(Adapted from an email I posted on the Fallible Ideas list some time back)
Very long/interesting article. Very interesting on historical details of UK immigration policy. Says some bad stuff about capitalism but overall pretty solid.
Some highlights:
By 1997, Britain’s ethnic minority population had grown, thanks to immigration and the children born to immigrants, to about four million. That population had certainly leavened what had formerly been a strikingly ethnically and culturally homogenous country. Nevertheless, British—again, really English—society remained defined by a national culture that Orwell would have recognized. In that year, however, Tony Blair’s just-elected first Labour government launched a demographic—and, concomitantly, a cultural—revolution, a revolution that historians and commentators of all political stripes now recognize as by far Blair’s most historically significant legacy. New Labour greatly relaxed or entirely eliminated previous restrictions on immigration, with the aim to convert Britain quickly to a polity as fully exposed as possible to the apparent social, cultural, and economic advantages of globalization.
The government never systematically laid out its rationale for pursuing this radical policy. It emerged from a convoluted set of ideologies, shibboleths, slogans, and aspirations that celebrated the dynamism of global capitalism and that rejected what was regarded as a stultified and insular traditional British culture. Although rooted in an economic vision, the policy derived its energy and appeal from its cultural, even aesthetic aspirations: “diversity,” “inclusiveness,” and “vibrancy” were its watchwords. Cook’s “Chicken Tikka Masala Speech” was New Labour’s most famous pronouncement of its vision of this policy, a feat of social engineering designed to forge a new national identity by means of“the changing ethnic composition of the British people themselves.” In a fit of consumerist enthusiasm, Cook disdained the former “homogeneity of British identity,” dismissed older Britons who clung to that antiquated and stodgy identity, extolled the ways mass immigration had “broadened” lifestyles, and enthused over the prospect of a pulsating and ever-changing “immigrant society” that would continue “enriching our culture and cuisine.”
Note: even allegedly “centrist” left-wing types like “New Labour” engage in radical, utopian social engineering based on vague ideas about how nice “vibrancy” is. You really can’t trust any modern leftists with control of government at all, ever. Even the moderate-seeming ones are either dangerous radicals or fools.
I also find the big focus on cuisine diversity by leftists very peculiar (its a common theme, gets brought up tons). Are there no higher values to consider than the proximity of Indian or Thai? Very strange.
In significant respects, the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis form a metaphorical foreign encampment, rather than an immigrant neighborhood, within a country in which a significant minority of them feels in fundamental ways incompatible. A Home Office report on the standoffish Pakistani and Bangladeshi districts in the northern mill towns found that “Separate educational arrangements, community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social and cultural networks, means that many communities operate on the basis of a series of parallel lives.” Less abstractly, Andrew Norfolk, the self-described liberal London Times investigative reporter who methodically uncovered the Rotherham sexual grooming scandal, concludes that “It is possible for a Muslim child to grow up—in the family home, at school and in the mosque and madrassa—without coming into any contact with Western lifestyles, opinions or values.”
!!!!
Big parts of Britain are occupied by completely foreign cultures. Maps showing one continuous country are basically a lie. And it’s getting worse.
Muslims, the refrain goes, don’t speak with a single voice. The particular makeup of Britain’s overall Muslim population, though, renders that population’s aggregate voice particularly harsh. Since 2001, news organizations, opinion-research firms, and groups such as the Pew Research Center have conducted surveys of the undifferentiated group “British Muslims.” Although any one survey can be misleading or poorly conducted, the findings of various such surveys over a lengthy span of years have regularly disquieted the British public and government because those surveys have consistently shown that a significant minority of British Muslims hold views that could be generously characterized as unsympathetic to the ethos of their adopted nation. Those surveys have found that 24 percent of British Muslims believe British security services played a role in the 7/7 attacks; that 23 percent believe the four men identified as the 7/7 bombers did not actually carry out the attacks; that 45 percent believe the 9/11 attacks were a conspiracy of the U.S. and Israeli governments;
!!!
And btw probably a big chunk of those 45 percent simultaneously feel something like “and they deserved it”, which of course is completely incoherent in the context of their false-flag conspiracy theory.
that 56 percent believe those identified by the U.S. as the 9/11 assailants were in fact not involved in the attacks; that 37 percent believe British Jews are “a legitimate target as part of the ongoing struggle for justice in the Middle East”; that 46 percent believe British Jews “are in league with the Freemasons to control the media and politics”; that 68 percent want the prosecution of British citizens who “insult” Islam; that 28 percent hope Britain will become a fundamentalist Islamic state; that significant majorities believe that the populations of Western countries—including the British—are selfish, arrogant, greedy, and immoral.
Conspiracy theories, violent anti-semitism, and theocracy. Seems bad. Maybe stop the flow?