The title of this piece is taken from an article by Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph (16 April 2011 – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/charlesmoore/8454662/Will-there-always-be-an-England-whatever-the-origin-of-its-people.html ). Moore’s article addresses a fact which to most, probably all, people is obvious , namely, that human beings are not interchangeable units who can be moved from and to societies in large numbers without having effects which change the nature of the society which receives the immigrants. The article is noteworthy because this profoundly important truth has been resolutely censored by the mainstream British media for over forty years and denied by mainstream parties of all political colours.
Moore was prompted to write the article by an experience on 14 April. He was due to attend an St Georges Day dinner at the Honourable Artillery Company (held early so not to clash with Easter) where he was to give the toast to “England”. The venue was in Sussex and he went by taxi only to find that his driver was very much at variance with the theme of his intended evening, viz;
“ In these days of satnavs, few drivers really know where anything is: this one got slightly lost. Eventually, I had to stand in a central London street in my white tie and tails, waving my arms and calling in the driver on my mobile phone. He was a friendly man, who quickly endeared himself to me by saying that I had a “lovely accent”. He spoke somewhat fractured English and when I asked him where he was from, he said Bangladesh. It turned out, however, that he was born and had spent his entire life (about 40 years) in England.
“He asked where I was going after dinner. I said Sussex. He had never heard of it.
This experience caused Moore to ask a question forbidden by the commissars of political correctness:
“What, I asked myself, was his “England”? If he had had the misfortune to sit in on my speech that night, would he – even if he spoke the language better – have picked up any joke or reference that I made? Would names like the Duke of Wellington, Tennyson, or William Blake have rung even the faintest bell? “And did those feet…?,” we sang. “What feet?,” my driver might have wondered. Anyway, what is “England’s green and pleasant land” to a man who lives 50 miles from Sussex but has never heard of it? He told me he finds our climate horribly cold, so that when he wants to get out in the country, he flies “back” to Bangladesh. “
Having trodden deep into the treacherous marsh of political incorrectness, Moore attempts to rehabilitate himself by placing his feelings within the realms of political correctness:
“These thoughts made me brood. Part of the pleasure of the England which I was trying to talk about is that it is shared. I am English-English (with a little Irish thrown in), but England is not the special possession of those like me, and I wouldn’t want it to be.”
England as a special place for the English? Heaven forfend! However, having made his obeisance to the god of multiculturalism, he blots his liberal credentials copybook further by continuing
“The point about a country is that it belongs to all its settled inhabitants. I don’t think that the driver felt excluded from an England which he wished to possess; rather that he simply had very little idea of it. He had an idea of London as a place (and of Tottenham Hotspur as a football club), and Britain as an entity that issues passports, but England? Little more, perhaps, than a geographical expression, and, as I say, his geography was vague. “
Moore than sways back into politically correct mode with
“Yet I could not possibly claim that I am a better citizen of this country than he. He works and, I expect, pays his taxes. He has a family. He patiently and politely drives businessmen to meetings and even takes men in white tie and tails to incomprehensible ceremonies. What I was on about that evening probably has less to do with the way we live in this island now than does this pleasant Muslim doing his bit to make London the most successful and cosmopolitan commercial hub in Europe. “
I was particularly struck by Moore’s grovelling and defeated acceptance that the Bangladeshi taxi driver was more representative of England than Moore and the people with whom he was about to celebrate St George’s Day.
Moore than goes on to retail the massive immigration since the advent of Blair in 1997 – the population of the UK has risen by more than two million through net immigration since then. He then breaks the liberal omerta on immigration by pointing out the salutary fact that net immigration only tells us “about overall numbers, but not about the composition of the population. It conceals the fact that hundreds of thousands of British-born people left and many, many more non-British people came. “
All well and good. He then adds
“Most of us do not want immigration on this scale. That is shown by every poll. But, in another sense, most of us do. You and I want someone to serve us in a bar and clean the hospitals and make cheap clothes. I want someone to drive me across town so that I can make my Colonel Blimp remarks to a friendly audience.
Here Moore continues to swing backwards and forwards between honesty and political correctness. He confuses the fact of immigration and the jobs done by immigrants with what the native population wants. All immigrants do is displace native workers by a mixture of taking lower wages than the natives (which they can afford to do because the savings they make are multiplied several times in value when they take the savings back to their own country) and colonising areas of work especially those which are organised by gangmasters who themselves are often foreign and generally only employ people from their own ethnic or national group. Moore’s view is that of the white middle-class liberal who would cannot conceive of immigrants ever competing with him for jobs, healthcare or housing.
Moore also shows a remarkable lack of imagination when it comes to breeding rates:
“Above all, we show, in our obsession with birth control, that we do not want to provide a big enough next generation of people like ourselves. Demographic projections now show Britain overtaking Germany as the largest EU country in 30 years or so. None of that growth will come from the indigenous white population. “
I doubt that it has ever occurred to Moore that much of the cause of native English families having children at below replacement rate is directly or indirectly due to the mass post 1945 immigration and its consequences. These plausibly may have reduced the willingness of the native population to have children from a mixture of demoralisation through seeing parts of their land colonised and the competition for jobs, housing, schools and welfare which immigrants have brought. It is also a fair bet that many native white families have left England because of the immigration. There is also the point that demography is notoriously unreliable at making accurate predictions. Without the post-war immigration it would not matter very much that the native population’s breeding rate was below replacement level because a new equilibrium would gradually emerge. With mass immigration the lower breeding rate of the native population is of the greatest importance because it is conceivable that within 50 and certainly 100 years the native English could be a minority in their own land through a mixture of continuing mass immigration to the UK (the vast majority of which comes to England) and higher breeding rates amongst immigrants and their descendant populations.
Moore ends by flying the white flag as he accepts the end of England as inevitable:
“All this need not be a total disaster. It is possible, though hard, to forge a United Kingdom made up of many ethnicities. Leaders like Mr Cameron are right to try to insist on common standards and better rules, rather than to despair. But whatever it is, and however well it turns out, it cannot be England. Perhaps when I am very old, my grandchildren will ask me what England was. It will be a hard question to answer, but I think I shall tell them that it seemed like a good idea while it lasted, and that it lasted for about 1,000 years.”
Moore is a defeatist when there is no need to be one. The dissolving of England and the English in a multicultural immigrant soup is not inevitable. The size of non-assimilated populations is not yet so vast that nothing can be done. Most of the immigrant populations is compressed into the larger towns and cities. Geographically, most of England is still occupied by the English. Mass immigration could be ended if Britain recovered control over its own borders by withdrawing from the EU, repudiating all other treaties and conventions which facilitate immigration to the Britain such as the UN Convention on Refugees and throwing over the globalist ideology which currently holds sway. Having stemmed the flow, a British government could then start reducing the numbers here by removing illegal immigrants, followed by the departure of those without work, followed by the removal of those without British citizenship whose work is not absolutely necessary . Native Britons could be given the right to take a job occupied by an immigrant if they had the ability to do it. The benefits of the welfare state (barring emergency healthcare) could be denied to first generation immigrants. British citizenship should be withheld from those who cannot or will not assimilate. Those actions would allow meaningful control over the size of the ethnic minority populations in England.
What Moore does not address is his own position and the position of those of his class and position. Moore has spent his life as a journalist (over 35 years). Between 1984 and 2003 he was successively editor of the Spectator magazine, the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Telegraph. Never at any time in his various editorships did write or speak out forthrightly against the malign effects of mass immigration or allow any of the publications he managed to forthrightly promote such views. Instead, he was if not content willing to play the politically correct game when it came to race and immigration. If doubts were expressed they were always couched in terms which attempted to place them within the parameters of politically correctness. Immigration was not bad per se, it was merely a question of numbers. When immigrants misbehaved, stories which dealt with the misbehaviour were placed on a pc cushion along the lines of “immigrants are generally a great boon to the country”. This latest article shows Moore is still trying to do the same thing. Nonetheless, it is a significant breach in the carapace of political correctness which has grown over England in the past fifty years and should be welcomed for that reason.
