Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Didn't I Tell You ?

To repeat myself :

The solutions will be the entertaining bit. Having knocked down Britishness over 40 years, they're arrogant enough to believe they can rebuild it with a few citizenship lessons, a rebuild of the history curriculum and some media pressure. They'll find destruction is much easier than construction.


Here we go again :

School-leavers should be encouraged to swear an oath of allegiance to Queen and country, says a report commissioned by Gordon Brown on British citizenship. Report author, ex-attorney general Lord Goldsmith, says it would give teenagers a sense of belonging. Council tax and student fee rebates are suggested for people who volunteer - as well as a "Britishness" public holiday.


Let's pass on what exactly qualifies Lord Goldsmith as an expert on social cohesion. I guess it's an encouraging sign of incompetence that Gordon Brown thinks his input will be useful. The derision he's attracting from both left and right is most beautiful to be seen, as the Bard of Dundee would say.

I have a feeling the Labour Party focus groups must be telling them some rather unpleasant stories. At this moment BBC Radio Four's "You and Yours" is discussing the white (i.e. British) working class, and drawing calls from bemused middle class lefties asking "what's this all about ?".

It's about our rulers crapping themselves, that's what it's all about. No, that's not fair, they probably haven't got to that point yet. The BBCs sudden rediscovery of the WWC is a prophylactic, a catch-up exercise in reminding the poor Brits that they do count, really.

Elsewhere, Tim Lott in the Indie, of all places :

My father worked in a greengrocers' shop for 35 years; my mother was a housewife before she committed suicide in 1987. They were both lifelong Labour voters. My mother hanged herself in the house she lived in all her life, in Southall, west London, a town that had changed beyond all recognition. It is today the least white place in the whole of Britain.

She wrote in her suicide note: "I hate Southall, I feel so alone."

By what methods were the white working classes (WWC) despatched? The first development that undermined WWC hopes and morale was the great betrayal in education – the abolition of grammar schools and the retention of private schools.

Grammar schools, in the guilt-ridden WLMC view of things, favoured middle-class children over working-class children. What they actually favoured – or could have favoured, if the tests were designed sufficiently well – was clever children over less clever children. And if you look at the dyna7mism of the post-war grammocracy (Pinter, Dyke, Potter, Jacobson, Sillitoe, Bragg, Bennett and hundreds of others), it provided a crucial injection of WWC sensibility into the wider culture.

Now, in the name of everyone being equal – except for the WLMC who could pay for private schools – no one could be admitted to a school just on the basis that they were clever, which a remarkably large number of working-class people are. The WLMC had it that the WWC are all about as clever as each other (not very, though you had to pretend otherwise) and thus must all go to the same, very big, often rather crappy schools in which maybe dozens of languages are spoken.

The second great betrayal was multiculturalism. This was the creed that said all cultures were as valid as each other (in theory) but that minority cultures were somehow – no one was quite sure how – actually superior to the host white indigenous culture which was axiomatically racist. So even if you happen to come from a culture that endorsed female circumcision and was misogynist and homophobic, it was a given that you were a "victim". And who were the "victimisers"? The WWC who were faced with the profound challenge and stresses of assimilation.

There was a lot of WWC resistance to immigration. This was partly about racism, which, of course, the WLMC are immune to. Something in the organic bread, I think. But it was also about losing housing opportunities, cheap labour taking away jobs, and the simple, profound problem of learning to exist in a new kind of culture, which in some cases overwhelmed and bewildered the indigenous one. The trick of learning to feel ashamed at the same time as everything was being taken away from you was a really hard one to pull off.


And the mighty Yazza in the same place. You've been talking to that Melanie Phillips* again, haven't you ?

A Jewish friend prompted this column. She said to me: "I condemn Israeli politics and some things British Jews are up to. But when anti-Semitism seeps through the land, unseen, unacknowledged, I must stand up for my people. You must too. It is your duty. Powell's ghost is awake, Racism is everywhere. I can feel it. Can't you?"


I can see the Tories pinching that last line for their next campaign, but that's by the by.

"I must stand up for my people"

And if you do that, Yasmin, you are a doughty campaigner against oppression. If I do that, however, I am a hideous racist !





* not really. I do love the Magna Mater, but she would never use a word like 'seeped'. It would be a 'raging tsunami' at least.

6 comments:

Thud said...

my mother insists on taking the same bus into town that she has taken for nearly 70 years...now though she feels alone and occasionaly afraid (no guesses why)...but stubborn as she is...she persists.Is she a racist...I'd like a guardian reader to tell me and explain to her.

Anonymous said...

Thud,

Maybe she could contact Muslim Alibi Brown, and find out how to be British. Might get a lift too.

Anonymous said...

There are ofcourse other problems the extent of which have been massively covered up by the national media, as referenced by TotLad

Harry J said...

If anyone is brave enough to take up the challenge of reading Yazza's latest blather a welcome antidote is the wondrous Melanie's latest column in the DM. "I must stand up for my people' completely exposes what YAB is really all about.

I can also second the suggestion made by anon 10.30pm to take a look at Tottenham Lad's latest effort. Quite an effort it must have been too.

http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=572

Anonymous said...

"So even if you happen to come from a culture that endorsed female circumcision and was misogynist and homophobic, it was a given that you were a 'victim'"

Not 'was a given'. IS a given. This is still the default mindset of the Establishment.

Anonymous said...

It's quite ammusing how "multiculturalism" has been pushed as if it was an actual policy. Of course it was nothing of the sort. The reality was that after years of allowing mass immigration with no thought to the consequences it was realised that the newcomers were not assimilating as perhaps one might have wished. So the question was "what are we going to do about it?" - unavoidable once Enoch put the question into words. Forcing them to integrate (and thus give up Islam for Christianity perhaps?) was never going to work without serious bloodshed. Forcing them to "go back home" would raise eyebrows worldwide. So we were stuck with multiple cultures in Britain. Thus this was called a policy as if someone had once cleverely thought it up, and the policy was called multiculturalism. But what it really meant was "bugger, we fucked this up, we'd better put a sticking palster over it". And the race laws were passed to prevent people discussing whether the policy was a good idea and to stop people prying into what these other cultures were up to.

Of course these other cultures are not superior to our own. THIS culture produced the greatest empire the world has ever seen, invented the agricultural and industrial revolutions and contributes massively to literature and music. The OTHER culture created Pakistan and Bangladesh. We now know that in 100 years this latter culture will compete on an equal footing with the former culture in these lands. Thus civil war must become inevitable.

I imagine that the Islamists are currenty licking their wounds after a number of failed terrorist suicide attacks. They will return. This time with real bombs left on timers in busy places. Thousands will be killed. And then the backlash will begin. The parallels to Northern Ireland are obvious, but at least an order of magnitude greater in danger.

It is inevitable.