State Broadcaster Does Its Bit

Maddy frets because it creates low paid, insecure jobs.

Johann frets because it creates BNP voters.

Laban chips in :

Mass immigration is IMHO the main engine of insecure employment/low wages - and that's what it's there for.

Jon Cruddas pointed out two years back that the govt "tacitly used immigration to help forge the preferred flexible North American labour market. Especially in London, legal and illegal immigration has been central in replenishing the stock of cheap labour across the public and private services, construction and civil engineering."

Immigrant labour "is the axis for the domestic agenda of the Government".

They certainly have a flexible labour market in the States, thanks to mass illegal immigration from Mexico and points South. During the Republican primaries it seemed that every other day some populist anti-immigrant candidate was busted for having an 'undocumented' gardener or nanny. Might be hard to credit, but evil fascist GWB was only stopped from 'regularising' millions of illegal migrants by a revolt from his own party.

Some say mass immigration is the Left's revenge on the working class for the Thatcher years, but that implies a degree of planning and forethought so is unlikely. It's more a cultural thing, but it does neatly coincide with a need for cheap workers.

People like Johann Hari and some Guardian commenters are calling for an increase in the minimum wage as the answer to the "problem" - the problem being that the natives are restless. They've missed the point. Keeping wages low are what it's all about.

(Of course if immigration stopped tomorrow and all the Poles went home OR if the minimum wage was doubled then yes, wages would rise and that would cause a rise in inflation. But to a great extent inflation has been 'hidden' over the last 10 years via a combination of the Chinese miracle (goods) and mass immigration/offshoring (services). In one sense it OUGHT to rise - that would give a truer picture of where we actually are economically. Then we might look hard at our education and manufacturing disasters and start doing something about them)

And talking of restless natives, did you see the State broadcaster doing its little bit for social cohesion on all its news bulletins tonight, with the video (kindly provided by HMG) of the UK Border Agency (60 guys in Clockwork Orange white boiler-suits, backed by police) in action ?

"Shocked, scared, confused - 56 workers are lined up"

Putin can't teach this lot anything about media control.

"There are dodgy employers out there who are trying to undercut their competitors and drive down British wages by employing people illegally, so we've come up with this new way of taking much faster on-the-spot action," Immigration Minister Liam Byrne told the BBC.

Ah, those British wages ! Can't you just see Britannia on the coins and the Queen (God bless her) on the notes ? Drive them down illegally and the white boiler-suits will nail you ! (drive them down legally and anyone who doesn't like it is a Nazi).

Thus far has the party of Keir Hardie advanced. But hey, it'll help convince the stupid natives that 'they' are doing something.

(There was also an interesting discussion on utility which alas time prevented me from joining)

Rhys Jones Murder - "We Have Failed His Killer"

The Mad Mahdi (aka Sobbing Abbess) once more attempts to render satire redundant.

Channeling Madeleine

Ms Bunting may have left Demos, after a reign of Clough-like brevity, but "you can't kill the spirit".

They've just produced a pile of waffle (pdf file) on "Community-based approaches to counter-terrorism", promoted as ever by the BBC, which positively reeks of the old, appeasement days before the Jack Straw putsch, when multiculturalism was laid to rest and 'community cohesion' replaced it.

What qualifications have the three authors, Rachel Briggs, Catherine Fieschi and the fetchingly tilted Hannah Lownsborough ?

Hannah has produced such insights as "For the integration of services to work at a local level, the implementation of the new policies must be truly local. In part, that requires central government to take a genuinely "hands-off" approach to its introduction, trusting the local knowledge of officials to shape solutions tailored to meet local need. Every Child Matters represents one of the most important changes to children's services in the last 20 years"

Catherine Fieschi's finest hour is undoubtedly her 2004 Fabian essay "the resistable rise of the BNP" in which the Director of the Centre for the Study of European Governance at the University of Nottingham explained why the BNP threat was overblown - just as they got 4.8% in the Euro elections, quadrupling their 1999 vote.

Rachel Briggs advises on corporate security, so you might expect her to be a little reality based. Alas the link to "Viva La Revolution - An article in Renewal, November 2005, on the social revolution taking place in Spain" doesn't work. I'm assuming she sees the coming replacement of the Spanish people as a triumph for feminism. Her blog entries show standard Guardianista attitudes :

After the usual questions about think tanks - independence, funding, government influence - the penultimate questioner caught me off guard.

Did I, he asked, believe that the 'axis of evil' is actually an anti-Chinese policy in disguise?

Without further consideration you might think he's just as barmy as Bush.

Don't hold back - tell it like you see it. Just the kind of person we need at the FCO-funded Wilton Park, 'established in 1946 as part of an initiative by Winston Churchill to help re-establish peace and democracy in Europe'. I'm sure she'd get on well with him.

"Ms Briggs has declared that she has no involvement in any political activities." Really ?



There are a few rough and uncut gems to be found in the liberal alluvium.

One of the reasons that the government is getting things wrong is because it has a shallow and partial understanding of the communities with which it needs to engage, which makes it behave schizophrenically.

On the one hand ‘communities’ are the stuff of multicultural Britain – they are benign exotic groups that add a cultural je ne sais quoi to the UK. The priority for policy-makers is not necessarily to understand the differences, but to celebrate them.

Well, yes. The whole point was to import lots of exotic people to prove how cool and multicultural you were - and to cheese off the evil Right. The actual culture of the people you were importing was irrelevant - the point was that it wasn't 'ours'.

Maybe tonight I'll get round to a proper fisking. Suffice it to say that the conclusions amount to 'you know what you did before - after 9/11 - that didn't work ? Do more of it. And make the process of foreign policy formulation totally transparent. That'll be fun. And institute ethnic policing for ethnic areas. And fund more enquiries like this one.'

Dear Madeleine Bunting ...

Re your Guardian article "Our culture of contempt for parenthood".

“The fact that we still have as many births in the UK as we do is extraordinary”

“The point is that parenthood is against the grain of all the aspirations of our culture.”

That depends, I think, on who you mean by ‘we’ and ‘our’.

Yours seems to be a view which only takes into account the culture of the natives, rather than considering the many other cultures which make up Britain (particularly England) today.

It's true that 'we' don't value motherhood or the job of caring for and socialising children - hence the 'I'm only a housewife' syndrome, the fact that mothers caring for their kids are discriminated against by a tax system which rewards joint-earners and single parents over two parent/one earner families. Take a look at which social category (on the 2001 census) child minder and nursery nurse fall into. This culture, common to all Western nations, has been recently described with great insight by the (childless) writer Lionel Shriver in the Guardian and the Sunday Times.

As recent research has pointed out, only the very poor or the wealthy can afford large families - the biggest drop in births has been among those on average incomes.

But we should not confuse 'our' culture with that of all the UK. Other cultures are still having children, and therefore presumably still value them. The ONS birth statistics for England in 2004 showed that nearly 20% of births were to mothers born overseas - 50% of the births in London.

Other research showed that of these babies, half the fathers were born overseas.

In towns like Bradford, where I lived for many years, the ethnic minority population is projected to have tripled in the thirty years 1980-2010. Fifty percent of the current minority population is under eighteen.

I would imagine that if you asked the DFES for a breakdown of primary school numbers by ethnicity (recorded by each head and reported to the DFES) the figure would be 25%+ for ethnic minorities in England.

So the picture may be less bleak than you paint. As the anti-natalist culture continues not to reproduce, and other cultures do, the problem will solve itself. The anti-natalist culture will literally die out.

I had to smile last year, when commentators after the 7/7 bombings pointed to the low numbers of Pakistani and Bangladeshi (origin) women in full time employment as evidence of a disconnection from UK culture. Those women are working alright - they’re raising children.

Regards

LT


Afterthought. Ms Bunting finishes with these words (on why we still have any children).

"I prefer a more romantic notion: that it's a form of popular rebellion by which the prevailing anti-natalist mores of a manipulative consumer capitalism are trumped by the innate understanding of millions of women (and men) of what really constitutes love and fulfilment - dependence, commitment, the pleasure of guiding enthusiasm and, above all, the privilege of nurturing innocence."

I think romantic is the only possible description of the idea that parents are making some kind of Naomi Kleinish 'No Logo'-type statement, having noted above that outside the rich, only the state-funded underclass can afford large families. Whatever's being nurtured there, innocence ain't it.

I was at a gathering last weekend with many teachers present. A pair from North London secondaries told me, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, that all secondary schools in the area had police permanently present. Then I talked to the head of a primary on a large council estate in a Northern town, discussing the limited options a school has when dealing with a damaged child (one of several, all different fathers, no set hours - or set anything - at home, brother dead of an overdose at sixteen).

"I'd say the majority of kids at my school come from homes like that"

Hmmm.



(other Maddy-reaction at Norm, Clive Davis, Adventures In Capitalism, Jon Rowett.

Speak For Yourself !

Madeleine Bunting :

"Honour is meaningless to us; we have replaced it with a preoccupation with status and self-fulfilment."

Who's we, paleface ? You might have done.

Uncharted Territory

In a (perhaps surprisingly for the Guardian) sober and factual piece, reporting rather than opinion, Leo Benedict looks at Britain's coming future. Native Brits are projected to be a minority in the United Kingdom by the century's end. Sooner in England. Within ten years in London and Birmingham. Read the whole thing.

According to the last census, in 2001, 30% of London residents had been born outside England - that's 2.2 million people, to which we can add the unknown tens of thousands who didn't complete a census form. And even this total takes no account of the contribution of the city's second- and third-generation immigrants, many of whom have inherited the traditions of their parents and grandparents. Throughout the 1990s, Greater London was the fastest growing part of the UK - and yet the white population in that time actually fell.

Despite the 'mongrel English' bit (what does he mean ?) this paragraph is illuminating.

In fact, the mongrel English, fissured with post-imperial self-doubt, neither American nor fully European - nor even Welsh, Irish or Scots - have a rather thin national identity all round. We are proud of our country, but we can't remember why. In Londoners - who seldom have a word of praise for the great city of their birth - this is especially pronounced. The private English also seem less susceptible to big ideas. Our national religion is perhaps the weakest in the world, and in the 2001 census almost 16% of Londoners said they had "no religion" at all - more than all the Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Buddhists put together. Londoners resent immigrants less than they might, in short, because they have so few values left to be threatened.

Spot-on there, I think. Although to be fair the natives have also voted with their feet. In this Madeleine Bunting piece from the same issue of the Guardian the phrase 'white flight' is used without irony quotes.

It's not all gloomy. The news that black Africans now outnumber Afro-Caribbeans in the capital should mean less talk of 'black crime' - the two communities have very different cultures. Think Damilola Taylor. Think the people who killed him.

No matter what your politics it's worth a read. Credit to the Guardian - and how often do I say that ? I enjoyed the piece on my favourite recent arrivals - the Koreans of New Malden, whose youth hang about the streets in threatening gangs on a Sunday morning, playing guitars, singing hymns and inviting you to their churches.

In fact only one ethnic group isn't covered - the poor, old, valueless (both spiritually and politically) Native Brits.

Have a nice day.

Islamophobia Part 734

Norm and newbie clever-clogs Jonathan Derbyshire do a pretty good job on Madeleine Bunting's tastelessly timed Guardian piece.

But five stars for the following - Jack Straw, as spotted by Harry.

Sometimes we are too swift to move away from the original and fundamental causes of such terrorism, namely the terrorists who perpetrated such an act, and shift away to other things - in a sense taking for granted their culpability.
There are some things which happen amongst human kind which are almost inexplicable according to any basic moral norms - Nazism was and this is.

And the wondrous Yasmin Alibhai Brown, a burning bright flame amidst the hideously white self-haters of the Indie. No liberal guilt there.

When confronted by such abominable crimes, we have an obligation to cross over the horror which wells up and try and comprehend (not forgive, but understand) the perpetrators and the circumstance which led to the violence. Today I find such searching analysis almost impossible. For some people that line was crossed with the Sept 11 attacks (which, it will be remembered, Yazza believed the US brought upon themselves - but it's never too late to repent). There are events which silence the voice ... for now, for me, this crime has no place even within the farthest boundaries of human behaviour; it has destroyed the fundamental definition of what it means to be human.

For Yazza, for Jack Straw, and for me, the crime is too disgusting, too unspeakable, to be balanced in some equation against Russian actions in Chechnya. Not so the Indie's vile cartoonist, who I presume is the same guy who did the baby-eating Sharon.

Putin stands, dunce's cap on head, in the corner of a bombed-out classroom, blood and glass on the floor. Surprisingly there are no dead children, not even being eaten by Mr Sharon.

The blackboard contains the equation

LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE + REPRESSION = TERRORISM

The caption ? "Back to School".


UPDATE - as I've said before, what Ms Bunting knows about history could be tattooed under a child's armpit.

" ... the particular association of Islam with violence is a colonial hangover, dating back to the 1857 Indian Mutiny, when Muslims rebelled against British imperialism."

Two points. The Indian Mutiny involved Hindu and Muslim troops. As the Army Museum site says "Fortunately for the British the Mutiny was almost exclusively confined to the Bengal Army. The Company’s Madras and Bombay Armies were relatively unaffected and other units, including Sikhs, Punjabi Moslems and Gurkhas, remained loyal.". Nicholson's force at Delhi mainly consisted of Muslim tribesmen from what is now the Afghan border region.

To say the revolt was against imperialism is incorrect. Imperialism of one sort or other - Sikh, Muslim, Hindu - was the usual form of government on the subcontinent. The mutineers proclaimed the re-establishment of the Moghul Empire under Bahadur Shah. In Charles Allen's words 'the root cause was a growing unease among both Hindu and Muslim sepoys about the way their traditional way of life was being interfered with .. a real fear that religion and caste were being actively undermined. The British Government was forcing the pace of change in ways that threatened the customs of centuries, bringiong reforms such as the banning of suttee and female infanticide ...'.

Caste, suttee (the burning of widows), female infanticide. Can't say Madelaine doesn't know a good cause when she sees one.


And as for the particular association of Muslims with violence, I'd better quote again the Archbishop of Canterbury. No, not Rasputin - Queen Elizabeth I's Matthew Parker, nearly 300 years before the Mutiny.

" Better it is for us to fall into thy hands, than into the hands of men, and especially into the hands of Turks and Infidels thy professed enemies, who now invade thine inheritance... First, the Turke with his sword, what landes, nations, and countreys, what empires, kingdomes, and provinces, with cities innumerable hath he wonne, not from us but from Thee! Where thy name was wont to be invocated, thy word preached, thy sacraments administered, there now reigneth barbarous Mahumet with his filthy Alcoran. The florishing churches in Asia, the learned churches of Grecia, the manifold churches in Africa, which were wont to serve thee now are gone from thee."

Or what about the Irish poet Thomas Moore, who wrote 'The Fireworshippers' in 1817, describing the conquest of Zoroastrianism in Persia by Islam. He described

One of the saintly, murderous brood,
To carnage and the Koran given,
Who hold through unbelievers blood
Lies the directest path to heaven

I'm not saying I agree with Moore or Parker. But to suggest that Islam only became associated with violence in 1857 is ridiculous. She's making it up as she goes along.

‘Tis Pity She’s A Guardianista

How strange. I find myself agreeing with Madeleine Bunting about the Sun’s rather pathetic anti-Clare Short campaign. Ms Short has no intention of reviving her legislative campaign against the Sun’s Page Three (twice her private member’s bills have failed) – she simply said she believed it should be banned.

The Sun’s campaign – featuring a bus parked outside Short’s home and unflattering fake photomontages of her topless, isn’t even, as Ms Bunting points out, remotely funny. And I’m no fan of the MP for Ladywood – though for years I considered her a kind of antiparticle Ann Widdicombe, whose honesty you can applaud even while disagreeing with her. Clare’s antics over Iraq – staying in the Cabinet and then resigning after the war, along with her ambivalent views on murderous Irish republicanism have caused me to change my mind.

I wish these Guardianistas would make their minds up, though.

Is selling sex in all its forms, from car adverts through Page Three and ladmag shoots to Amy and Lara, a major cause of gang rape, frustration and impotence, and eating disorders (Ms Bunting), ‘violence against women’ (femiluni Julie Bindel), is it just another job - sex work, or is it ‘a girl power thing’ where the exploited are the poor sad male punters (A Good Thing) rather than the girls (A Bad Thing)?

After all, if sex is just another recreational activity, like a rubber of bridge or a game of tennis, then why shouldn’t some individuals sell their God-given talents and abilities ? And in a free market, you sell your assets or services at the market rate.

For the TUC and their Women’s Equality Officer Rebecca Gill, ‘sex workers’ are ‘legitimate workers in need of protection’. Even the great Aaronovitch seems chilled about it. Madeleine talks of women who claim ‘to be "empowered" by sticking her breasts at a camera’. Yet surely it’s the cheque that’s empowering, not the act. Or as one escort said ‘my self-esteem went through the roof. It made me feel like the next best thing to Claudia Schiffer, to be paid all this money by men who wanted to spend time with me.’ I get a distinct impression that the money is important here. So what’s the problem ?

For the Bindels, Dworkins or Catharine MacKinnons of this world the objection seems to be that men are involved, with all the violence and misogyny inevitably associated with the extra Y chromosome. Worse, they actually get something out of it. But the high tide of gender feminism has long passed and such voices have little influence - besides, as the Spectator reports, we sent most of them to Iraq - a far better use of taxpayers money than 'toys for the boys' like flak jackets.

Surely only the prudish, moralistic or (heaven help us) religious would argue that sex is in any sense sacred, private, or related to the conception and rearing of children ? Yet Madeleine and her pals remain uneasy. Something, somewhere seems wrong.

She’s right of course. But until she becomes prudish, or moralistic, or (heaven help us) religious she’ll never quite know what it is, and she’ll continue to rail at what she calls ‘fascistic norms’ and what I call secular post-Christian culture.




PS - Lordy, her sense of history ! I’ve noted her inability to comprehend the Victorians. She writes "In peasant cultures of the past, it was the reproductive powers of the female body which dominated representations of women. Now it is their power to provide male sexual pleasure. It doesn't seem much like progress".

Hang on – I thought the change from breeding machine to autonomous sexual being was progressive. And I presume when she says ‘now’ she’s no longer talking about peasant cultures. But when she writes about the representations I don’t think she means the Sheela–Na-Gig or the Venus of Willendorf (who incidentally bears a remarkable resemblance to the Sun’s idea of a naked Clare Short). I think she’s got in mind one particular woman with one particular child, which dominated all representations of women from Russia to Ireland for a thousand years.

Merry Victorian Christmas To All ....

Another glass of gluhwein to take away the vision of all the children's presents yet to be wrapped. And to try and lessen the bile-count induced by Madeleine Bunting's idiotic Guardian piece. Not worthy of a full fisk, but her take on the Victorians deserves a shoeing.

"The blame lies first of all with the Victorians. They pretty much invented Christmas - trees, Santa Claus, puddings, turkeys, decorations, cards, presents, family togetherness - ingeniously turning what had become a sober religious feast into a great festival requiring months of preparation. If women were to be kept at home, they had to have something to do."

It's true that many of the accoutrements of the modern Christmas have Victorian origins - indeed Christmas cards only became common in the 20th century. But families gathering to eat well (or as well as they could) together, such presents for the children as could be afforded - the heart of the secular Christmas - has been with us for much longer. "It was Christmas Eve, with its loads of holly and mistletoe ..." wrote Hardy in Tess of the D'Urvbervilles. His short story 'The Grave By The Hand-Post' is about a son returning to see his father for Christmas. And hasn't Ms Bunting read 'A Christmas Carol' ?

"But the crucial point about the Victorian Christmas, which always gets overlooked, is that it was only the middle classes who had one ..."- see above. There's a good reason why it always gets overlooked - because it isn't true.

"The Victorian rebranding was a response to industrialisation: the family was no longer the wealth-producing unit; people were swapping work at home for factories and offices; and urbanisation was disrupting the old domestic structures. Social relations needed strengthening, so the home was relaunched with rituals such as regular family meals and the Sunday lunch. Home was idealised as a sanctuary from competitive market capitalism - a place where vulnerability, innocence, and sentiment could be safely expressed. At the same time, childhood was idealised as a life-stage free of responsibility, a time of imagination, magic and enchantment. All of this came neatly together in the rituals the Victorians developed for Christmas. "

Ah yes. Victorian culture as 'rebranding', as some small group of people kicking ideas around, followed by the Victorian equivalents of posters, advertisements, handouts in schools and doctors surgeries, interviews on the Today programme. Such a metaphor betrays a complete lack of understanding, of empathy, with Victorian culture. Or she could just be pig-ignorant.

The home was 'relaunched', was it, with regular family meals ? Just where the hell do you imagine families ate in Georgian times - McDonalds ?

And the last liberal myth, continually regurgitated in true bulimic style, that "childhood was idealised as a life-stage free of responsibility, a time of imagination, magic and enchantment". I'm sorry, your forebears must have lived in a parallel universe to mine. Is this the Victorian age of the Little Match Girl ? Of Tom and Mr Grimes ? Of Shaftesbury and Barnardo ? Of a hundred weepy parlour ballads about orphans, disasters and death ? Of "Father's a Drunkard and Mother Is Dead" ?

But there's one thing we have in common with the Victorians. Our old people are still dying of cold.

Happy Christmas. And check out those old people over the road.

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.

(And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)

And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, (because he was of the house and lineage of David,) to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.