazier writing in a pamphlet for the Cornerstone group:

“Overcrowding is a key cause of many of the factors which are destroying quality of life: mortgage slavery, over-development, congested roads, water shortages, flooding and overstretched public services. We should do everything we can sensibly – and fairly – to reduce the level of immigration to well below the level of emigration.” (The Times August 01, 2006)

On the other side of the political fence is Labour MP Jon Cruddas, MP for the Essex seat of Dagenham. Writing a commentary on a Rowntree Trust study THE FAR RIGHT IN LONDON which deals with the recent success of the BNP in his constituency he comments:

“…it [the Blair Government] has tacitly used immigration to help forge the preferred flexible North American labour market. Especially in London, legal and illegal immigration has been central in replenishing the stock of cheap labour across the public and private services, construction and civil engineering…

“For many of my constituents the value of their social wage is in decline. House prices appear to rise inexorably upwards whilst thousands and thousands seek nonexistent, new social housing. Public service improvements fail to match localised population expansion let alone the long term legacy of underinvestment…

“At work their terms and conditions are under threat as they compete for work with cheap immigrant labour. In terms of access to housing and public services and their position in the workplace many see immigration as a central determinant in their own relative impoverishment….

“Those communities that must accommodate the new immigrant communities are the ones least equipped to do so they themselves have the most limited opportunities for economic and social mobility…”

But realism from a few politicians acting as individuals is worthless if the major political parties do nothing or indeed, with our various treaty obligations, can do nothing legally while we are bound by them. The only way Britain could meaningfully regain control of immigration is to leave the EU and renounce all other treaties, such as the UN Convention of Refugees, which prevents Britain from controlling her borders. There is absolutely no sign that any major party or even individual politician is willing to contemplate such a policy.

Immigration is only one part of the problem. There is still very little realism from even by individual MPs over the effects of laissez faire economics and freer trade, both of which severely undermine the condition of the white working-class (and increasingly, much of the middleclass).

The manic drive to privatise everything in sight, whether by outright privatisation or the introduction of private money into public services, shows no sign of abating. The immediate consequence of this is all too often reduced services at greater cost, while the long –term effect may be to reduced public provision generally, either because the costs simply go out of control or because the fact that a service is provided by a private contractor rather than by direct labour public provision makes it easier to reduce the service or stop providing it altogether..

On the education side so much damage has been done to our education system, from primary schools to universities, that it is difficult to see how things could be changed in less than a generation.

Perhaps the greatest problem is the current state of our political system which has become utterly unresponsive to the needs of the British people in general and the white working-class in particular.

The Labour MP John Cruddas wrote this recently in his commentary on a Joseph Rowntree Trust report “The rise of the Far right”. “The [Blair] government is not a coalition of traditions and interests who initiate policy and debate; rather it is a power elite whose modus operandi is the retention of power.” The words could be as readily applied to the modern Tory Party.

Compare this with George Orwell’s words in 1984:” “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. …We are different from the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and Russian Communists came very close to us in our methods, but they never had the courage to recognise their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard arevolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” (O’Brien speaking to Winston Smith during his interrogation).

That is the political system we have now: a simple desire for power. The only thing which will change it is fear, fear in the political elite that things are running out of control, that they may be brought to account. Then they will shamelessly amend their ideology, what they said was black yesterday will become white tomorrow. Elites only have one settled principle – to do whatever is necessary to preserve their power and privilege.

Politically incorrect film reviews – Outlaw and Made in England

Nick Love and Shane Meadows, two directors of white workingclass origin who like nothing better than to tell the world how much they empathise with the white workingclass world they grew up in. In pursuit of this they make films such as Football Factory (Love) and 24/7 (Meadows). As films their products are watchable but they are also profoundly dishonest. The problem is that both Love and Meadows have donned the liberal bigot coat of many pc colours and the white workingclass world they show is robbed of one essential ingredient: an honest portrayal of the racial friction between workingclass whites and black and Asian immigrants and their descendents.

The dishonesty takes one of two forms: race is either completely ignored (Football Factory) or the story is skewed so that (1) non-white characters are included in an attempt to show workingclass whites and nonwhites “living in harmony” and (2) to allow some of the white characters to be represented as racist boneheads and some to display a white liberal’s appreciation of “the joy of diversity”. Outlaw and Made in England display these latter traits.

Outlaw could have been an English taxi driver. It has a first rate cast which includes Sean Bean, Bob Hoskins and Danny Dyer. The story is of a group of men who form a vigilante gang in response to the supposed crime wave politicians are always feeding the populace. Bean as the leader of the vigilante group gives a dynamic charismatic performance as a workingclass northerner Royal Marine just returned from Iraq to London. . The rest of his gang bar one are entirely plausible, being white and working class Londoners. The “bar one” is a posh black QC who supposedly joins the group because his wife is killed by gangsters on behalf of a Mr Big whom the posh black QC is prosecuting for the Crown. The killer is inevitably white.

The sheer improbability of this scenario – white workingclass lad, posh black QC – alone made the film ridiculous. The clunking political correctness makes it wearisome : the Hoskins character (a serving detective) fawns over the black barrister whom he is part protecting part driving around, utterly robs Hoskins of his normal upfront bluntness, while the rest of the gang never think to say “’ere, what’s this posh black geezer doing with us?” The clear message of the film is that this is that race is utterly unimportant and that everyone no matter what their background is perfectly happy to muck in together and violent crime is really a white thing – none of the characters the gang attacks is non-white. The film is worth seeing for one reason as a film – Bean’s performance.

Made in England is rather more subtle. Here we have a skinhead gang in Lincolnshire around the time of the Falklands (1982). The gang , led by “good guy” Woody ( Joe Gilgun) adopt an eleven year old boy Shaun (Thomas Tugoose) whose father has been killed fighting in the Falklands. The gang, despite being skinhead, has a black member (natch). Meadows attempts to justify this improbable scenario by claiming that the roots of the skinhead phenomenon lay in white boys taking a liking to black music in the late sixties. Whether that is true or not, by the early eighties skinhead culture was resolutely anti-immigrant and the existence of a gang of skinheads who not only have a black member but never mention race even when the black member is not with them, is improbable in the extreme.

All goes along swimmingly in a multi-culti fashion until an ex-con Combo (Stephen Graham) returns from prison and tries to take over the gang and inject a racial element into it. He merely splits the gang between himself and Woody. Bingo! We have the “good” skinheads (Woody) and the “bad” skinheads Combo and the trite little pc agitprop piece is then played out to show how the “bad” skinheads are violent thickos and not at all representative of England while the “good” skinheads are the real English deal, all bubbling with enthusiasm for “the joy of diversity. The film ends clankingly with the Shaun symbolically tossing his flag of St George into the sea. Despite its agitprop by numbers nature, this film does have some very strong performances from the main actors, especially Tugoose who gives one of the great child actor performances.

The PC lesson to draw from the two films is simple: the white workingclass’ real problem is not race or immigration or a lack of national expression it is their social circumstances.

The Effects of Mass Immigration On Canadian Living Standards and Society

Edited by Herbert Grubel – a compilation of essays by 12 authors

Published by the Fraser Institute of Canada in 2009 ISBN 978-0-88975-246-7

Robert Henderson

Massive numbers of immigrants who are either unable or unwilling to integrate with the society into which they come; cities increasingly dominated by ethnic and racial ghettos; laws which grant immigrants rights which make it next to impossible to stop them entering the country or to deport them once they are there; employers greedy for cheap labour; immigrants depressing wages and forcing up native unemployment; immigrants taking more out of the communal national pot in benefits than they put in through taxes; a political elite which is sold on the idea that immigration is an unalloyed good at a naïve best and a source of new voters for parties which support mass immigration at a venal worst; a bureaucracy which religiously carries out the politically correct dictates of the elite embraced multicultural ethos ; the development of an “immigration industry” comprised of vested interests such as lawyers, pressure groups, charities; public servants appointed to act as what are effectively political commissars for multiculturalism; a mainstream media which ceaselessly propagandises on behalf of the wonder of multiculturalism and value of immigration whilst censoring any opposition; a rabid state-inspired suppression of dissidence at any level by a mixture of laws banning honest discussion of immigration and its consequences and the engendering of a public culture which puts anyone who voices anti-immigration views, however cautiously, at risk of losing their job or political position and to ostracism from their social circle if they are judged to have committed a “crime” against multiculturalism.

Welcome to the Canadian experience of the joy of mass immigration. Sounds familiar? It certainly will to British ears, but the same could broadly be said of any First World country for the globalist ideology has become the creed of elites throughout the First World. This makes the book generally valuable as a primer on the dangers of mass immigration. This utility is enhanced by significant reference being made to immigration as it affects the USA, Britain and France.

There are of course differences of detail between the Canadian and British experience. Canadians traditionally have seen themselves as a nation of immigrants whereas the British have not and do not. This means that Canadians have, like Americans, at least the residue of the sentimental idea that immigration should be the natural order of things and that it is somehow wrong to deny to others what they or their ancestors enjoyed. The Canadian elite have taken this to extremes according to Stephen Gallagher of the Canadian International Council because “….more than any other country Canada has bought into the cosmopolitan logic that there can exist a ‘civic nationalism in the absence of any ethnic or cultural majority, shared roots or social coherence” (p188). His claim is borne out by the objective evidence of modern Canadian immigration policy and its consequences.

The problem with the “civic nationalism” mentality is it is one thing to have immigration consisting overwhelmingly of people who are broadly similar in race and culture into the receiving society – as happened throughout most of Canada’s history -who can assimilate rapidly; quite another to import immigrants in large numbers who are radically different in race and culture and either cannot or will not assimilate. That is what has happened to Canada in recent decades.

Over the past quarter of a century immigrants to Canada have come overwhelmingly from Asia. The result is that at the last Canadian census 5 million (16 per cent) out of the Canadian population of 16 million were “visible minorities” (p5). The size of the overall population also counts hugely: 16 per cent of 33 million is considerably more concerning than 16 per cent of, say, Britain’s currently estimated 62 million.

It might be thought that the geographical vastness of Canada would mean there is not the same sense that the country is being physically swamped as there is in a geographically small country such as Britain, but Canada is a very urbanised country with 25 million Canadians living in towns or cities and most immigrants are concentrated in a few places. 60 per cent of the 5 million “visible minorities” live in the Metropolitan areas of Toronto and Vancouver (p5). In Toronto in 2001 those classified as “English (Anglos ) “only formed a majority in in a quarter of metropolitan “census tracts” (p180). The sense of conquest by stealth is as apparent in those particular places as it would be in London or Birmingham.

Reckless Canadian immigration took off in the 1990s. In 1990 the annual limit was raised to 250,000 by a Progressive Conservative government with the Minister responsible, Barbara McDougal, arguing that this would help the party with the ethnic minority vote, the clear implication being that a large portion of the additional immigrants would be black or Asian (p4). Since then immigration has averaged nearly 1 per cent of the population (p4. )Things worsened after the 2001 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act was passed. This set selection criteria for immigrants without putting any limit on the numbers who could come in. As there were vastly more people who could meet the criteria than Canada could readily accommodate and there was no flexibility to adjust to changes in economic conditions generally or to the Canadian labour market in particular, the system soon ran into trouble. A backlog of would-be immigrants waiting to be processed formed which is estimated to reach 1.5 million by 2012 (p7) to which did not include refugees who number is considerable. Canadian asylum policy became so lax in the 1980s that over the past 25 years more than 700,000 asylum seekers were admitted (p14). Canada has taken steps to amend the Immigration Act,, but even if those are effective the existing backlog of 1.5 million will be processed under the old rules (p5).

All but one the most sacred cows of the pro-immigration, pro-multicultural lobby are precisely dissected before being put out of their misery. Overall, immigrants do not add to Canada’s per capita wealth (p104), not least because less than 20% of immigrants come in based on their work skills or training (p3); cultural diversity does not equal an enhanced society but a divided one with an ever weakening national identity and bringing in huge numbers of young immigrants will not solve the problem of an ageing Canadian population – Robert Bannerjee and William Robson (chapter 7) estimate that to even stabilise the Old Age Dependency ratio – the ratio between those of working age to those over retirement age – and those from what it is at present would take decades of annual immigration amounting each year to 3% of the Canadian population (p142). The effect of that would be to effectively end any concept of a Canadian nation as it has been and still largely is. It would be a classic case of the transformation of quantity into quality. A place called Canada might still exist but he existing Canadian nation would be no more.

The sacred cow which remains standing if more than a little nervous, is the question of the incompatibility of races. Nonetheless , some of the contributors (especially those in chapters 9-12) come close to venturing onto this currently forbidden territory, for example :-

“..the analysis of Sammuel Huntingdon (2004), who argues that a nation is the function of the identity of its majority population and in the United States this identity is rooted in the original founding Anglo-Protestant culture and a value system described as the American Creed.” (Stephen Gallagher P188).

“What guarantee do we have that diversity in itself is a desirable objective? At what point does diversity mutate into a form of colonisation? (James Bissett p6).

The book is also good at flagging up consequences which are not immediately obvious. For example, Marcel Merette makes the important point that as higher skilled immigrants increase the differential in wages between the skilled and the unskilled shrinks (p159). This discourages Canadians from taking the trouble to acquire skills because the advantage of doing so would be lessened.

Nor is any change in the type of immigrants without ill consequences. For example, if immigrants are restricted to the young (which might be thought a god thing in an ageing society) that disadvantages the native young because it means they face greater competition for jobs from the immigrants in their age group.

There is also the effect on the one long-standing substantial Canadian minority, the French-speaking Quebeccers . They are increasingly finding their language and culture undermined both by the presence of immigrants who will not integrate and by having to compete for attention and privileges from the majority population with the new minority groups.

Rather touchingly, Gordon Gibson (chapter 11) imagines that the position is much healthier in Britain because there is at least growing public discussion here and an organisation such as MigrationWatch UK to ostensibly provide a focus of concern about immigration (the final essay in the book is by the head of MigrationWatch UK Sir Andrew Green). But public debate can be not merely useless but positively harmful if it is controlled.

It is true that there is vastly more public discussion in Britain now than there was under the Blair Government when any many of immigration and its consequences brought squeals of “racism” from politicians, the left-liberal dominated media and any pressure group or individual able to climb onto the “anti-racist” bandwagon. But public discussion does not equal action and despite Cameron’s Coalition Government’s rhetoric about cutting net immigration to Britain “from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands a year” , the numbers remain much the same as under the Blair and Brown governments.

The extent of the growing disquiet amongst Canadians is indicated by the very existence of the book. The editor has brought together a wide-ranging group of contributors: economists, political scientists, think tank members and retired ambassadors. These are not the class of people who would commonly be found publicly expressing concern about immigration, for they are by background part of the broad elite which has embraced the multiculturalist ideal. That they are willing to write pretty forthrightly about the dangers speaks volumes in itself. The message it sends is that they are so worried by the observable effects of mass migration that they are willing to put their heads above the parapet and risk, at the least, social, political and academic ostracisation.

The failure to address the question of race as a social separator is frustrating but understandable in the present politically correct circumstances, but it cannot be ignored forever. Those who say physical differences in race are unimportant and that race is merely a social construct should reflect upon the fact that if there was no natural mechanism to stop humans of different physical types breeding as freely together as those of a similar physical type then there would be no broad physical groups which we call races . These group separations cannot be ascribed to humans evolving in separation from one another because throughout history there has been an immense amount of movement of peoples with every opportunity for inter-breeding. We see the same thing happening today in places such as London where, despite the open invitation to inter-racial breeding and the incessant multi-culturist propaganda over several generations, a surprisingly small percentage of the population does interbreed.

I can unreservedly recommend this book because it provides almost all the ammunition needed to refute the multiculturalist propaganda . It is not the easiest of reads because most of the contributors take an academic approach, which means a fair number of charts and tables plus a decent dollop of jargon. But the book is not very heavy going and its message is the most important which can be given to the developed world at present: guard your own societies against this surreptitious form of conquest or they will die.

The claustrophobia of diversity

Robert Henderson

In November a 34-old woman Emma West was recorded on a tram in Croydon (near to London) expressing her very no-pc views of the effects of immigration on England even though she was surrounded by ethnic minorities. Since her public complaints were recorded by a passenger and put on YouTube other instances of such behaviour have come to light, the most recent to hit the national media being another youngish white woman (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2097142/Woman-filmed-hurling-racist-abuse-Tube-passengers-ANOTHER-video-rant-London-transport.html#ixzz1lgvuUjuO). I put a few URLs for videos of such behaviour from England at the end of the article. The examples are all of people who are under the age of 40. Nor does it take long for instances of such behaviour in the USA to be found on media hosting sites. This goes against the oft made claims by liberals that what they term racial prejudice is restricted to the older generation, who it is implied “don’t know any better”, while the young are race-blind.

Such outbursts are surprising because of the risk they carry of assault by the ethnic minorities listening to them. They are doubly unexpected because present day England (and Britain) is rigid with political correctness. As Emma West’s case vividly shows, the authorities are ever more penal in their repression of dissent. After her arrest in December 2011 Miss West was kept for weeks on remand in a high security prison for what the authorities coyly called “her own protection” http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/emma-west-immigration-and-the-liberal-totalitarian-state-part-2/) . She has since been charged but not as yet tried (she appears at Croydon Crown Court on 17 2 2012) with a serious criminal offences which carry a potential jail sentence of two years. (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/emma-west-immigration-and-the-liberal-totalitarian-state-part-3/). All of that for simply expressing her anger at the consequences of mass immigration.

But even if people are not charged with criminal offences, to be publicly labelled a racist in England is to risk the loss of a job or accommodation if rented, a campaign of media abuse and social ostracism. The risk of losing a job is particularly high for public service employees. In extreme cases such as those accused of the murder of Stephen Lawrence the persecution may be officially generated and sustained and last indefinitely and include the holding of trials which are manifestly unfair because of hate-campaigns conducted against the accused by both politicians and the mainstream media. (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/stephen-lawrence-gary-dobson-david-norris-and-a-political-trial/).

With these very considerable disincentives to expressing honest views about race and immigration under any circumstances, what is it that drives people to express them uninhibitedly in situations which objectively place them in physical as well as legal danger? After all the instinct for self-preservation lies at the core of human behaviour and people are generally media savvy enough these days to realise that anything they say in public is likely to be recorded and placed on sites such as YouTube. So why do people like Emma West ignore all these formidable barriers to behaving in this way? Drink or drugs you may think, yet the noteworthy thing about most of the examples caught on mobile phones is that they show no signs of being seriously intoxicated by either. These are people who are doing it in the full knowledge of what they are doing and its likely effects. But even if they were intoxicated with drink or drugs all that would mean is that the brakes of sobriety were removed and the true feelings of the person released.

A clue to what is happening can be found in the fact that their complaints gather around the same theme: that England is being invaded and colonised to the point where, in places such as parts of London, it scarcely seems to be England in anything in name. Their complaints are not about the particular ethnic minorities with which they are surrounded when they make their public complaints or against individual immigrants generally, but the general effects of mass immigration.

These people are suffering from what I call the claustrophobia of diversity. They feel that they are being oppressed by immigrants, that the land which is ancestrally theirs is being colonised to the extent that parts of the country seem no longer to belong to England. Worst of all they see themselves as helpless to prevent it because the colonisation is being facilitated and encouraged by their own elite who all, whatever their ostensible political colour, subscribe to the treason and viciously support the suppression of dissent to the betrayal. This mixture of the act of elite-sponsored colonisation by foreigners, the failure of democracy through the tacit conspiracy of the political elite to ensure that no meaningful alternative policy on immigration is offered by any party capable of forming a government and the inability of the native population to even voice their protest at this betrayal of their most pressing interests in the mainstream media produces an ever growing sense of rage, a rage made all the more terrible and onerous by the feelings of impotence engendered by the ever more oppressive restrictions on public expression which British governments have imposed.

These feelings are with the English all the time. If someone English lives in an area which does not have a large ethnic minority population the anger and frustration may remain bubbling below the surface most of the time, although they will be exacerbated by reports of their fellow county men and women elsewhere being harassed and bullied by the liberal elite into towing the multiculturalist line while ethnic minorities are pandered to ever more grotesquely with bizarre interpretations of what constitutes a human right and the constant growth of interest groups which cater solely for ethnic minorities, for example, the Refugee Council (http://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/about/board).

But those who live in an area which is heavily populated by ethnic minorities will face constant triggers for the anger and frustration to come to the forefront of their minds. Every time someone in such an area walks the streets they will be reminded of how the demographic balance has changed and is changing. Every time a native English parent seeks a school for their children they will be faced often enough with choices of schools where many, quite often a majority, of the pupils are from ethnic minorities. A visit to their GP or hospital will find them sitting in waiting rooms outnumbered by ethnic minorities. When they go for a job, especially if it is low-skilled or unskilled, they are likely to find themselves being asked to work, if they can get such work at all, in a situation where they are in the ethnic minority and English is not the common workplace language. If they go into a shop, cinema or café they are increasing likely to find themselves being served by foreigners with inadequate English for the job.

Everywhere the white English man or woman in an area with a large ethnic minority population looks it seems that their world is being changed utterly and that they can do nothing about it because of the elite complicity in what has happened and is happening. That is why the public outbursts of frustration such as that of Emma West occur. They are the bursting of the emotional dam. The fact that the episodes recorded so often occur on public transport is unsurprising because it is here that the proximity with those who trigger the feelings of rage and betrayal is greatest and there is the least opportunity to escape from these reminders of the surreptitious elite-sponsored conquest of England. The physical claustrophobia of being on a crowded train or bus marries with the social claustrophobia of diversity.

The people recorded in the urls at the end of this essay are white working class Englishwomen. They of course are from the class who had to and have to suffer the main brunt of mass immigration. They live cheek-by-jowl with the immigrants and their descendants. They send their children to schools where their child may be the only white English child in their class. They live in the tower blocks where they are the only white English family in the block. Not for them the middle class white liberals escape through white flight to the suburbs or countryside or the gentrification of once working class areas such as Islington. It is small wonder that people such as Emma West should feel deserted and betrayed and eventually lose all patience with public silence.

But uninhibited racial language and complaint is not restricted to those without status, wealth, influence and power. Two well know and recent examples are the fashion designer John Galliano (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CQO8q3FSH0) and the actor and director Mel Gibson (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50_qMJSPtqY&feature=relatedso – go in at 1 minute 17 sec). There is far more to these public displays of anger at the fact of mass immigration and the behaviour of the political elite than simple desperation. It is entirely natural behaviour. Public expression of dissent can be partially successful but it will never be entirely complete. Even in extreme autocracies such as the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany there were still voices raised in opposition. The English have been subject several generations of ever greater elite propaganda and censorship of dissent about immigration and its effects but this has not made them race or ethnicity blind, merely increasingly reticent, fearful and stressed about immigration and its consequences. Not only that, but the oppression arising from mass immigration is different in quality from the oppression of a native elite which merely tries to enforce its will on the masses. The effects of mass migration are around people all the time. There is no respite.

When people are asked to suppress their normal feelings stress occurs. Where the suppression of feelings relates to the most fundamental social and psychological structures stress is at its greatest. That is what happens when an elite tries to recreate society by asking the population to override the behaviour which makes a society strong and stable.

Social animals have two universal features: they form discrete groups and within the group produce hierarchies – although both the group and the hierarchy vary considerably in form and intensity. Why they do this is a matter of debate but it is a fact that this what invariably happens. Human beings are no exception; whether they are hunter-gatherers or people populating a great modern city they all have a need to form groups in which they feel naturally comfortable and within that group form hierarchies.

But the sense of being separate, of belonging to a discrete group with identifiable characteristics is of a different order of complexity than it is for any other social animal because homo sapiens is high intelligence, self-awareness and most importantly language. Where an animal may simply accept another member of the species as part of the group through simple and obvious triggers such as scent, markings or imprinting, human beings judge by wide variety of criteria who is and is not part of the group, the most potent of which are racial characteristics and cultural differences. In some ways that makes acceptance of the outsider easier – at least in theory – but in others much more difficult than it might be for an animal, for there are many more reasons for human beings to accept or not accept someone into the group than there are for a non-human social animal.

Social animals form hierarchies almost certainly because otherwise there would be no way of the society organising itself to accommodate the differing qualities and abilities of individuals which arise in any species. Societies which consist of various human groups that see themselves as separate from each other disrupt the creation of a healthy hierarchy. Instead of there being a single hierarchy within an homogenous group (defining homogenous as a population in a discrete territory which sees itself as a group), there are hierarchies formed within each group and a further overarching hierarchy formed from the various groups themselves with each group hierarchy competing within the population as a whole.

Man is also a territorial being. Homo sapiens need the security of a homeland. Remove that and insecurity is perpetual. That is why mass immigration is the most fundamental of treasons. That which is called racism by liberals and their ethnic minority auxiliaries is simply political protest of the most fundamental kind. When someone resorts to complaint based on race, ethnicity or nationality in their own country they are saying “This is my land, you will not steal it from me without a fight”. The time to worry is when there are no public demonstrations of dissent to the policy of mass immigration and its consequences.

The package of emotion transmuted into conscious thought we call patriotism is an essential part of maintaining a society (http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/09/20/patriotism-is-not-an-optional-extra/). A society which forgets that is doomed.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pONVYjAd1wc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTocvGIEqOU&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfGqwtn3GZY

It must be no to Devomax

Robert Henderson

The leader of the Scots Numpty Party (SNP) Alex Salmond has a secret love. He has a long-time partner Independence , but also a burgeoning affair with the siren Devomax. No, this not a relative of the cyber personality Max Headroom, although it is just as artificial and improbable a creation.

Like all lovers with two mistresses who know of the others existence the SNP leader has been drifting into a fevered incoherence as he tries to keep both the objects of his affection satisfied. Only the other day he said that if Scotland votes for independence it will still be part of the UK: “That union, that United Kingdom if you like, would be maintained after Scottish political independence.” (http://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/i_still_want_to_be_in_uk_says_alex_salmond_1_ 2085533)

Exactly what finery Miss Devomax should be clothed in when he finally presents her to the world, Master Salmond has not crystallised even in his own mind, but he knows that her garb would indubitably involve a skirt of full fiscal autonomy. As Scotland under the reign of Mistress Devomax would be technically part of the UK, her political clothes would also mean keeping the Queen as head of state, continuing to use the Pound and sharing defence, foreign affairs, EU membership and the servicing of the National Debt and all other financial obligations in the UK including Foreign Aid. (Strangely, when speaking of his ever less secret love, the SNP leader always omits to mention the “servicing of the National Debt and all other financial obligations in the UK”). In short , it would be Home Rule more or less.

The biggest fly in the Devomax ointment is fiscal autonomy which would mean Scotland raising all its government revenue from taxes which it imposed and collected itself. Some of those taxes would have to be used to pay a share proportionate to Scotland’s fraction of the UK population (around 9%) of the UK defence budget, the foreign affairs budget and the servicing of the National Debt and all other accrued financial obligations in the UK. (Devomax would also mean that Scotland would have to fund the cost in Scotland of welfare, education, housing, the arts, the NHS , transport, roads, the environment, PFI and PPP projects in Scotland, policing and justice . Some of this is already funded from the Treasury disbursement to Scotland but much is not, for example, most of Scottish welfare. )

A fiscally independent Scotland would radically change the relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK. If the Scots were paying part of the expenditure on UK projects such as defence and Foreign Aid they would expect to have some say in those projects. This would cause immense difficulty both in terms of the level of expenditure and how the UK project expenditure was deployed.

How much would Scotland have to contribute to the UK budget under Devomax? It would be a substantial. Let us have a look at the financial year 2011/12. The UK defence budget for 2011/12 is £40 billion, National Debt interest is £50 billion, http://cdn.hm-treasury.gov.uk/2011budget_complete.pdf p6), Foreign Aid is £8.7 billion (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1391334/Britain-doles-aid-country-despite-savage-cutbacks-home.html ), the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is £1,6 billion (go to http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/publications-and-documents/publications1/annual-reports/business-plan and click on Business Plan). The net UK contribution to the EU in 2010 (the latest figure available) was £9.2 billion with the gross contribution being a whopping £19.7 billion. (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100081949/britains-net-contribution-to-the-eu-budget-has-risen-by-74-per-cent-in-one-year/). The total (taking only the net contribution to the EU into account) is £110 billion. That would mean Scotland’s share would have been £10 billion. If the accrued liabilities of UK taxpayer funded pensions at the point of fiscal separation were dealt with at the UK level as well that would add billions more Scotland would have to put into the UK pot. In addition, there is the question of how much of the financial chaos created by the Scottish banks RBS and HBOS should be laid at the Scotland’s door. The headline amounts involved in rescuing the banks are large enough (£45 billion for RBS and £20 billion for HBOS via the Lloyds Banking Group rescue (http://money.uk.msn.com/news/articles.aspx?cp-documentid=152384309), but the true figure runs into hundreds of billions (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/nov/12/bank-bailouts-uk-credit-crunch and http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/the-wages-of-scottish-independence-public-debt/.)

That is the position now. By the time a referendum is likely to be held and a decision made, it is likely to be 2015. By then the national debt is projected to be around £1.4 billion as against £1 trillion in 2012. That would add something like £45 billion for Scotland to service. Foreign Aid is due to increase to £11.5 billion by 2014 (http://www.dfid.gov.uk/news/latest-news/2010/spending-review-2010/). The EU net contribution is also due to rise after 2013.

Although it is impossible to give more than a rough approximation of what a Scottish government would have to be handing over to the UK Treasury under Devomax, realistically it would be in the region of £20 billion per annum, a sum which would probably represent at least a quarter of the total Scottish budget by the time Devomax was a fact. That would put great pressure on domestic Scottish government spending and heighten the already natural desire of a Devomax Scottish government to demand a strong say in the UK’s affairs.

The general difficulty with UK projects is obvious. Scotland would expect a say on the amount spent and the nature of the spending , but the rest of the UK – which is 91% of the UK population – would overwhelmingly outweigh the Scots in any democratic procedure to make decisions. It is impossible have an arrangement which did not have one of two outcomes that would be unpalatable to one of the two parties. Either Scottish wishes would be ignored or the Scottish tail would wag the rest of the UK dog by giving them a disproportionately powerful say.

The situation would be exceptionally sharp in the case of defence. The SNP is ideologically against a nuclear deterrent. There is probably a majority of the Scottish public who support this view. Any likely Scottish government for the foreseeable future will have the SNP as at least a strong partner in a coalition. This state of affairs has three possible consequences. If things stay as they are with the nuclear facilities in Scotland continuing, they would be a high value bargaining chip for a Scottish government to extract substantial concessions from Westminster on other subjects, for example, the servicing of the UK national debt. Alternatively, if the nuclear deterrent facilities were placed entirely in England the Scots will cavil at paying a proportionate share of its costs even though they would benefit from the protection it offers. More generally, a Scottish government ideologically opposed to a nuclear deterrent might try to refuse to pay anything towards it.

The other great military problem would be action overseas which would have profound foreign policy implications. It would clearly be absurd to get into a situation where Westminster decided on foreign action and the Scottish government could veto the deployment. There would also be occasions where even if a fighting role was not being contemplated disputes could arise, for example, over the military being used in policing roles such as those in the Balkans or substantial amounts of the military budget being used to defend the Falklands. In addition, Scotland might well try to engineer a situation where there were military assets such as Scottish regiments which, while they were not formally under the control of the Scottish government, were in practice always stationed in Scotland or at least in the UK , with an understanding that they were not to be deployed overseas .

The second immediate and pressing problem would be foreign policy in general and the EU in particular. Apart from foreign policy relating to the armed forces, there would also be many points of potential conflict between Scotland and the rest of the UK. For example, Scotland might object to funding or facilitating the British arms trade while the UK government was in favour or the UK government could be in favour of restricting immigration and Scotland for increasing it.

But those problems would be nothing compared to the perpetual wrangles over the EU. Assuming the UK remains a member of the EU and the EU is not dissolved by the economic acid bath which is the Euro collapse, how would the UK’s relations with the EU be decided with a quasi-independent Scotland paying part of the annual membership fee? Scotland would undoubtedly ask for some form of official representation and however that was delivered it would weaken the hand of the UK government because it would seem to the rest of the EU that the UK was speaking with two voices. That could provide a lever for the EU to weaken the UK by playing Scotland off against the rest of the UK.

In any discussions of new policy or bargaining over such things as the UK rebate, fishing quotas or the disbursement of that part of the money from the UK EU budget contribution which is returned to the UK in various ways, the UK could find itself in a similar position to that UK domestic politics is presently in with the coalition government: no clear public voice but one perpetually moving as deals are done behind the scenes. Most dramatically, imagine a situation where there is a new EU treaty which greatly increases the move towards a United States of Europe. Scotland would be in favour: the UK government probably would oppose such a treaty. Even if the decision was left to a UK referendum would a quasi-independent Scotland accept such a referendum? Would they not seek a referendum for Scotland only? In the medium term the likely response by the EU would be to try to expand their long-held regionalist plan to dissolve the power of nation states within the EU to allow places such as Scotland a large and ever increasing autonomy within the EU while Scotland remain legally part of a member state.

The other great immediate Devomax problem would be the management of the Pound. Many of the problems associated with a supposedly independent Scotland continuing to use the pound also apply to Devomax– see http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/an-independent-scotland-must-not-be-allowed-to-have-the-pound-as-their-official-currency/. Foreigners at both the business and government levels would begin to see the UK not as single economic sphere but as two separate economies. That would create uncertainty which would of itself weaken the Pound.

If Scotland had a much weaker economy than the rest of the UK under Devomax, which is probable because of the dangerous narrowness of the Scottish economy and its massive public sector, something similar to the Euro situation would arise. The value of the Pound against other currencies would be suppressed, just as the Euro has not reflected the strength of the German economy because of the other weaker vessels such as Greece and Italy. An artificially low Pound might sound attractive for exports, but it also means more expensive imports and creates a risk that the currency may slip into the dangerous territory of precipitously devaluing until the credibility of the currency itself is in danger. At the very least a Pound dependent on two separate fiscal policies would mean that the massively larger entity – the UK minus Scotland – would to some degree be dependent on the behaviour of the much smaller entity – Scotland.

Fiscal autonomy also means, in theory at least, no transfer of money from the rest of the UK (in practice from England) to Scotland if the Scottish economy runs into serious trouble. This could easily happen because of the size of the tax take Scotland would have to generate to meet their present obligations under Devomax.

The quick way of getting a quick approximation of the amount of money a Scottish government under Devomax would have to raise to fund present expenditure . The total budget projection for £2011/12 is £710 billion (http://cdn.hm-treasury.gov.uk/2011budget_complete.pdf p6). 9% of that is £64 billion.

In 2009/10 – the last year for which there are official Scottish government figures for public expenditure in Scotland : Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland ( GERS) – Scottish tax revenues were £42,201 billion excluding North Sea oil and £48,132 billion with what are coyly called “an illustrative geographical share “ of North Sea oil revenues with expenditure for the year of £62.086 billion (http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2011/06/21144516/1). Even with the Oil revenues included there was a shortfall of £14 billion in tax revenue.

But there are problems with GERS which could well substantially understate public expenditure in Scotland. For many items there are no official statistics collected for Scotland alone. Consequently, the GERS figures are often based on extrapolations from UK statistics with methodologies which even the GERS compilers warn do not produce objective data: “… these methodologies are subjective and therefore the figures should be viewed accordingly” (http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2011/06/21144516/2). The other problem is the treatment of North Sea Oil revenues. The “illustrative geographical share of North Sea oil revenues” are based on a study by the University of Aberdeen (http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2011/06/21144516/7).

The fact that both the GERS estimates and the North Sea oil revenue estimate have been made in Scotland rather than by non-Scottish bodies puts a large question mark against their impartiality. If there is partiality favouring Scotland in the GERS estimates it does not have to be conscious. It is human nature to always put the best appearance on things from the individual’s point of view. That is particularly true when a study is commissioned by those with political power.

Even if there is no overestimating of the bare figures they would not tell the whole story. Scotland’s GDP is dangerously dependent on public spending. By 2012 it will be in the region of 67% of Scottish GDP (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/4217793/Scotlands-dependence-on-state-increasing.html). The important thing to understand about tax collection is that tax collected from those drawing their pay from the public purse is that it is simply recycled taxpayers’ money. It is only the money derived from private enterprise which drives an economy. We can see this graphically in the present UK financial position. Only the private sector can grow the economy to allow larger tax receipts to reduce the deficit. To have two thirds of an economy dependent on public expenditure is profoundly precarious because the tax base can shrink radically very rapidly. It is doubly dangerous for a small country of only 5 million people which does not have much diversity in in the little there is of a private sector.

Even if 90% of the oil tax revenues were allocated to Scotland this would not, on average, compensate for the loss of a subsidy of some £8 billion pa which Scotland presently receives from the UK treasury through higher per capita funding resulting from the Barnett Formula. Not only that but revenues veer about wildly. In 1991/2 they were a paltry £647 million; in 2008/9 £13 billion; in 2009/10 they dropped dramatically to £6.4 billion. (http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2011/06/21144516/7). The remaining oil in Scottish waters is also declining rapidly and becoming more expensive to extract as the major oil discoveries run down (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/05/14/the-truth-about-uk-oil-and-gas/). While it is true that overall oil consumption is rising because of the countries such as China and India, which might be expected to keep the price of oil high, there are also dramatic developments around shale oil and gas so there is no guarantee that the price of oil will remain high or continue to rise. In any event it would be a rash government to base its future on a single crock of gold.

There is also the strong possibility under Devomax of the English public sector jobs exported to Scotland being repatriated (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/scottish-independence-yes-but-only-on-these-terms/) and of companies in Scotland moving out of Scotland if a Scottish government cannot afford to offer them financial incentives to say.

There would also be a problem with new national debt. With a fiscally independent Scotland neither England nor Scotland would wish to run up new UK National Debt. After Devomax Scotland would have to take sole responsibility for any new finance raised by the Scottish government, while the rest of the UK would assume responsibility for any new post Devomax debt it incurred. There is the risk of Scotland being unwilling to cut its public financial cloth much closer because it has become substantially poorer and running up unsustainable Scottish debt.

It is only to easy to imagine Scotland getting into the same mess that the Republic of Ireland and Iceland got into by a mixture of reckless spending and a failure to control credit or risky financial operations generally. The rest of the UK (essentially England for reasons already given) would either have to bail out the Scots or see Scotland go effectively bust with the dire effect that would have on the Pound and the UK international financial and political credibility. The latter would also bring large numbers of Scots to England after jobs, housing, schools and welfare which their own government could no longer afford. Which option would a UK government take? Almost certainly the bailing out of Scotland with English money because of the damage anything else might do. This might be done as a supposed loan, but there would be no guarantee that it would be repaid.

The best that could be hoped for from Devomax from an English perspective would be that Scotland would not be reckless and would pay their share of UK projects such as defence. But along with that would come a perpetual uneasiness and clashing of democratic wills. It would be, as mentioned previously, akin to the situation we have with the coalition government with no clear position on anything. Unlike the coalition government there would be no end to it. If Scotland is to leave the UK, it must be as a fully independent state asking no favours from England.