Friday, July 31, 2009

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.

26 comments:

Thud said...

I restored and sold at a huge profit(to an idiot) a georgian town house in toxteth...then I took flight, I wasn't alone.

Sgt Troy said...

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

Standard "soft totalitarian state" stuff really

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25361297-7583,00.html

"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 kind of nonsense you would expect from commie scum. It is perfectly apparent to anyone who has any dealings in a very highly enriched area that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the only indigenous people left are those simply too poor, too fucked up and/or too stupid to leave. The so-called mixed areas are in fact those in process of colonisation.

"Democracy" has failed us utterly, it's not dissimilar to the situation Livy wrote about at the final collapse of the Roman Republic and the establishment of the Empire - with the difference that Livy bitterly regretted the loss of the Republic and I think hardly anyone anymore really gives a shit about the "Mother of Parliaments".

Personally I'd like the military to take a hand - it may well come to that in circumstances of economic collapse and a lost war; it is clear that we are being systematically annihilated and replaced in our own country, which is being destroyed.

If this were to be the case(a nice coup) then house-cleaning operations could start - something will go bang, we cannot say what, but it will happen

I have been banned by the "Independent" - for pointing out that Pakistani women here have 4.7 children on average; that was the final straw apparently. If I have no free speech then why should the creatures who peddle commie poison have it either? It is a filthy, traitorous rag - well overdue for house-cleaning operations. There must be many thousands of rank traitors abroad; examples should be made. Really treason used to be quite rare in England historically; and that is because of the awesome nature of the penalties involved. It will be essential to make examples.

The law of praemunire should be re-introduced, Enoch Powell liked it; essentially miscreants introducing foreign influence into England could be stripped of all civil rights. Proscription lists were commonly used at the end of the Roman Republic - if thousands of red traitors were proscribed all their property could be taken into the hands of the state and be used for instance to re-house soldiers who have served in Nulab's mad wars. Then we could start to raise good families again. The commies could go and seek asylum somewhere - Iran, North Korea, Algeria - who gives a toss?

Be great to bid a fond farewell to Ludi and Nissa.

Anonymous said...

Sgt Troy: you have spent too long in the water. Come out and get dressed, you are frightening the horses.

(It was proscription lists that destroyed the Roman Republic.)

Sgt Troy said...

I think that the proscription lists were more of a symptom than a cause, anon.

But treasonable elements must be destroyed so let us then return to the Good Old Laws of England, I referred to praemunire above, which would have similar effect

Blackstone defined praemunire as "introducing a foreign power into the land and creating an imperium in imperio (state within a state) by paying obedience to other processes which constitutionally belong to the King alone."

It would be brilliant to have this back and so strip miserable traitors of all civil rights
Obviously the supreme penalty would have to be extracted in some cases, but we wouldn't want a bloodbath

We are now in by far and away the biggest most disasterous situation since the Normans invaded; the whole national existence is not only in doubt, we will cease to exist as things stand.

This not a time to stand upon niceties. There is no time to listen to the canting, handwringing equivocations of such as Rowan Williams - who I very much hope will suffer the fate of Laud

Cromwell was right, "necessity hath no law"

Essex was also no doubt right when he said of Strafford, "stone dead hath no fellow"

But for the most part driving traitors of the country out should suffice

As for frightening the horses "the time has come to speak, or forever hold the tongue. The important occasion now is no less than to save a nation out of a bleeding, nay, almost dying condition"

Oliver Cromwell to Parliament - 9th December 1644

The case is desperate - the warped reds are having another go at Year Zero

Anonymous said...

My wife is from Colombia. Friends of her who came before her told her
"Come to the UK they give you a house"
(She came to study and then leave but met me and stayed - she wants us to leave though)

Anonymous said...

'It is perfectly apparent to anyone who has any dealings in a very highly enriched area that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the only indigenous people left are those simply too poor, too fucked up and/or too stupid to leave.'

I live in Tower Hamlets and I would say the local British population consists of the following:

The lost, feckless etc, the old solid working-class with an high average age and people who have moved into new developments.

This last group are becoming increasingly influential and they are not as pro-Ethnic as you would think. After a few years living in the East-End they lose their illusions and understand that local politics is ethnic politics and that don't mean them.

Sgt Troy said...

From whence can national salvation spring? How can treason be extirpated?

1) Obviously nationalism is pretty much boxed in, partly of its own making, by unfortunate continental historical associations. It would be much preferable if the BNP were to be regarded as a genuine indigenous nationalist movement without all the irrelevant baggage, but the state and the claw hammer gangs will do everything they can to stop this. So it's checked there, until perhaps such time as the economy topples or perhaps the austerity squeeze has been on long enough. I am very much persuaded by the genetic evidence with has completely given the lie to the "nation of immigrants" bullshit. Obviously it is nonsense with or without genetics - a Somali enriching yesterday is not the same as Hengist and Horsa. England has been a country for 1000 years, but the genetics helps greatly because then cards such as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People can be played. The mental associations have got to change from Einstazgruppen to red squirrel. Here of course the soft totalitarian grip on the "education" system isn't helpful both in terms of course content - the Nazis breakfast noon and night with a bit about the American west and the history of medicine chucked in - and also the apparent inability to teach anything serious at all, and to have the ability to express it. But I hope nationalists will have their part to play, newer people would bring a fresh focus

2) The Forces - still apparently pretty sound, and more efficient than the other branches of the ramshackle state. They have been contemptibly betrayed and one can only hope this, plus the gravity of the situation as outlined by Rear Admiral Parry, has not been lost upon them. Here again we can't expect anything until the economy collapses

3) Tories - well I have been interested to note how the excerable Timothy Garton Ash, has taken to slating Cameron because he is "allying" with nationalist European parties liberal man doesn't approve of. I find Tories quite detestable; but beggars can't be choosers. Cameron does have the blood of such as John Talbot(Henry VI part one) running through his veins. Whilst he has adopted sheeps clothing it seems that his opinions are pretty right wing. Maybe something can be done here. The danger is of course of a right wing Junto run by the rich for the rich, as opposed to the desperately needed national movement.

In any event it seems that England is a naturally monarchical caste ridden society. Churchill said that it was the grammar school boys who would rule after the war; that they deserved to because it was the sergeant pilots who had won the Battle of Britain. Well social engineers stuffed that up, and looking at such state products as the ment Brown(and Thatcher) one can only throw one's hands up in the air.

But perhaps there will be some mileage in Cameron as a first step.

4) The broad mass of the population is deeply unsettled, troubled at heart - the older ones the more so. This is clearly so from the polls that overwhelmingly oppose immigration. Lose your country, lose the lot - and we are being colonised at a truly frigtening rate by god only knows how many third world diasporas.

Apparently Tory canvassers at Norwich North were deeply shocked by the hostility of the voters - all public faith in our "democratic" institutions has been lost. There is a vacuum, and we all know that nature abhors one of those. Who will ultimately emerge, we cannot say - but it needs to be somebody in the not too distant future. Cromwell was a relative unknown in the late 1630s

Sgt Troy said...

"The philosophy of "live and let live" and "take as you find" runs reasonably deep in the national psyche,"

The God of Battles doesn't smile upon the timorous

I recall how quite recently there was an attempt to classify this as a hate site

The enemy would love to have Laban and regular contributors down a salt mine/re-education camp.

We are in a kind of war, a war of words at the moment.

Do unto them before they do unto you should be the watchword

Anonymous said...

The so-called mixed areas are in fact those in process of colonisation. - The Sarge

The difference between an event and a process. I saw that described as the inability to tell the difference betwenn an 18 wheeler parked down the street and one hurtling towards you at 60 mph. They could look the same. In this debate the lefties are very focused on seeing an event. They are unable or, more likely, unwilling to see a process.

Anonymous said...

Selective use of statistics is the main weapon of our beloved government and its numerous quangos.

It matters not what figures they produce the British public have decided that the government is no longer to be trusted, the knock on effect of this distrust is that all these unelected quangos are all treated with suspicion, the bitter in-fighting of Mr Phillips quango is a sure sign that the left know this and are attacking each other in their final moments.

Anonymous said...

I don't tend to give too much credibility to statistics emerging from organisations with an established track record of political tramlining.

But even an entirely unbiased analysis of demographic change will easily fall foul of blinkered research.

For example, white flight from any inner city area, is a difficult thing to assess unless you take all the relevant factors into account. There have been many areas in which mainly white working class populations have become overwhelmed by immigration, which still have what appears to be a core of white occupancy. But a closer inspection will tell you that many of the white occupants are transients, such as students, who can only afford to live in the cheapest accomodation on offer. The families moved out, leaving behind a rump of the old, the disabled, and the students, hippies, squatters and homeless replaced them.

Look at the student quarter of any University town, and ask yourself who was living in those terraces half a century ago. Before they stopped being neighbourhoods and started being communidee projects.

Anonymous said...

The EHRC's statistics did not give a geographical analysis of new tenancies. If they had it would have shown that immigrants were receiving a lot more than 1.8% of new tenancies in London.

Richard

I estimate as much as 15-20% per year.

Anonymous said...

Do these figures mention housing benefit?

On the basis of need many incomers are going to get HA even if they are in private accomodation.

Sgt Troy said...

"SARDAR, DUDLEY says...
3:37pm Fri 18 Jul 08
First of all congratulations to Dr. Khurshid Ahmed CBE and the Dudley Muslim Association.

The Muslim community have clearly demonstrated their patience and remained steadfast despite the bellicose rhetoric of a pathetic few.

Councillor Caunt's response is a typical one and it "smacks of islamophobia". It seems as though the council are preparing to put yet more obstacles in the way of the muslim community because it suits their political careers how shallow these small time politicians are!

I predict soon Councillor Caunt and Malcolm Davis will be drowning their sorrows together!

Clearly they have failed to comprehend the ruling of an independent planning professional whose livelihood is not effected in any way by dubious petitions unrelated to the planning process."

http://www.dudleynews.co.uk/news/3216268.Mosque_decison_a__smack_in_the_teeth___/

Note the triumphalism

Homophobic Horse said...

"Here of course the soft totalitarian grip on the "education" system isn't helpful both in terms of course content - the Nazis breakfast noon and night with a bit about the American west and the history of medicine chucked in "

I did American West and the History of Medicine. I enjoyed it as well. But ya, today they teach you practical nihilism.

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