In the past I might have unthinkingly gone along with an ideology of “diversity” on the grounds that it is the “right” or “moral” response.
However, if we take the emotion out of the issue and use simple inductive logic demonstrates how toxic and nonsensical it all is.
The other day 700 illegal migrants came into Britain on one single day. I
f we take that number down to 500 for ease of calculation that equates to 182,000 migrants per year.
Those people need assistance and housing.
How is that even possible in a country that is already falling apart?
Something needs to give.
Someone has to pay.
Guess who that might be.
Yes, it’s ordinary working people from communities that have been deprived for at least a generation since Margaret Thatcher.
Any wonder ‘the plebs’ are rebelling?
Now I would like to focus on a spat between Tony Blair’s spin doctor, Alastair Campbell and Douglas Murray who wrote a book,in 2017, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam.
I would never agree with these people that British imperialism was a net good but, in terms of what is happening in Britain and other countries, they are absolutely correct in my mind.
Here is a discussion between Laurence Fox and Calvin Robinson with Megyn Kelly.
Despite embracing everything “British” they are definitely right,
Douglas Murray and More Threatened Over "Dangerous" Speech, w/ Laurence Fox and Fr. Calvin Robinson
In the interview they reference this
'A sick individual': Douglas Murray hits back at Alastair Campbell
Here are two articles recently penned by Douglas Murray
The unfashionable truth about the riots
Douglas Murray
As the days slip by, the likelihood that anything will be learned from the recent rioting looks ever more remote. And with that suspicion comes the inevitable sense of déjà-vu. Because we have indeed been here before.
In 2011 England was engulfed by riots, originating in London but leading to copycat violence across the north of England. The ostensible cause that time was the shooting by police of Mark Duggan, a charming young drug dealer who was in possession of a gun. The initial unrest in Tottenham may well have started as a result of claims that police had shot an innocent man – and an innocent black man at that. But by the time Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool were going at it, the proximate cause for the violence seemed to have been forgotten.
The coalition government set up a panel to look into the causes of the violence, and as with most such government panels it was made clear from the start what the answers could not be. Indeed, after the report was released The Spectator published a minority report by Simon Marcus, one of the members of the panel, blowing the whistle on matters his fellow panel members refused to consider. These things included gang membership and ‘an epidemic of father absence’.
Equally interesting is to look at the few things that people were allowed to focus on back then. The 2011 riots happened in the aftermath of the great crash of 2008. Many government officials and wise heads in the media tried to understand the spate of lawlessness by looking at things through this lens. One of the few acceptable questions to ask about those riots regarded the correlation between deprivation and rioting. This was one of the fashionable things to fix on.
Doubtless similar fixations will emerge now. The long-defunct English Defence League and the question of social media appear to be the main focuses of permitted attention. But I decided to do some checking on the employment stats for some of the northern towns that have seen the worst rioting in the past week. I also checked the 2011 statistics and then compared the two. I should warn you in advance that if you’re easily depressed, you should look away now.
Back in 2011, the proportion on out-of-work benefits (including incapacity benefit) in Sunderland was 18 per cent; today it is 19 per cent. In 2011 the unemployment figure in Rotherham was 16 per cent; today it is 18 per cent. In Hartlepool, it was 21 per cent; today, 23 per cent. Consider just that last one. A quarter of people of working age in the area are claiming welfare for incapacity or worklessness.
If you look at the figures for the towns in which rioting has occurred in the past week, there is not one of them in which the job situation has improved in 13 years. In every one, the employment has got demonstrably worse since 2011.
Let us assume that unemployment and the resultant hopelessness were factors in the 2011 riots. Personally, I am slightly reluctant to do so, because plenty of people who have had every disadvantage in life do not decide to burn police stations. But since this was seen as one of the causes of the 2011 conflagration, why did nothing get better? Why, instead, did it get measurably worse?
One reason is that from 2011 until today, all three main parties have followed the same model on job creation. Seemingly un-able to actually improve education, incentives and job opportunities in these areas, they went for the easy route. That was to issue visas for migrants to come to the UK and to claim that the economy was growing as a result. Of course this ‘growth’ is almost entirely faked. Study after study shows that this type of migration benefits the migrant (naturally) but does almost nothing to improve the actual economy. In fact for many people it undercuts local labour and, due to increased demand for housing and limited housing stock, it makes their situation much worse.
At the time of the 2011 riots, foreign-born workers accounted for 14 per cent of the UK workforce. Today it’s 21 per cent. Employment has grown by 3.6 million since 2011, but fully 74 per cent of this is down to immigrant workers.
In these figures you see one of the inevitable failures of consecutive governments. The economy has created more jobs, but this has not reduced the workless levels of local populations. The communities who needed the work have been bypassed. ‘Left behind’ doesn’t do justice to what has happened, because it makes it sound like it happened in a fit of absentmindedness. It didn’t. It was a decision. So while 3.6 million more are in work compared with 2011, only 929,000 were born here. The job creation benefited many people, but it did not do much for Bolton, Sefton or Rotherham.
There will be plenty of discussion in the coming days about the cultural and immigration factors in these riots – as there should be. But this other cause of the unrest should not be ignored. Successive governments promised to do something to help improve the lives of people in these towns. An inclusive economic model, we were told. A dividend of Brexit, even. But they didn’t just do nothing. They did worse than nothing.
Our government has the same choice the Conservative and coalition governments had. It could focus on getting people into work and bringing work back to these areas. Or, like the governments before them, it could try to cover up the problem with immigration. As the Tory party could tell them, it is an easy and addictive fix. Does Keir Starmer have the guts to go cold turkey? Everything will depend on whether he does.
The persecution of ‘the plebs’
ot so long ago we went to politicians for politics and comedians for comedy. Today, like many others, I watch politicians for amusement and listen to comedians for their political insights.
Whenever I want cheering up, I watch Kamala Harris riffing on a theme of her choice, or sometimes a Labour politician trying to explain why a woman can have a penis. By contrast Joe Rogan analyses political questions better than any of them, as does Noam Dworman, of New York’s Comedy Cellar.
So it was that when the question of free speech returned again recently, I did not turn to the hilarious Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood, but instead to the sombre and sage Rowan Atkinson.
Readers may recall that some years back both Labour and a Tory-Lib Dem coalition government tried to keep a law that made ‘insulting’ speech a criminal offence. The person who made the best case against this was Atkinson, who gave a speech in one of the committee rooms in parliament which showed a more astute sense of politics and principle than anything that had occurred in that place for years. While our present government tries desperately to crack down on social-media users, one part of Atkinson’s warnings is especially pertinent.
He noted: ‘I am personally highly unlikely to be arrested for whatever laws exist to contain free expression, because of the undoubtedly privileged position that is afforded to those of a high public profile. So, my concerns are less for myself and more for those more vulnerable because of their lower profile. Like the man arrested in Oxford for calling a police horse gay. Or the teenager arrested for calling the Church of Scientology a cult. Or the café owner [given a police caution] for displaying passages from the Bible on a TV screen.’
Recently I have been thinking of Atkinson’s wise words while following the cases brought against those who have been prosecuted for things they’ve said online. For instance, it is impossible not to notice that it is indeed ‘the plebs’ who have been marched to court sharpish during the unexpected speeding up of our justice system in the wake of this month’s riots. They include people like Bernadette Spofforth, a 55-year-old mother of three who, shortly after the Southport attack, rather got over her skis. Specifically she was one of those excitable people (and I will never understand why people do this) who wanted to name the suspect in the killings of the three little girls before anyone else did. She wrongly repeated an internet rumour (though caveating it with ‘if this is true’) that the suspect was a man called Ali Al-Shakati who was on an MI6 watchlist and had arrived in the UK by boat last year.
Of course she was wrong, though the glee with which certain people celebrated those like her being wrong was something to behold. After all, there have been plenty of people with similar names on terror watchlists who have arrived here and carried out acts of terror soon afterwards. The Parsons Green, Reading and London Bridge attackers are a few examples. It’s just the Southport suspect wasn’t one of them.
In any case, Ms Spofforth is out on bail pending further inquiries. All this despite her acknowledging that her tweet was ‘a spur-of-the-moment, ridiculous thing to do’. Nevertheless, the same police forces that have not solved a burglary in half of the country for years are now policing unwise things people are saying online.
One oddity about this is, once again, the two-tier nature of the pursuit. People like Nick Lowles, from the incorrectly named far-left campaign group Hope Not Hate, also published fake information online. That particular dolt passed around a claim (swiftly shown to be false) that a Muslim woman in Middlesbrough had had acid thrown at her from a car window. The post was seen by more than 100,000 people and led to Muslim men appearing on the streets in the belief that they had to defend their areas from racist acid-attack monsters.
Yet so far as I know Mr Lowles has not had his collar felt, perhaps because he enjoys the government’s favour, as well as backing from prominent left-wing philanthropists such as Trevor Chinn. Kenan Malik of the Observer similarly passed around misleading reports in print and online this week, but also seems strangely immune from the law.
Lord Bingham famously said in 2006: ‘The law must be accessible and so far as possible intelligible, clear and predictable.’ The government’s attempts to crack down on this month’s spontaneous and grass-roots riots is anything but intelligible, clear or predictable. Perhaps because (and this may be controversial, but it nevertheless seems true) there is no evidence the disorder was centrally organised. What appears to scare the authorities and much of the media is that the lawlessness was spontaneous and uncoordinated – something the ‘anti-fascists’ hoping to have street clashes with some British Nazi party appear rather disappointed about.
Meanwhile the uneven and unpredictable application of the law continues. Just last month, on arriving into office, Mahmood warned that UK prisons faced a ‘total collapse’ due to overcrowding, and that Britain risked ‘a total breakdown of civil law and order’, before announcing she would release thousands of inmates early.
Yet just weeks later, this threat of overcrowding seems to have magically disappeared. Indeed Mahmood appears intent on overseeing the locking up of any low–profile ‘pleb’ who has ever tweeted something incorrect or distasteful online.
I do not doubt that she, Keir Starmer and others will continue to give us all a laugh as they struggle at their jobs. But couldn’t someone arrange for Rowan Atkinson to become justice secretary?
Go back to Enoch Powell British MP 1973-85 and his famous speech I think 💭 t was called rivers of blood. That was when only 50,000 immigrants a year were entering Britain. He predicted all of this- way ahead of his time. It was also around this time that the UN Lima agreement was signed. That’s when immigration with integration changed to immigration with multiculturalism. I’m in Australia, and our current government doesn’t s considering allowing immigrants to take citizenship ceremonies in their own language. There is even local councils setting. Aside new subdivisions for Indians or Muslims. When I speak to older immigrants the ones who came after WW 2 they recognise the difference and also don’t like the direction our country takes s going.
I became acutely aware of the immigrant crisis in 2008 when i was made redundant and was forced to sign with a number of employment agencies to make ends meet. As a lorry driver I was travelling all over the country delivering goods. I noticed that pretty well everywhere I went there were immigrants working there. At one place near Heathrow airport I asked three people regarding unloading none of whom spoke English, the forth person I spoke could speak good English and it turns out he interpreted for the others. Their was a guy I knew who was seeking to get a raise who was told that his boss could get lots of Poles who would do the job for the pay he was currently on.
It's about time the the ordinary working man in this country made himself heard. I am ok with immigration but what we've suffered especially 2004 when we opened our borders to ten formerly non EU countries is invasion not immigration.
What happens if you complain about this invasion is you are then accused of racism, but the people who say that are not affected by the influx of no or low skill immigrants who then proceed to take the jobs of the indigenous people. What also amazes me is why the trade unions have not been vociferous about the threats to there members livelihoods, it could be that as some people say what is happening here is a communist plot to collectivise the World and as most trade union hierarchy are socialist/communist sympathisers should I expect anything else?
Anyway thanks Robin for you posts and long may you reign.