"Croydon abandoned by middle-class"

Forget for a moment about today's inevitable news that native Brits are officially a minority in what was their own capital city - it's what was reported last week that struck me :

"One of Croydon’s biggest private employers has said that it could be forced to move out because middle-class workers do not want to live in the borough.

Mike Webb, chairman of insurance company Allianz Global Assistance, warned that his firm was struggling to maintain its pool of 600 staff because of Croydon’s negative image. He told a business summit aimed at promoting the economic renewal of Croydon that the middle-class talent pool from which his company recruited was leaving the borough at such a rate that the firm could be forced to leave within two to three years.

His warning that they may quit comes on top of Nestle's announcement earlier this year that it was moving its Headquarters to Gatwick. And in October another major employer, department store Allders, was closed down after administrators were called in.

“Croydon has been a fantastic place for us and we would like to be here for a long time,” Mr Webb said at Develop Croydon last Thursday. “The key issue is how we are going to continue to find these people because we see a large drift out of Croydon of the middle-class who have traditionally been our employees. If they are not here in two or three years, we won’t be here.”

Mr Webb said that the firm had long-standing links with the borough and that, traditionally, most staff lived locally. However, he said that the public’s perception had worsened after last year’s riots and added: “We need to be making the case for Croydon and its strengths more positively.” Mr Webb told the Standard that his company was committed to staying in Croydon for the next three years, but might reassess the situation if the trend continues. “When I said middle-class people, what I meant is white-collar workers,” he said. “Not necessarily graduates, but hard-working and enthusiastic people.”

Croydon was, well within living memory, one of those London boroughs like Ealing, Bexley Heath, Dulwich - shorthand for safe, dull, conformist suburbia. Gone.

The laurels are speckled in Marchmont Avenue
Just as they were before,
But the steps are dusty that still lead up to
Your Uncle Dick's front door.

Pear and apple in Croydon gardens
Bud and blossom and fall,
But your Uncle Dick has left his Croydon
Once for all.

Apologies

For light blogging. New work, steep learning curve, long hours, longish travel.

Inshallah at some stage the learning cliff-face will be conquered and I'll emerge either into a fertile plain of relative competence, or a bleak, windswept plateau of not quite up to it. I reckon either way it'll be another three or four weeks.

One or two things that caught my eye.

Blackburn - twinned with Abbottabad. I thought the point of these school twinning arrangements was for the children to learn about other, unfamiliar cultures - in which case why choose Abbottabad, whose culture will be familiar to the pupils of Daisyfield School, most of whom are of Pakistani heritage? If they wanted to expose the children to an unfamiliar culture, why not a school in, say, Petersfield or Winchester?

The Conservative pledge to cut immigration looks like another one of David Cameron's cast-iron guarantees.

"Net migration in to the UK soared by almost half last year and is now close to the record levels of 2005. It is the fifth quarter in a row that net immigration has risen signalling a worrying upward trend. And two of the main drivers were a slump in emigration and a sharp rise in Eastern Europeans coming to the UK for work – two areas that will not be affected by the Government’s annual cap or other immigration measures. "

Three points here. One is that the counting immigration only in net terms is a neat way of ignoring the demographic transformation illustrated in the Blackburn link above. If all the native English were to emigrate and be replaced by incomers, net immigration would be zero and the BBC would doubtless headline that immigration WAS zero. To a large extent headline immigration figures have been reduced by the massive UK brain drain, as young natives with degrees leave to be replaced by young Afghans and Somalis.

Two is that the left and IPPR argument - "they're only here for the booming economy and they'll go home when there's a downturn" doesn't seem to have reflected reality. I'm shocked.

Three is that Cameron is so serious about cutting immigration that 5,000 jobs are going at the UK border agency. While that agency is useless, corrupt and incompetent, I'm not sure increasing its workload and reducing its staffing levels is going to improve it.


The TB jab returns? Only a few short years after declaring victory over tuberculosis, we're importing it at such a rate we've got to start all over again.

A Department of Health spokesman said: "We recognise that tuberculosis is a serious issue in London, particularly in more deprived boroughs and among the migrant community."

"Crucially, both the public and health care professionals need to be aware that TB is back, and growing fast."

26.5% of primary school pupils are now ethnic minority, up from 23% in 2008. The destruction of what was, with all its faults, one of the best places in the world to live continues.

Still, say not the struggle naught availeth, what ?

"strengthening the family and increasing the birth rate"

I've covered the Russian demographic disaster previously. Now ...

"Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has unveiled plans to reverse Russia's declining population. The government will spend 1.5tn roubles ($53bn; £33bn) on raising the birth rate and extending life expectancy."

Not only that, this summer they'll be hosting in Moscow what's described as the first world pro-life and pro-family demography conference. Ironic, considering that Russia is still the world's abortion capital. Maybe Mr Putin needs to consider figures like these :

"In 2001, 1,320,000 children were born in Russia, while 1,800,000 abortions were performed. The abortion rate in the USSR peaked in 1964, when 5.6 million abortions were performed, the highest number in Russia’s history."

Makes the UK, where about 25% of pregnancies are aborted, look a model of restraint.

Russia also shares with the UK the demographic feature that some ethnic groups have a lot more babies than others. Encouraging more Russians may, for example, encourage even more Chechens.

Quite how you encourage people to have more babies is an interesting point. I'm generally inclined towards Steve Sailer's theories on Affordable Family Formation, but there are a host of other cultural factors. AFF is IMHO generally valid as a pointer to relative fertility within a given group - say working and middle-class white Americans or Britons. But that wouldn't, for example, explain why those of Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage have so many more babies than white Brits - my guess would be that rearing five children on housing benefit in East London compares most favourably with raising them in Sylhet or Mirpur. 'Affordable' means different things to different cultural groups.

The Japanese are from 2010 paying parents £175 per month per child, something this father of four would have loved (and although UK child benefit stops when they leave school, strangely the student grant people consider them to be dependent up to the age of 25). Be interesting to see if it works, although remembering the insane house prices in Japan family formation still isn't exactly affordable.

But there's more to having children than affordability. What sort of country will they grow up in? When I look at a possible UK future, I often wonder what possessed us - and I encourage my children to have an exit strategy. Over the last week, I read two books on Russia - Roderic Braithwaite's 'Moscow 1941' and the late Anna Politkovskaya's 'Putin's Russia'. In many respects - incompetence, corruption, despotism at local and national levels, the cheapness of human life, the country doesn't seem to have changed that much in seventy years.

Politkovskaya's book is almost unreadable in its depressing quality. Her Russia isn't a place you'd ideally choose to sprog in. One tale of brutality and corruption after another - to the point where you start to wonder whether things can really be this bad. Then you remember her murder. Which le Carre novel is it where the quality of information is attested to by the murder of the provider ?

Along with AFF (with allowances made for group differences), I'd suggest that confidence is key to sprogging in a world with freely available and effective contraception, just as we're always told that confidence is key to business investment decisions - and what greater investment than children ? The hope and expectation that your children will have a better life than their parents will IMHO be a key driver of fertility, all else being equal. True for the baby-boomer parents of the post-war West, true for the Bangladeshis and Mirpuris of Bradford and Tower Hamlets. But for today's Russians ? And today's Brits ?

"Two white people wearing seatbelts — you've got to be cops"

"I have been away for four years, living as an ethnic minority in a monocultural part of the world, amassing a host of stories to tell to disbelieving friends.

On the whole, I am glad to return. I shan't miss some locals' assumptions that, being a white woman, if I was outside after dark, as I occasionally was, usually to walk the few metres between my house and the church, I must be a prostitute eager to give them a blow job. I shan't miss the abuse my priest husband received: the daubing of "Dirty white dogs" in red paint on the church door, the barrage of stones thrown at him by children shouting "Satan". He was called a "f***ing white bastard" more than once, though, notably, never when in a cassock. I will also not miss the way our garden acted as the local rubbish dump, with items ranging from duvets and TV sets, to rats (dead or twitching) glued to cardboard strips, a popular local method of vermin control to stem the large numbers of them which scuttled between the rubbish piled in gardens and on pavements."

What Third World hellhole can this be? Haiti?

I'm not sure, but I think it's either Small Heath or Sparkbrook.

(via)

Doomed ?

If you really want to be depressed about the state of the nation, and need an illustration of the total triumph of the 60s agenda, don't go to the Guardian. After all, you expect Guardianistas at the Guardian.

No, the Daily Mail's the place where you see the cultural damage in full effect. Remember that these are about the nearest thing to 'the good guys' that we've got in the UK, once you get beyond a select few. Your average Mail commenter hasn't had them removed like his Guardian counterpart - but totally accepts the idea that "what's good for me now" is pretty much the only criterion to live by. For example, the paper's readers are pro-euthanasia and anti-religion - the latter subject you can argue about, but on euthanasia can't Mail readers put two and two together?

Here's a childless (by choice) Sharon Parsons (editor of Top Sante, whate'er that may be - nay, I lie, she's just been replaced), telling us 'I don't need a child to be happy'.

"...it seems to me that those with a family often have more tangible stages punctuating their lives: there's the day they become parents; later, they may become grandparents; and inbetween there are all the defining events that will be remembered and celebrated, such as the one my friend was enjoying so much, the marriage of her child.

Perhaps, in a few years, she will also see the birth of her first grandchild and another chapter of that particular family's life will begin as their lineage continues onward into the future. It's something people like me will never know.

And that - for me, at least - is a jolting part of being childless. However pretentious it may sound, there's the startling fact that my husband and I have severed the thread in our personal ancestry (unless, of course, he should decide to run off with a fertile 20-something).

Despite our respective nephews and nieces taking up the family baton, he and I know that we are not passing anything of ourselves on to future generations.

After an infinite genealogical timeline - impossible to imagine - we have drawn the mark in the sand. Enough. No more. Our bloodline stops here."

Hmm. Very Lionel Shriver. What's impressive are the best-rated and worst-rated comments.

"There's absolutely NOTHING wrong with a woman choosing not to have children." +784

"It had nothing to do with my career, finding a partner, wanting to do things before having children. I just didn't want them." +572

"Children are supposed to look after you when you're old - if you bring them up well." -678

"I have 4 children aged from 16yrs - 10 months. I have an unconditional love for them and they fill my life with happiness. I am blessed. I will reach the age of 50 and be surrounded in love.." -373 (I've reached the age of 50 and am surrounded by bickering - takes all sorts - LT).

"Now with the spending cuts and more old single people ending up in hospital, who is going to make sure they eat the bad food they are given. The nurses don't have time or care to be frank. What I am saying is, when you women who have chosen not to have children are old, infirm and in hospital, whose gonna look after you? Forget the government they are not going to help. Bet by then you'll be wishing you had children to care for you." -367

Once again, these people seem incapable of reading the news and putting two and two together. While you can never be sure that you won't end up feeling like King Lear did about his kids, I think it's reasonable to expect a modicum of care from those you cared for when they were helpless. No matter how good the health system may be (and how good will it be when the elderly boomers are fracturing care budgets right and left ? Some council care staff will almost certainly be cut this year - what will it be like in fifteen or twenty years?), there's nothing like familiar faces at the bedside, or popping in at your house.

We're entering unknown territory, both energetic and demographic. The industrial revolution and our subsequent economic growth has been built on ever-cheaper energy - and it's going to get more and more expensive. Similarly 'our' population has been ever-increasing - but as I've blogged many a time and oft, that came to a halt twenty years back and the decline has only been halted then reversed by mass immigration - to the point where nearly a quarter of children in English primaries are ethnic minority.

According to this interesting Weekly Standard piece by Jonathan V Last, "no society has ever experienced prosperity in the wake of contracting population." I'd like to see some references for that - while it's common-sense, is it the prosperity driving the increasing population ? Affordable Family Formation, in fact ? And contracting population historically hasn't tended to be a matter of choice - think the Black Death or the Second World War.

It strikes me that a number of factors are coming together. Our elites are terribly keen on economic growth. We've had getting on for 200 years of exceptional growth since Trevithick, Boulton and Watt. This has been accompanied by population growth, and I doubt many people worried about whether and to what extent the two were connected. The creation of the post-war Welfare State was/is also predicated upon population growth - as 'National Insurance' is no such thing, and pensions/benefits are paid straight out of government income.

But energy supplies are getting more and more expensive, and people are having fewer babies all over the world. What does this mean for growth ? Doesn't look rosy to me.

In 1950, China had 550 million people; today it is home to 1.33 billion. According to projections from the United Nations’ Population Division, -China’s population will peak at 1.458 billion in 2030. But then it will begin shrinking. By 2050, China will be down to 1.408 billion and losing 20 million people every five years.

At the same time, the average age in China will rise dramatically. In 2005, China’s median age was 32. By 2050, it will be 45, and a quarter of the Chinese population will be over the age of 65. The government’s pension system is almost nonexistent, and One-Child has eliminated the traditional support system of the extended family—most people no longer have brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, or nephews. It is unclear what sort of havoc this atomization will wreak on their society. China will have 330 million senior citizens with no one to care for them and no way to pay for their upkeep. It is, Eberstadt observed, “a slow-motion humanitarian tragedy already underway.”

By 2050, the age structure in China will be such that there are only 1.6 workers—today the country has 5.4—to support each retiree.

This looks like trouble for China. But most of her competitors will be in worse trouble. Prosperity isn't just a question of lots of babies - or South Yemen and Burkina Faso would be economic powerhouses. California's seen mass immigration from the failed state to the south - and no one would say the Californian economy's in better shape than thirty years back. Germany and Japan will hit the demographic buffers first, while Britain and the US will IMHO find that quantity of people isn't a substitute for quality.

"Today there are 26.6 million legal immigrants living in America and roughly 11.3 million illegals. We need these workers to prop up the entitlement programs we’re no longer having enough babies to fund. "

How's that working out in the Golden State ?

One of the best predictors of fertility is education: The more educated a woman is, the fewer children she will have. The total fertility rate for American women without a high school diploma is 2.45. With each subsequent level of educational attainment, fertility falls—it drops to 1.6 for women with a graduate degree. One of the drivers of our fertility decline was the making of college de rigueur for middle-class women.

Education level is a fair proxy for intelligence in a Western democracy. The above implies that we're getting more stupid, as clever women fail to pass on their clever genes. This also doesn't bode well for economic growth.

So for all the above reasons, the rate of growth we became used to for the last two centuries seems to be in danger, if not on the way out. Which society will be the first to successfully adjust to this ? I don't see any preparation for it anywhere in the world.

Immigration: the need for controls

I don't think I can disagree with a single word of this WalesHome piece by Michael Jones, a former open borders advocate. Here's a paragraph or two, but read the whole thing :

Some people say soothingly that one should relax about this. The whole history of Britain’s population, they assure us, is one of ebb and flow of different peoples and tribal groups. All of these facts are correct, but the way they are presented is thoroughly questionable. Past migrations, of Jews and Jutes, of Celts and Romans, of Angles and Saxons, have never been on anything like the current scale. Around 95% of Britain’s pre-war population had been born here, and the other 5% was mostly made up of English and Scots whose parents had happened to be serving the Empire.

Historically, we have been a country of emigration, not immigration. Ashkenazis entered Western Europe by the tens of thousands, not by the millions. The Normans, although they seized land and power, were a tiny elite. The Dutch who arrived in the 16th Century were, in proportion to the whole population, a much tinier group. Even the 50,000 Huguenots from France only ever amounted to a hundredth of Britain’s total population, and they arrived over a period of 50 years.

Today, immigration adds 1% to Britain’s population every two years, or more than 5% every decade. Inevitably, this has led to changes in the queuing system for council housing, which once kept established working class communities together, but has now been adapted to meet the needs of new arrivals, who have tended to occupy housing units in higher densities and have settled in enclaves, cut off from their neighbours by great walls of ignorance, by impossible language barriers and by a growing, cold dislike. In the south east of England and around the Pennine towns in the north, there are places where people from different racial origins never meet, never talk, never go into each others’ homes. The result is the worst of both worlds: stoking up resentment against foreigners: and stoking up resentment against the authorities. The question that pro-free movement advocates should ask is: will the descendants of today’s huddled masses join the middle class or form a new underclass?

Of course, we have no crystal balls, but leaders with sound judgment on core policies don’t play dice with the fabric of organisational life. We’re lucky to live in a country cautiously built up by our ancestors through institutions like Parliament, the monarchy, Magna Carta, the system of justice and, at a more modest level, the pubs, chapels, local choirs, co-operatives, county regiments, trade unions, local rugby teams, and thousands of other local voluntary clubs and societies. Without a stable population there cannot be the values, habits, understandings and loyalties that enable us to live as we do and perhaps sometimes to act for the benefit of others in less fortunate places.

I chipped in with a comment about the secondary impact of immigration on Wales - the westward shift of the English which is damaging so many Welsh-speaking communities - and which I have blogged here, here , here and here.

"There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies"

The Japanese, admittedly a tad late, get natalist :

Several sectors of the Japanese economy are tipped to benefit from the Y2.2 trillion programme, through which families will receive payments of Y13,000 (£97) every month for each child if the new Government is able to push its much-vaunted programme through parliament.

Payments will rise to Y23,000 a month in the second year of the scheme as part of the Government’s effort to demonstrate that the State will permanently be on the side of families and childrearing.

The past two decades have witnessed relentless declines in the Japanese birth rate, prompting a range of demographic concerns, from a lack of elderly care provision to long-term fiscal catastrophe.

At getting on for £175 per month per child, presumably tax-free, it appears to this father of four, taxed as a single person, to be a pretty good deal. The previous deal was Y10,000 per child, increased from 5,000 for the first two and 10,000 for subsequent kids in 2007. So for four children you're talking an increase in 3 years from Y30,000 to Y92,000 - tripled, and at current exchange rates nearly £700 a month.

By contrast, the UK Child Benefit rate is £20 pw for the first, and £13.20 for subsequent - about £250 a month for four. I'm sure there are various tax credits in addition for those who can navigate them, but they're a fairly recent innovation. And of course, for non-earners, there are all those various welfare state goodies - free housing, council tax etc.

You have to wonder if such a policy will work for Japan, and whether one could work over here.



Of course a much less generous policy has worked already for some UK communities.

While most graduate girlies might not fancy a council flat and £100 a week, the assorted benefit package is quite enough to keep the Williams sisters or a Karen Matthews in their accustomed lifestyle.

And imagine thirty or forty years back, when early arrivals in Bradford or the Isle of Dogs brought the news back to Mirpur and Bangladesh that the UK taxpayer would pay you to have babies - the locals probably thought the deal too good to be true. When all the other goodies - free health care and education, money even if you didn't work - were added in, no wonder V.S. Naipaul's manpower export experts were busy.



I think it unlikely that our rulers will introduce such policies any time soon. Japan are doing it for a reason - they have minimal immigration and want more Japanese babies, not babies per se.

In the UK, we don't need to do that sort of thing. The current incentives are quite sufficient if you just want babies, as we reached the point of inflection back in 2001. Then it was that the increasing number of births to immigrant mothers started to more than compensate for the shortage of births among clever grads or ordinary Janes. Now we're on a roll - or somebody is :

The equivalent of more than 2,000 new primary schools will be needed within the next eight years to cope with a massive increase in pupil numbers, figures suggest. Places need to be found for almost 550,000 extra pupils by 2018, it was disclosed. The projected rise is believed to be down to a sharp increase in birthrates combined with an influx of immigrants in some areas...

Last year, MPs said that the extra pressure on primary places was a "direct result of mass immigration" into the UK. The Cross Party Group on Balanced Migration said the number of births to foreign mothers increased by 64 per cent in the last eight years. At the same time, birthrates among UK families increased by only six per cent. It accused the Government of being "in denial about the consequences of their losing control of our borders".

The quote which opens this post is apparently 1943 Churchill (I've never found a proper reference - anyone got one ?).

"There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies"

In 1943 we knew who Churchill was talking about. For which community now will it be 'a fine investment' ?




UPDATE - Sho(t)gun weddings :

Everything, from the generously elasticated rental dress to the special anteroom for napping, is part of the “Double Happy” service — once a niche market for pregnant brides, but one that now represents nearly a third of the hugely lucrative Japanese wedding industry.

The shift reflects changing attitudes in Japan. The historic taboo of pregnancy outside marriage was largely abandoned during the 1990s but a strong tradition of being married by the time of the birth remained.

By 2004 the national average of ten months between marriage and the birth of a first child had fallen to six.

Equally important, social commentators say, is the psychological effect of Japan’s bigger demographic problem. For 28 consecutive years, the country’s population of children under the age of 15 has fallen to a new low. For the parents of young women, that relentless decline has had a profound effect — in a country where fewer and fewer women are choosing to have children, a daughter’s pregnancy and the prospect of grandchildren is hugely welcome.

And Another One ...

Lefty (but no party line-toer he) blogger and toilet-mouthed iconoclast John Band, like Ben Elton, has 'done a Darcy' and moved to Oz.

"Mineral wealth, newly-elected centre-left government, and no bloody ice. And about as far as you can get from George bloody Osborne… "

And, as I noted in the Elton post, a place that's a lot less diverse than the UK, especially his old stamping ground of London.

Mr B, whatever else he may be, is an intelligent, competent chap. I wonder who we'll import to replace him ?

I used to chaff him somewhat for not having children, on the grounds that only parents should be able to vote on matters affecting children (i.e. most things). The poor chap's now running on one cylinder after a series of unfortunate events, but he mustn't think that centre-left Aussie Premier Kevin Rudd is going to let him off sprogging :

I was at a function where Kevin Rudd was giving the keynote address. He talked about the ''crisis'' of Australia's ageing population and the various economic challenges we will face as a result.

Arguments were made about superannuation and the strain on healthcare. But there was a deeper message: young people (women in particular) are failing in their civic duty to reproduce. Apparently, gen Y is to blame for the inverted population pyramid.

There were hundreds of people in the room but only a handful under 30. As one of the under 30-crowd, I shuffled nervously, hoping no one would recognise me - and my empty womb - as the deeply unpatriotic and traitorous felons that we are.

After Rudd came off stage, he spoke to me and the few other under-30s (we had congregated for strength in numbers). He extended his points about the problems with the ageing population and the financial problems gen Y will incur when the baby boomers become pensioners.

At that point one of my friends introduced me, dropping in that I am completing a PhD. At this, Rudd rolled his eyes and in a terse voice lacking any sense of irony remarked that is the "excuse" that "all" young women are using nowadays to avoid starting families. Since then I've come up with numerous one-line retorts, but in the moment I just froze in shock.

Hah ! Kevin Rudd seems more switched on to the demographic implications of failure to reproduce than any UK Labour MP. Mr Band's duty stands plainly before him.

More Flag-Flappers

Remember Gordon 'Union Jack' Brown ?

Remember when 'Britishness' turned out only to apply to England ?

It looks as if our rulers are giving up on 'Britishness' and worrying more about 'Englishness'. John Denham MP on England :

"the next election will be determined by which party has the most convincing story about our society and our country. Who has the most convincing tale about where we have come from: and the most positive and optimistic story about where we go next."

So it's all a matter of good PR, you see. The trouble is that the most convincing tale about where we have come from will definitely not provide a positive and optimistic story about where we go next.

These stories work because we have a sense of who we are; what our society represents. Put a different way, people ask politicians to pass the ‘people like us’ test.

Keep digging.

"... at once progressive and patriotic ... Billy Bragg ... Morrissey ... multi-ethnic identity ... white working class ... disconnect ... zzzz"

This is the nub. Been here before, of course.

The problem of multi-culturalism was not its insistence on respect for those of different cultures, or of their freedoms to express themselves as they wish: it was the neglect of the glue that binds us together; it was the failure to recognise a multi-cultural society can only work if there is equal engagement and activity in building and developing shared values and the framework of a shared identity which enables us to be multicultural within a cohesive society.

Or to put it another way, the problem of multi-culturalism comes when people don’t have shared values and identity. In other words, one common culture.

Someone tell me - what does ‘multi-’ mean again ?

PS - one of the comments at Socialist Unity - you can see the confrontation here :

At yesterday’s confrontation, the EDL demo was composed overwhelmingly of young working class men. The UAF demo consisted mainly of palpably middle class students.

Which group is “our class”?

Another comment :

It was said the EDL chanted at UAF ‘you're not English anymore’, and this much to Mark P’s annyance is actually true. Once you become a socialist your first self identity is as a worker, part of an international class, that has more in common with workers from abroad than with bosses here.

I wouldn't mind that so much were it true. But the trouble is, the UK left mostly "has more in common with workers from abroad than with workers here."

Immigration, Immigration, Immigration

"Stop it at once" sayeth Norman Tebbit in the Telegraph :

These islands are our islands. They do not belong to the political classes, the European Commission, the United Nations, nor the government of the day. We live here and it is we, the people, who have the absolute right to decide who may, and who may not, come here and upon what conditions they come. That is probably enough to have me held under suspicion of racism and worse...

I think that the massive, deliberate, uncontrolled, uncounted and often denied programme of mass immigration has more complex origins. There is within NuLab a detestation of much that is British quite unknown in the Labour Party of Attlee or Callaghan. It is often a form of self-hatred and guilt. Guilt about being born comfortably middle class, having been to a decent school and a private hospital. Guilt even about being born into a prosperous country with a glorious and proud history. Like Caliban, these people rage against their own image.

In Attlee's party, perhaps. Not necessarily in all of Callaghan's. And anyway, the 'we' who live here isn't the 'we' it used to be, and will be even less so in the future, even were all immigration to stop now.

UPDATE - Norm returns to the fray in his trademark combative style :

We could require schools to teach the history of this country, and I mean teach the history, not to teach pupils to engage in emotionally incontinent spasms about how a Roman soldier might have felt as he was mown down by Boadicea’s chariot, or how a black African being sold by other black Africans to an Arab slave trader might have have felt about that. What is needed is to teach how the people of these islands built a great nation. ...

And by the way, if you do not want your church to become a mosque, then you had best start going along and sitting in the pews.

BBC Radio Four has - for one week only, the following excellent programme :

In the past decade, Britain has experienced mass immigration on an unprecedented scale. A former government aide recently suggested this was a deliberate policy, motivated in part by a desire to increase racial diversity. David Goodhart investigates the ideological forces behind one of the most significant social changes to have affected the UK.

Andrew Neather, a former Number 10 speechwriter, recently wrote a much-discussed article in the Evening Standard in praise of multicultural London, but suggesting that those who have influenced immigration policy under Labour were politically-programmed to be relaxed about such numbers. His article was immediately seized upon by anti-immigration campaigners as evidence of a conspiracy to make Britain a more racially diverse society.

In this programme, David Goodhart investigates the truth about reasons for recent increases in migration to Britain. Political insiders, including former home secretary David Blunkett, talk candidly about the real influences behind the scenes. None of them give credence to the accusation that there was a plan to create a more multicultural Britain. An unexpected increase in asylum applications and the demand for cheap labour from employers were the main motivators, according to those who influenced policy. But, admits former Home Office special adviser Ed Owen, a nervousness about discussing immigration policy meant that New Labour was, in its first years in office, poorly prepared to deal with the issue.

We may not have witnessed a grand act of social engineering, concludes David Goodhart, but New Labour's combination of economic liberalism and cultural liberalism led it to regard mass immigration as a trend which would bring great social benefits and few disadvantages.

Interviewees include:

Rt Hon David Blunkett MP, former home secretary

Tim Finch, head of migration, equalities and citizenship, and director of strategic communications at the Institute for Public Policy Research

Andrew Neather, Comment editor at The Evening Standard and former Number 10 speechwriter.

Sir Andrew Green, Migrationwatch

Sarah Spencer, deputy director, Centre on Migration Policy and Society

John Tincey, Immigration Services Union

Ed Owen, former Home Office special adviser

Claude Moraes MEP.

Associated news story here - seems it was all a series of unfortunate events which is apparently the new narrative. The BBC seem to have decided that shouting 'racist' at any and every critic of mass immigration hasn't worked.

Podcast of the programme here - it's there for a week for download and the prog will apparently be repeated on Sun 14 Feb at 21.30. I didn't catch all of it last night, but what I did catch was good stuff. Recommended.



At Bronte Capital, an interesting piece by John Hempton on demographics and the national budget - from an Aussie perspective, but the principles apply to all welfare states.

Australia – like much of the developed world – has a demographic problem from aging baby boomers. Our dependency ration (the ratio of people of non-working age to working age) is increasing and likely to increase dramatically. Moreover the dependent group will shift from young people (who impose schooling expense) to old people who impose nursing home and medical expense. Old people generally cost more than young people and as we live in a country with (semi) socialised medicine that expense is likely to fall (heavily) on the Federal Budget.

Australia's national budget will thus become a little tighter each year. [This is in contrast to the glory days of the 70s and 80s where economic growth and baby boomers going through their years of peak productivity made the budget just a little easier to balance every year.]

The net effect is that something has to give. Either

(a) Australia cuts benefits to old people (and with socialized medicine that means deciding when you turn the respirator off) or

(b) Australia sharply increases taxes or

(c) Australia sharply change the mix of our population by having more babies or importing more people through immigration.

Some smaller things can work at the margin. For instance Australia can change ages at which people qualify for various pensions. This should keep old people in the workforce longer and hence reduce the dependency ratio. Also – as the working age population become the scarce factor wage levels for those still working should rise. The higher wages will attract some older people back into or into staying in the workforce. However these are effects are likely to be too small to overwhelm the main thesis.

With a good size baby boom and old people driving government expenditure (something that is certainly the case in the US) the problem is real and will remain intense.

The problem could be solved with very rapid economic growth – but the Australian Treasury models a quite high real rate of growth and Australia still has a problem. If economic growth were to decline to Japanese levels the fiscal imbalance by (say) 2030 would become very intense. [Australia could get very lucky with sharp increases in commodity prices. That sort of luck is possible because Australia is small – however that sort of luck will not bail out the US.]

By far the easiest solution is (c) - changing the mix of the population. Societies are not good at rationing health care expenditure for the elderly and there are limits to the ability of smaller open economies (such as Australia) to keep increasing taxes. [Though in my view a little of both these things will happen.]

Hempton comments :

Everyone that matters in Australia knows that the easiest solution is (c). Peter Costello – Australia's last Treasury (in the US context read Secretary of the Treasury) knew this and advocated women having three children – one for mum, one for dad and one for the country. **

Costello had his eye on the future fiscal balance (as he should) but there is an undertone of racism in his pronouncement. Australia's population is a matter of choice because there is an endless supply of skilled and/or needy immigrants who want to live in Australia and the main case for having babies over importing people is that the babies are probably white.

Anyway the core way that Australia is balancing the long term budget is through immigration. If you want to solve the problem that way you need very large immigration now so that in 30 years the you get the right dependency ratio. That – for better or for worse – is what the government is currently doing. Australia's immigration rate is massive – roughly 1 percent of the population per year. That level of immigration will have Australia on the path to a 50 million population (currently 21 million) by the year 2050.

Maybe I'm dumb, but it seems to me that the policy isn't any more sustainable there than it is here. So you import enough immigrants to fix the dependency ratio 30 years hence. Either their fertility tends towards the fertility of the host community, in which case you're just moving back the identical demographic problem for another generation (to be solved by another influx ? - compound interest says you'll run out of land before too long, even in Oz) , or it doesn't - in which case it's likely

a) that you've also got cultural separation

b) that the ethnic balance of the population will tip more and more towards the incomers

Those two together aren't good juju.


The Aussies have some good ideas. We could do with an Intergenerational Report - not to mention a Charter of Budget Honesty.

Under the Charter of Budget Honesty Act 1998 an Intergenerational Report is required every five years.

The reports focus on the implications of demographic change for economic growth and assess the financial implications of continuing current policies and trends over the next four decades.

The Scots Are Bastards Too (it's not just the Welsh)

Oh, alright - it will actually take some time before the majority of Scots are born outside wedlock, just as it will for the Welsh. But their 2008 births have hit that magic 50% total.

The latest ONS Population Trends stats (pdf) are out. Links to the 'historic' data as far back as 1997 are here.

Headline figure is that :

There were 170,834 births in England and Wales in 2008 to mothers born outside the United Kingdom, accounting for 24 per cent of all live births in England and Wales. This is the highest proportion since the collection of the parents’ country of birth at birth registration was introduced in 1969. The proportion of births to foreign-born women has increased every year since 1990 when it was just under 12 per cent, with a marked rise over the last decade: the proportion of births to mothers born outside the United Kingdom was 14 per cent in 1998 (Figure 7).

The replacement of the English continues apace. Table 1, page 88. 25% of births in England, 10% in Wales, 13% in Scotland - higher than I'd have expected - and 12% in NI.

In 1981, the Census showed that just over six per cent of the UK population had been born abroad. By 2001, this had risen to over eight per cent, and in 2008 people born abroad represented about 11 per cent (6.7 million) of the total UK population (see Figure 3A).

Add the 25% of babies born in England to foreign-born mothers, consider that in 2008 23.3% of English primary schoolkids were 'ethnic minority' - these demographic changes represent transformation on a massive scale.

The bastardy and childlessness figures are interesting. An overwhelming majority of births to the under-24s are outside marriage (fig 5 p88), and while the number of babies born within marriage is increasing, the number outside is increasing faster (fig 4). The Scots have at last caught up with the Welsh, with 50% of births outside marriage, while Wales accelerates into the distance with 56%. England, at 45% is third while NI trails at 39%.

And in Fig 3 p86 you can see the doubling in the number of childless women since the 70s. Be interesting to compare that rising graph against the number of women going into higher education.

Trends in true birth order (see Background Note 3) show that childlessness among women aged 45 has almost doubled over the last two decades.

To see exactly who is having the babies, Pop Trends 137 (Autumn) is probably more useful, as it shows births and fertility by local authority area.

• The highest fertility level among the Government Office Regions of England in 2008, as represented by the TFR, was in the West Midlands where there was an average of 2.09 children per woman. The lowest was in the North East with 1.86. See Explanatory Note 8

• The highest level of fertility among the Government Office Regions of England in 2008, as represented by the GFR, was in London with 69.4 live births per 1,000 women aged 15–44, followed by the West Midlands (66.4). The lowest GFR was in the North East (58.7)

• The London borough of Newham recorded the highest GFR among local authorities in England with 96.5 live births per 1,000 women aged 15–44. The London borough of Barking and Dagenham and the unitary authority of Slough share the second highest GFR of 94.0. The lowest GFR was in Durham county district (39.4)

• Of the local authorities in England, Boston had the highest TFR of 2.81 children per woman, followed by Barking and Dagenham (2.80). The lowest TFR was in Westminster (1.21), followed by Camden (1.26)

I haven't got Excel out on these figures yet, but I'd imagine the scene looks very much as it did in 2006.

A quick Excel sort gives us the following top ten local authorities, ignoring Rutland, where a woman having quads seems to have distorted the figures.

Newham
Blackburn with Darwen
Bradford
Barking and Dagenham
Luton
Oldham
Peterborough
Pendle
Slough
Boston

Merry Christmas - and God bless us, every one.

"the moral equivalent of climate change"

As so often, it takes a minority spokesman (or woman) to say the unsayable in this country :

Europe is "dying" because its citizens are too selfish to have children, the chief rabbi has said, blaming a dwindling birthrate on a culture of "consumerism and instant gratification". Sir Jonathan Sacks accused people of caring more about shopping than spirituality and tied the secularisation of Europe to population decline.

"Europe today is the most secular region in the world. Europe is the only region in the world experiencing population decline. Wherever you turn today the more religious the community, the larger on average are their families. Parenthood involves massive sacrifice: money, attention, time and emotional energy. Where today, in European culture with its consumerism and its instant gratification because you're worth it."

There was no room for sacrifice for "the sake of generations not yet born" in such a culture.

In Lionel Shriver's words : "We shun values such as self-sacrifice and duty as the pitfalls of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and don't especially care what happens once we're dead."

"Europe is dying," he concluded and compared the situation in the continent today to ancient Greece with its "sceptics, epicureans and cynics". He said: "That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it." Religion was the safeguard of morality and the decline of religion would lead to fragile families and communities in atrophy.

Not much to argue with there, I'd say. My secular Jewish friends are just as poor at sprogging as any post-Christian. Not so for the faithful :

The UK's Jewish population is growing for the first time since World War II, research suggests. The rise appears to be due to a growth in the size of ultra-orthodox Jewish families, according to researchers at the University of Manchester. The population fell to a historic low of 275,000 in 2005, but that figure has since increased to 280,000 in 2008... Dr Wise calculates the proportion of Jews in the UK now is only about a quarter of its peak. Dr Wise - who says his research is based on regular monitoring of Jewish births - attributes the decline in the Jewish population to the fact that about half of more secular Jews marry outside the community, and many of them do not bring their children up as Jewish.

He says secular Jewish women - coming from a relatively well-educated and prosperous section of society - have had on average only 1.65 children. The UK average is 1.8. However, the very high birth-rate of the minority of strictly orthodox - also referred to as ultra-orthodox - Jewish families is having an increasing impact on the population as a whole. They marry young - often in their early twenties or even late teens - and have an average of almost seven children.

It means that elderly people in the community can have hundreds of descendents. Although other researchers have made more conservative estimates of growth among strictly orthodox Jews, Dr Wise says almost three of every four Jewish babies are now being born to them. He calculates that at current trends strictly orthodox Jews will outnumber their more secular counterparts by the middle of the century.

The Guardian's report is not quite kosher, in that Dr Sacks didn't exactly say 'Europe is dying'. His words were (a/c/t the Telegraph) :

“Europe, at least the indigenous population of Europe, is dying. That is one of the unsayable truths of our time"

Which raises the ire of the Daily Telegraph's resident mass immigration enthusiast, George Pitcher :

Lord Sacks was ostensibly attacking our secular, consumerist culture. But a regular canard of European racists is that the Muslim immigrant population is “out-breeding” other ethnicities. They usually add that the name Mohammed is now the most popular boy’s name in some cities. The truth is that immigrant birth-rates settle down to mirror local trends. And the much greater pluralism of non-Muslim names is bound to make the Mohammeds stand out statistically.

But I worry about the Chief Rabbi’s remark that “the indigenous population of Europe is dying”. That “indigenous” is a dangerous word, as Lord Sacks must know. Clarification please.

I haven't a clue what if anything Dr Sacks was implying, nor will I until the Theos thinktank post a full transcript of his speech (update - it's here). But the indigenous population IS dying out - or emigrating - and you wouldn't necessarily blame him for saying so. It's not English neo-Nazis who carry out anti-semitic attacks every time something happens in Judea and Samaria. Mind you, if Dr Wise is right about the Orthodox birth-rate, maybe it's those carrying out the attacks who should be nervous !

(comments off for alas the usual reasons)

Drop The Baggage

Yazza is worried about the bloggers :

I never read the raving racists online but those who do tell me how revolting it is getting out there in the blogosphere. Ugly populism is fast food for the disillusioned.

For the centre-left leadership, the predicament is whether to pander to demagoguery or assuage genuine frustrations. Over the past three decades, governments have deepened income inequality and therefore resentment.

But Yazza, if you assuage genuine frustrations, you will be pandering to demagoguery ! Believe it or not, our coming woes aren't all about income inequality, though mass immigration certainly hasn't helped that.

Unquestionably, multiculturalism – once an effective policy tool – is now failing to connect, to counter resurgent white racism or self-exclusion.

But Yazza, that is multiculturalism ! Which is why multiculturalism is doomed to fail. It could only work as long as incomer numbers were small enough. Once the numbers were large enough - of whatever culture - it was going to mean trouble.

Popular consent, I believe, can be galvanised for the greater good. A renewed national identity united old enemies in South Africa and Germany, and Anglo-Franco Canada promoted a one-nation consciousness which accommodates diversity. History mattered; so too national memories. The future mattered more, and these nations sought to drop the baggage that would hold them back.

Well, yes. But we've already turned our education system into a propaganda tool, wrecked the teaching of British history. More than enough cultural baggage has been jettisoned.

Britons need to be drawn to such a collective enterprise. Who do we think we are? Who do we think we can be? What will bring our different tribes closer together? How can we become a more equal and less unhappy population?

It was thinking about these questions which was one of the things (though not the big kicker - that was the reaction of the left - and Yazza - to 9/11) that started me, first commenting elsewhere, then blogging. The thing is, I couldn't see any cheerful answers to those questions. And Yazza has none either.



Ed West takes Yazza apart in the Telegraph :

The economic benefits of mass immigration, as opposed to small-scale skilled immigration, are far from “indisputable”. Any economic benefit is short-term, with long-term and permanent social effects, and of benefit largely to the well-off.

To the rich, immigration means Tongan cleaners, Polish handymen and Thai chefs; to the poor it means queueing, lower wages and more crime, both from immigrants themselves and the native unemployed. It is often to these people, and to ever growing numbers of middle-class people squeezed out of their old neighbourhoods by house price increases, that an alternative view on immigration appeals. The internet has its downsides, and unpleasantness is a big one – but it also provides an alternative voice to a media class who find the rest of the population revolting.

And the comments are spot-on, too :

It was worse than never being asked - we were lied to. In the 1970s we were told that fears of being swamped were exaggerated, that there was no danger of the country’s nature being fundamentally altered. Then, almost overnight (in the early 80s) the line changed to `we are a multi-cultural society now, so get used to it’. In so far as we were ever able to express an opinion, through polls, we made it perfectly clear that we didn’t want this to happen. The suppressed anger at having been deceived, ignored and bullied is what now makes this issue so toxic.

or

Overwhelmingly the people in Great Britain are absurdly tolerant, and even when they’re not they are in general so damn polite they’d never allow a peep of intolerance to escape into public anyway.

The majority are, rightly, pissed off that they were never consulted on mass immigration, or the enforcement of multiculturalism. They just plain don’t believe the claims of necessity as it’s fairly freakin obvious other first world countries haven’t disintegrated despite despite not taking in half the world.

The liberal left at the BBC/Guardian, Civil Service and the main three political parties know the people of Great Britain aren’t all jackbooted BNP-supporting racists. They know the overwhelming majority just don’t see the need to import a massive foreign population into the country, changing the nation radically and permanently in less than 15 years, and then ordering us to be happy about it.

They know all that - it’s just we’re the only democratic country on earth where the elites basically hate the population. So I guess they decided to switch it.

or

The tension and a great many of the ills of the West today are from a spiritual vacuum which now envelops it. Most of the immigrants have a dreadful ideology - but it least it is not a spiritual vacuum, and that makes them stronger than those who are spiritually empty.

I say that as an atheist myself. But I have watched standards for everything decay from those of my childhood as liberalism has taken hold, liberalism which in today’s form substitutes fake ideals and utopias and fears for what used to be religious belief. On a mere empirical basis, increasing secularism has not been good for society, and in my observation, most people are less happy, suffer from an undefined malaise and oddly enough, are more willing to give up their freedom. I do not know why that would be so; but empirically it is so. I think most people need to believe in something, and secularism does not seem to fill that need.

(Hat-tips to commenters Sgt Troy, who seems to have stopped wanting to hang and shoot people for the moment or is at least deferring to house rules, and anon.)

It's Cognitive Dissonance Time Again ...

Picked Politics :

The SIOE and EDL people haven’t sprang up as a direct result of terrorism, otherwise they’d have started in July 2005. They’ve become more prominent recently because the rhetoric around Muslims taking over, the “demographic problem of Muslims”, the growing number of mosques etc has become fever-pitch, especially in the mainstream media. The kind of people who now daily scream about how many kids have Muslim names or how their babies are swelling in numbers are to blame for this hysteria.

Islam Online Factbox :

- Islam is the second religion in the UK with about 2.5 million Muslims
- The Muslim population of the UK has grown 30-fold since the beginning of the 1980s
- the name Mohammed is the second most common name in England and Wales and by far the most popular name in both London and the West Midlands.

I've got no idea if the above stats are correct - although I write about demography a lot, the ONS don't split the figures by religion - or ethnicity, except on rare occasions. But as we can see, it's not just the Mail and Telegraph who big up the Muslim numbers.


UPDATE - to be fair, having read Sunny's post on events at Harrow it may be that he includes the Islam Online people in his bestiary of "daily screamers".

Another Quote of the Day

You can hardly believe that Felipe Fernández-Armest, whoe'er he may be, could write this :

Britain’s indigenous population is fairly advanced along the road towards long-term decline.

So the latest figures are a source of hope — showing that relatively fertile immigrants can, at least for a while, replenish the new generation of young people the country needs. In these circumstances, population fear-mongering is a kind of terrorism ...".

The ONS figures are here. Fertility is up, again. The tipping point was reached a few years back, when the long decline in native fertility, driven by the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s, was outmatched by the fertility of incomers. Expect this continuing trend to accelerate. Compound interest is a wonderful thing.

The story of immigration and the Blair years can be seen in the percentages of births to foreign-born mothers - in this spreadsheet. According to the sheet, the figures are for the whole UK, so Lord knows what the England and Wales figures are like :

1998 - 13.6%
2002 - 17.7%
2003 - 18.6%
2004 - 19.5%
2005 - 20.8%
2006 - 21.9%
2007 - 23.2%
2008 - 24.1%

Interesting times - for my old age and my children's whole lives.

More Liberal "Myths of the Myth of ..."

Diane Abbott in the Indie (on the anti-Trevor Phillips campaign - I blogged it here) :

Black people have watched with mounting dismay as he made a series of interventions on race which were at best silly and at worst revealed no grasp of the facts and figures. First came his attack on multiculturalism. This baffled and upset very many ordinary people, both black and white, who had spent a lifetime fighting racism in their communities. Then there was his claim that we were "sleepwalking to segregation". Manchester University academics had to point out that there was no statistical evidence of "white flight" from inner-city areas with high numbers of minority ethnic residents.

The 'Manchester University academics' being of course Steven 'Ludi' Simpson and perhaps the lovely Dr Nissa. I took a look at his idiosyncratic definition of integration in the first link. But the "myth of the myth of white flight" seems to have at last taken off.

Pity about this comment, by one john b ellis :

Of course some native Brits live pretty much unperturbed alongside new immigrants, and the children and grandchildren of earlier immigrants. The philosophy of "live and let live" and "take as you find" runs reasonably deep in the national psyche, and lots of folk find no reason to take flight.

But there's another side. My other half and I visited some of her vast array of relatives last week, and particularly an eighty-four year old step-aunt in Wolverhampton. That lady and her sister, neither of whom had married, continued to live for very many years, long after the death of their parents, in the council house in which they had been brought up in the Black Country town of Tipton.

They moved, rather against the grain, because of the effects of immigration. Gradually, most of the council houses around them had come to be occupied by families of new Commonwealth origin. One day, one of the sisters observed a neighbouring family carefully spreading one of their carpets down the middle of the street, and proceeding to wash it. Presumably traffic had to take a detour while the operation was in progress! They decided, quite quietly and without any conflict, that it was time to move house, and did so.

It wasn't a move spurred by hatred, or even dislike, much less fanatical racist ideology. They just felt uncomfortable. The customs were different. They no longer felt at home.

Another liberal myth. Remember a couple of years back, Margaret Hodge and her worries about the allocation of council and housing association ('social housing") properties ?

We should look at policies where the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants.

We should also look at drawing up different rules based on, for instance, length of residence, citizenship or national insurance contributions which carry more weight ... most new migrant families are economic migrants who choose to come to live and work here. If you choose to come to Britain, should you presume the right to access social housing?

Need is an important factor, but it's not the only factor. This is about a rebalancing; listening and responding to a strongly felt sense of unfairness in the allocation of public resources.

It caused a bit of a media firestorm, she was accused of giving aid and comfort to the wrong sort of people, of feeding the myths peddled by the likes of the BNP - that 'they' get all the houses - and generally of letting the side down. When the BNP won nearly half the council seats in her constituency she was blamed.

My thoughts at the time were to the effect that as long as the system of allocating housing was needs-based rather than entitlement-based it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that incomers would get a disproportionate share of what housing was available. Read this pdf - from the BBC, of all people. No conspiracy necessary. Sure, you might get a few corrupt types or white idealists (after all, no one ever got fired from a council job for discrimination against white people, whereas even an unproven accusation of discrimination in their favour would impact negatively on a career) tilting the balance a tad against the natives - but apart from the strange concept of the Black and Minority Ethnic Housing Association it really did seem unlikely that there was much overt, direct discrimination. The discrimination was indirect - natives being likely to have fewer dependants and higher incomes than incomers - and indirect discrimination is not a concept I'm terribly happy with. As the Guardian put it :

It is true that many immigrant families have larger families and can benefit from the points system but the system itself is racially neutral.

The great and the good leapt into the breach against Ms Hodge. The Guardian in May 2007 was chocker with HYS pieces deploring her 'dog-whistle', unsubstantiated myths. Jon Cruddas was in the forefront - but the interesting stuff was in the comments. This one was from IShouldApologise, a paid-up Guardianista :

I am sorry, but I have to agree with Margaret Hodge.

When we arrived back in the UK four years ago my wife had a small job and so did I and the only house we could afford was a small cramped second story flat. My children had to share one small loft together with barely enough room to stand up in. Furthemore, it was a firetrap.

One of my students was a Sri Lankhan refugee: a very nice man. He was not allowed to work, but I think he did anyway; in one of the network of Sri Lankhan shops in our area. At the same time the government had given him and his family, with two children, a perfectly fine three bedroomed house to live in rent free. I saw it.

It seemed rather unfair to me.

We couldn't find anyone to help us. We were earning just too much to deserve help from the government, but not enough to rent a decent place to live in. My children suffered. Perhaps if my wife had been a single mother the council would have given us priority on a housing list. Perhaps if we didn't both work, then the government would have come to our aid. Perhaps.

But they didn't. Bitter irony. I didn't resent it overmuch, that my student had been helped, I resented, and resent, that we hadn't been helped. We were left to suffer by the politically correct.

There is definitely something very wrong in the system. It shouldn't stop helping refugee Sri Lankhans, but it should think about helping working people with British Nationality more than it does at present.

One contribution by a housing officer was mysteriously deleted, but rescued by another commenter :

"What many of them do is, get a 3 month visa, register to vote using their passport, get a bank account using the confirmation of residence letter from the electoral registration office, then get a national insurance number from the job centre and a job 'fixing' the underground at night (ie putting their feet up). Then they can take those documents to the housing office and go straight on to the list. If they've got a big family (often the case) they get higher up the list. And there you have it." ..
"these people then apply for an 'indefinite leave to remain', then they get their families over here, then they are the priority list because their house is overcrowded. They're playing it according to the rules, there's nothing we can do."

While another housing officer's remarks survived :

As a Housing Officer I have worked in five different organisations, with five different waiting lists (including areas in Manchester and Blackburn - both areas with a strong ethnic mix) and newcomers are not the problem. Its the lazy-born and bred brits whose parent and grandparents have lived in council housing and who now know the system so well they can play it, and play it well. They're on every benefit going, have no intention of ever getting a job and are breeding like rabbits. They also know how to play the system. They apply for housing before they actually need it and they play the waiting game. Once in the system, you need never leave.

You can't imagine that a housing officer who talked about their minority clients like that would last very long in post, can you ? I think it's a pretty honest description of the UK underclass. On another thread she'd have been a hideous right-winger, blaming the victims of capitalism, the poorest and most vulnerable etc etc - here she was a heroine sticking up for the New Brits against the disgusting Old Brits.

"Any road up" ... with immaculate timing, even Gordon Brown managed to imply this year that he would "change the current rules for allocating council and other social housing, enabling local authorities to give more priority to local people and those who have spent a long time on a waiting list" - much to the horror of lefties everywhere. Shades of 'British Jobs For British Workers'.

And then at last over the hill came the cavalry - in the form of Trevor Phillips' shiny new Equality and Human Rights Commission.

The allegation that new migrants are jumping the queue for council housing and housing association homes was nailed as a myth by research recently published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Phew ! That's sorted that one. From now on, anyone raising the issue can be slapped with the research. Only trouble is, their stats are crap.

… The claim of a report published 7th July by the Equality & Human Rights Commission (EHRC) - to have demonstrated that there is ‘no bias in allocation of social housing to immigrants’ - has been shown to be baseless by independent academic analysis.

According to a leading statistical analyst, Professor Mervyn Stone of University College London, the figures that EHRC has disseminated as if they were evidence for the claim are of zero inferential value.

The report therefore constitutes a serious betrayal of the public interest that whatever is the truth of the matter should be established scientifically. In consequence, Civitas has made a formal complaint to the UK Statistics Authority asking it to appraise the reliability of the statistical methods used by the report and the statistical reasoning that underlies its claims.

As Civitas put it :

“A democracy relies on the honesty of official statistics so that our differences can be settled by peaceful debate, but the EHRC report on social housing fails the most fundamental tests”

The report, by Professor Mervyn Stone, is here (pdf).

So we're paying to be lied to - the lies being in the service of a greater good - maintaining social cohesion and combatting the far-right. Admittedly that's the kind of thing we also get from, say, 'Manchester academics', who are also tax-funded, but the EHRC are far more directly an organ of government.

Sadly, this kind of tax-funded distortion may depress, but no longer shocks - which is in one sense the most worrying thing of all.

A Small Postette

At B-BBC.

The Way We Were

White City, London

While it's absolutely fascinating to read the stories of 40s/50s/60s Inner London childhood and the local characters of those days :

"Miss Knight who became Mrs Howie once took myself and three other pupils to her home for tea. I had too much Tizer and was sick on her sofa."

"Our milkman was Dai Jones who had a dairy opposite the Latimar Upper playing fields in Wood Lane. His dog ate our budgie! "

"During the air raids we would go down the shelters that lay between the u-bend shape of Phipps House. I can remember when I was four going down from the top floor and going in the shelters. I never liked the smell of them, but we had a lot of fun in ours with people playing the accordian and having a good old sing-song."

"Mr Garnett our Welsh Headmaster who was in his glory if the school excelled at any sports, such happy days, as was Christopher Wren especially Mr Ryder my 1st year form teacher, an inspiration to all that had the good fortune to know him. To read the tales of the General Smuts/shop owners/nanny no noes the toffee apple man plus numerous names and mates "you could write a book" about it all, but there was a sense of adventure/achievement and loyalty that came from that wonderful Estate, little crime, respect for teachers/elders and law and order (but I did love scrumping apples from the gardens near Wormholt Park) that was about the extreme extent of our law breaking."

(mind, you did get a few posters who used to go 'shopping without money')



not only has that world disappeared, but most of the people have gone too.

"... walked through Shepherds Bush market where we used to walk to get the bus when I was a teenager. My wife and I were the only white faces throughout the market and we were the only people speaking English"

"we now live in Bracknell"

"Moved to Brighton"

"Sunbury-on-thames"

"Hounslow"

"Hanwell"

"St Albans"

"Welwyn"

"Northolt"

"Greenford"

"Tring"

"We're spread all over the world nowadays"

"Greetings from across the pond"

"I now live in Perth, Western Australia"

"I've lived in Canada for over 40 years "

A Few Grass Clippings From The Curate's Lawn

I thought they'd come over here to do the jobs the lazy natives wouldn't do ? Not if this is correct.

Almost a quarter of children in London live in families where nobody has a job, far above the UK-wide figure of 15%, new figures show. North east England has the highest rate of child poverty, but London has many of the most deprived areas, according to the Office for National Statistics. Nearly a third of children in London live in lone-parent families (31%) compared with the UK-average of 25%.

I'm still trying to reconcile that last 31% with the fact that London has the lowest bastardy rate in England and Wales. I guess it may well be that the people without jobs and the people without husbands may not be the same people. I surmise there might be higher unemployment among London Asians, but lower numbers of single parents, for example. The ONS pdfs are here. Of course the doleys could be the remaining natives.

The Mail picks up on the fact that 40% of young Londoners are non-white. I'm surprised the figures are that low. Maybe another 10% are Polish.

The Nightjack fallout continues as another police blogger bites the dust.

Stressed Out Cop’s post here and this story in the Times, and then this one, scares me if I’m honest.

Life is too short and I worked too hard to get here.

Although I am a Police officer, I am still a regular bloke. I have a family, a mortgage, car payments and a pension to think about.

The Times pathetic justifications for their action are roundly dissed by commenters. I do wonder if the fact that editor James Harding, who must have approved Patrick Foster's disgraceful piece and the decision to defend it in the High Court, came from the FT and before that the EU, is relevant. Not a guy who worked his way up from the subs desk at the Glossop Advertiser, to put it mildly - or don't journalists do that any more ?


British jobs for Indian workers - they've come over here to do the jobs the natives do want to do.

'Hundreds' of Indian contractors are being brought to the UK by state-backed Lloyds Banking Group, which is using them to slowly replace British IT workers.

The Mail has obviously been in suspended animation for the last few years. This is not a new issue.

To make matters worse, the bank's British IT contractors were told just last week they must accept a 15 per cent pay cut, or leave. The whistleblower believes the government should use its 43.4 per cent stake in Lloyds (up 2.57p at 67.57p) to stop overseas contractors taking British jobs. Lloyds, which rescued rival HBOS at the height of last year's banking crisis, admitted it is bringing overseas workers to Britain. It also admitted to cutting rates for existing contractors by 'up to 15 per cent'.

A spokesman said: 'We continue to outsource areas of IT work to companies based overseas. At any one time some of the staff from these companies will be based in the UK to deliver aspects of our IT projects. We monitor all of our projects and keep a close eye on quality and delivery.'

Does your local council have a Violent Persons Register ? I must say I'd never heard of them.

A woman labelled "potentially violent" after complaining to a council about a vandalised flowerbed has won £12,000 in High Court libel damages. Jane Clift, 43, sued Slough Borough Council and public protection chief Patrick Kelleher over their reaction when she complained about the vandal.

Hugh Tomlinson QC, representing Ms Clift, said the former care worker had been following the council's own poster campaign about reporting anti-social behaviour and was "understandably furious, frustrated and angry" with Ms Rashid. After talking to Ms Rashid, she then sent a letter, in which she wrote: "I felt so filled with anger that I am certain I would have physically attacked her if she had been anywhere near me."

The court heard the council and Mr Kelleher had argued that a November 2005 entry about her on its Violent Persons Register and an email informing people about it were "substantially true".

Maybe someone in Slough Council needs to get a sense of proportion.

Travellers Tales - how Warwickshire police are spending your money :

Shock at police's gypsy party

Ian Hughes
25 June 2009

BEMUSEMENT has greeted the news police are planning a gypsy party this weekend in a bid to build bridges between travellers and residents.

Illegal camps set up by gypsies have long been a source of problems, with recent ones set up on Myton Fields in Warwick and on Abbey Fields in Kenilworth.
They have made life a living hell for neighbours, and often leave the taxpayer to foot the bill for clean-ups costs when they move on. The regular Horse Fair, held on private land in Kenilworth, brought a mini crime wave to the town last summer, with reports of shoplifting, intimidation, and pubs being forced to close their doors.
In a bid to promote "understanding" police chiefs to organise the Family Day of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller History and Culture, which takes place at the force's Leek Wootton headquarters on Saturday (June 27).
But Kenilworth councillor George Illingworth told the Observer that news of the party had “made him wonder” what side police were on.
He said: “You have to assume they know what they are doing, but I am very intrigued by the whole thing. The police move in mysterious ways sometimes.”
He added the town had been “taken over” by travellers during a chaotic horse fair on the outskirts of Kenilworth last summer, but said police had their improved their efforts since, quickly evicting a group of travellers from Abbey Fields before the most recent fair in April.
Warwickshire Police Asst Ch Con Bill Holland, who heads up the Association of Chief Police Officers group that leads on Gypsy and Traveller issues, believes the event will offer residents and travellers the chance to get to know each other.
He said: "This is set to be a really new and engaging event which we would welcome all members of our communities to attend. As well as having something on offer for everyone to enjoy, the event is a step in the right direction to improving relations between police and the travelling community.
"Unauthorised encampments have become a source of friction. We know education is at the heart of some of these contentious issues. Hopefully this day will be the start of building relationships with the aim to better understanding and learning about the different cultures and societies we all live in."
The free event, which runs from 10am to 4pm, will feature activities including traditional music and dancing display; storytelling; a collection of traveller memorabilia; plus children's arts workshop, graffiti project and competitions, together with refreshments.

Graffiti project ? It must be said that graffiti is not a prominent part of traveller culture.

Interesting to see that the Lib Dems former planning spokesman makes his money advising travellers on planning law.

A former parliamentary spokesman on planning matters has earned thousands of pounds advising gypsies on illegal camps. Matthew Green has been involved in around 250 planning disputes involving travellers through his company, Green Planning Solutions. Mr Green won the Shropshire seat of Ludlow for the Liberal Democrats in 2001 but lost it to the Tories at the last general election.He was party spokesman on matters involving the Deputy Prime Minister's Office, which had major responsibility for planning and housing.His company, Green Planning Solutions, advises gypsies on how to contest efforts to evict them as a breach of their human rights.Neighbours of the illegal sites refer to 39-year-old Mr Green as the "Gypsy King", according to the Daily Mail.His business partner is Ruth Reed - the next president of the Royal Institute of British Architects and also an expert on planning law.On her website she describes Green Planning Solutions as a company which "specialises in winning planning permission on difficult sites, usually rural locations including the green belt". Among those employing the expertise of Mr Green's company are the gypsies who set up camp last year near the £1million Warwickshire country retreat of Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell and her estranged husband David Mills.Mr Green's company is also representing a group of travellers who have set up camp in the village of Weeley, near Colchester in Essex. After buying a plot of land for £90,000, the group arrived there in June 2008, laid hardcore and built fences.Mr Green said that all the travellers and gypsies pay him privately. "About a third of our clients are from gypsy or traveller backgrounds," he said.

Swine flu heads south - to Worcester secondaries.

A school which closed after a confirmed case of swine flu will remain shut for an extra two days to try to stop the virus spreading. A year eight pupil at Nunnery Wood High School in Worcester was diagnosed with the virus on 12 June. It closed on Tuesday after the virus spread, with four cases now confirmed and 17 students awaiting test results. It will now only be open to GCSE exam students on Monday and Tuesday before opening to all pupils on Wednesday.

And Worcester primaries :

The cases were confirmed in pupils at Stanley Road Primary School in Worcester today. But health experts have decided to keep the school open as the pupils have not attended school since being symptomatic. Dr Richard Harling, Director of Public Health at NHS Worcestershire, said: “We have written to parents at the school today to explain the situation to them fully. “Two cases of swine flu among pupils at the school were confirmed last night. However, these children did not acquire the infection at school. In addition, they have not been to school whilst symptomatic and there is no evidence at the moment that there has been any further transmission within the school.

It seems the Asian community (Stanley Road is in the Wylds Lane area of Worcester, once an Italian enclave and now a Muslim one) are most affected.

Officials have blamed the extent of the virus in the West Midlands on an outbreak at Welford Primary School, Handsworth, Birmingham.

It shut in May, with nearly 200 people connected to the school diagnosed with the virus. It has since been reopened.

Welford is the school featured on the BBC last year. It had two white pupils at the time - out of 480.