Recently in Britain Category

White English People, anyway. White English Labourites, that is. Mind you, the "Stuff White People Like" concept isn't meant to describe the tastes, prejudices and beliefs of all white people, which obviously isn't possible, but of a certain sort of white person -- a bourgeois bohemian, more or less, though it's pretty clear that SWPLs are liberal bien-pensants (though I would be less than honest if I didn't admit that there are a few SWPL categories that apply to me).

I give you this background information for context to understand that Andrew Neather piece I referred to in the update to the British National Party post earlier. Having read only the Telegraph report on the essay, I was under the impression a guilt-stricken Neather was confessing that he felt rotten for having participated in a cynical political move to undercut the working classes of his own country, and to change the character of Britain. Wrong! Neather brags about it. Excerpt:

What's missing is not only a sense of the benefits of immigration but also of where it came from.

It didn't just happen: the deliberate policy of ministers from late 2000 until at least February last year, when the Government introduced a points-based system, was to open up the UK to mass migration.

Even now, most graduates with good English and a salary of £40,000 or the local equivalent abroad are more or less guaranteed enough points to settle here.

The results in London, and especially for middle-class Londoners, have been highly positive. It's not simply a question of foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners - although frankly it's hard to see how the capital could function without them.

Their place certainly wouldn't be taken by unemployed BNP voters from Barking or Burnley - fascist au pair, anyone? Immigrants are everywhere and in all sorts of jobs, many of them skilled.

My family's east European former nannies, for example, are model migrants, going on to be a social worker and an accountant. They have integrated into London society.

But this wave of immigration has enriched us much more than that. A large part of London's attraction is its cosmopolitan nature.

It is so much more international now than, say, 15 years ago, and so much more heterogeneous than most of the provinces, that it's pretty much unimaginable for us to go back either to the past or the sticks.

Field and Soames complain about schools where English is not the first language for many pupils.

But in my children's south London primary school, the international influence is primarily the large numbers of (mostly middle-class) bilingual children, usually with one parent married to a Brit.

My children have half- or wholly Spanish, Italian, Swiss, Austrian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Congolese, Chinese and Turkish classmates.

London's role as a magnet for immigration busted wide open the stale 1990s clichés about multiculturalism: it's a question of genuine diversity now, not just tacking a few Afro-Caribbean and Bengali events on to a white British mainstream. It's one of the reasons Paris now tends to look parochial to us.

This entire column ought to be preserved in Lucite so historians 500 years from now will have a perfect record of the British Establishment's mindset at this point in the nation's history. "Fascist au pair, anyone?" Well, dear, if we have to open the floodgates of our country to immigrants who share nothing of British history or culture so we can have suitable au pairs and good ethnic restaurants, why not? Because the point of life is consumption, right? If open immigration hurts the working-class white British people in the "sticks," who gives a toss, they're just a bunch of fascists anyway.

Andrew Neather is proud that Labour has turned London into a City White People Like. The right kind of white people, that is.

The British Labourite SWPLs are in one sense even worse than the classic American SWPLs. According to Christian Lander, SWPLs (meaning Americans) only like "diversity" insofar as it provides them with interesting restaurants to choose from. If Neather is correct, the Labour government are ideological multiculturalists, who deliberately wanted to make Britain a different, more world-cosmopolitan culture, even though they knew it would antagonize the British working classes. Whose good opinion didn't matter in the fundamental remaking of their country. There's your New Labour. This is what happens when your leftism is cultural, not economic.

In some sense, this all gets back to the post I put up the other day about shame, identity and the South. I think it goes back to the sense that the capitalist new class feels no sense of responsibility to (as distinct from responsibility for) the fate of the working classes. And people like me, who have come from this kind of background, and joined the broad New Class, may end up justifying our disdain, even treason, to the people we left behind by reminding ourselves of their unsavory and distasteful qualities. This is what Neather means when, with no sense of self-awareness, he bitches about fascist au pairs.

I admit my thinking on this isn't clear, because I'm not sure what I believe on this point. I have written before about how unfair I think it is that middle-class blacks are often seen by lower-class blacks as selling out their people by moving away from them. Whites don't have this burden; if you're white and you want to get away from white people who are violent, drunk, drug-abusing, no-count or whatever, you move if you can afford it, and nobody thinks anything of it. But I read something like the Neather column, and I feel disgusted by the lack of any sense of solidarity with the white British underclass shown by these Labour politicians. And it makes me think about how we white New Class Americans hold many of the same attitudes toward working-class whites. We dislike them, we're ashamed of them, we find them appalling -- in sum, we judge them in ways we don't judge people of other races and cultural backgrounds. And finding them wanting by our standards, we absolve ourselves of any responsibility to them.

For example, we may consider their attitudes toward Latino immigration to be nothing but racism, and undeniably racism plays some part in their response. But you won't see New Class people having to use public hospitals that are overrun by illegal immigrants. Poor whites have no choice. New Class SWPLs usually don't live in neighborhoods that have to deal with problems caused by unregulated immigration. When "rednecks" complain about Spanish being spoken everywhere, people like me roll our eyes, because we either don't mind it, or appreciate the opportunity to be cosmopolitan ("Hey, shall we eat at the Oaxacan restaurant tonight, or should we just go slumming with Tex-Mex?"). Personally, Spanish is fine with me, and I like that my kids are picking some of it up simply by living in contemporary urban Texas. But is it really the case that no sympathetic attention should be paid to people who see a foreign language spoken more and more places in this country, and who are bothered by it because they sense that their country is changing rapidly in front of their eyes? These are the kinds of people Pat Buchanan spoke of in his recent controversial column. You may not care for Buchanan's right-wing point of view on these matters, but Joe Bageant writes about these people from a left-wing but sympathetic point of view. Here's a bit from an answer Bageant gave to a Spanish student who wrote asking him why the white working class is no longer represented in American literature. Bageant said, in part:

-- These uneducated rural whites became the foundation of our permanent white underclass. Their children and grandchildren have added to the numbers of this underclass, probably in the neighborhood of 50 or 60 million people now. They outnumber all other poor and working poor groups, black, Hispanics, immigrants.

-- Because they are not concentrated in given neighborhoods, etc., they are pretty much invisible as a group in America. But because they are nevertheless encountered individually in society, we get representations of them as the hillbilly or white trash next door. Or the redneck stereotype as the butt of humor -- the people whose social skills do not resemble what is supposed to be the white Anglo norm. And in truth, they do not conform to the middle class behavior models presented by the media and the Corporate States of America as examples for approved societal behavior. They are not obsessed with their credit scores, they are always in the informal mode, they are rule breakers, and in short, they do not behave like property of the state. So they are useful as a bad example. Usually they are portrayed as having a southern accent, which for good reason is associated with a lack of education and sophistication.

-- However, because they cannot be encountered in aggregated numbers, they cannot be seen by the rest of America as a distinct culture. Only as nonconforming individuals as an object of ridicule. And in a sense, fear. Because what is left of the middle class is afraid of falling into that white underclass.

Which brings us back to the subject of the poor white underclass not being represented in America literature.

What literature? All I see these days is shallow crap. Real literature help us understand the world and the human condition. Obviously, that is no longer America's cup of tea.

Read the letters people send to Bageant. Here's from a letter an Asian guy who identifies himself as a leftist on a California college campus wrote to Bageant, saying that he's alienated from his own side for economic reasons:

And even if I did throw away my thirty pieces and side with the "progressives" or whatever the f**k they call themselves on campus, they just don't get it. They're caught up in disdaining Caesar's mutt people and celebrating diversity and race and specialness and all the little balkanizations. They're Queer, Fluid, Pinoy, Chican@, Afrikan, not laboristas! Well, some of them are. But they don't get the point that white labor is labor, too. Everything's got to be oppressed in some special way before it can join the club.

Again: this is what happens when your leftism is cultural, not economic.

I'll stop now. My thoughts are scattered and conflicted, and I'm thinking out loud. But I read that ass Neather's column, and I thought: whatever side he's on, I want to be on the other one. The Neathers of the world have no sense of loyalty to their own countrymen. They'll use multiculturalism and political correctness to justify selling out the economic and cultural interests of their countrymen who aren't the sort who have au pairs about whose politics they can agonize, and who don't particularly care if they can get interesting food easily, or if their children have broadening experiences with people of exotic backgrounds. These people are expendable, only good for the sake of exploiting for votes. To what extent am I complicit with Neatherism in my own country? I wonder about that. That was pretty much the point of my identity post the other day.

I wish I had a clearer answer to this problem. Maybe you do. Talk to me.

The racist British National Party is doing better than it has in ages. If you write that off merely to racism among a certain segment of the UK population, you'll make a mistake. A committed Tory voter I talked politics with this summer while in England despaired that the mainstream parties had become so compromised by political correctness that it fell to the BNP to defend commonsense English traditions, such as Christmas celebrations. Understand, this voter wasn't expressing sympathy for the BNP, but rather saying, in anger and frustration, how did the responsible political parties create a space for these people to thrive?

When I was in England this summer, the BNP won two seats in the European Parliament, setting off a round of head-slapping and garment-rending in the newspapers. Interestingly, polls showed that the BNP took most of its support not from disaffected Conservatives, but from angry Labour voters. Writing in the Telegraph, James Forsyth dissects the problem all the mainstream British parties have with BNP leader Nick Griffin, who caused a collective coronary among the chattering classes by appearing on the BBC's Question Time the other night. Here's Forsyth:

The agonising of the parties over who to put up against Griffin suggests that they know they have trouble reaching his target audience: the people forgotten by all three main parties; the people for whom a globalised knowledge economy is a threat, not an opportunity. There are too few MPs like Jon Cruddas, politicians who understand these people and their concerns. If more of the politico-media elite had listened when Cruddas warned years ago of the growing sense of alienation among sections of the old white working class then we might not be in this situation now.

More:

The Government's inability to explain itself on immigration was apparent when Jack Straw was asked about the subject. His answer was so convoluted that he himself appeared to lose the thread half-way through. It is tempting to say, as a member of the audience did, that the rise of the BNP is a direct result of Labour's immigration policy. Certainly, the spikes in immigration have strained services and depressed wages. But immigration alone is not the issue that is driving support for the BNP. Those in the frontline of the political fight against it on both the Left and the Right say that identity is as important as immigration, if not more so. The sense that communities are changing beyond recognition, that no one is standing up for what Griffin calls "the indigenous people", is what really offers the BNP an opening.

Sitting in affluent London - one of the most successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith cities in the world - it is tempting to dismiss these concerns as small-minded. But to do so would be to play right into Griffin's hands. Immigration without integration is unsustainable and a recipe for the balkanisation of society. There is nothing racist about believing that immigrants should learn English, that everyone who has a vote should know how that right was won, and that sealed ghettoes are unhealthy. But identity politics and multi-culturalism have so distorted our thinking that the Government is, as Andrew Gilligan reveals in this newspaper today, handing out grants to an organisation run by members of Hizb ut Tahrir, a group that wants to replace our parliamentary democracy with a theocratic dictatorship.

Follow that link. The British government gave over 100,000 pounds of British taxpayer dollars to a group of revolutionary Islamist radicals for the sake of educating their British children. Good grief. And people wonder why angry Britons consider voting for the BNP. As Forsyth concludes:

The Griffin-led BNP won't become a serious political player. Griffin is too unattractive and his extremist statements too well documented for him to successfully reinvent himself. But if the political parties continue to forget or write off sections of the electorate then someone else, more plausible and with less baggage, will come along and seriously advance the BNP's vile agenda.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that there's a danger in romanticizing the put-upon lower classes, who likely face the temptation to blame their own self-caused degradation on minorities. Theodore Dalrymple, the British physician and social critic, traces the society-wide decline in British values in this essay. Excerpt:

Certainly, many Britons under the age of 30 or even 40 now embrace a kind of sub-psychotherapeutic theory that desires, if not unleashed, will fester within and eventually manifest themselves in dangerous ways. To control oneself for the sake of the social order, let alone for dignity or decorum (a word that would either mean nothing to the British these days, or provoke peals of laughter), is thus both personally and socially harmful.

I have spoken with young British people who regularly drink themselves into oblivion, passing first through a prolonged phase of public nuisance. To a man (and woman), they believe that by doing so, they are getting rid of inhibitions that might otherwise do them psychological and even physical harm. The same belief seems universal among those who spend hours at soccer games screaming abuse and making threatening gestures (whose meaning many would put into practice, were those events not policed in military fashion).

Lack of self-control is just as character-forming as self-control: but it forms a different, and much worse and shallower, character. Further, once self-control becomes neither second nature nor a desired goal, but rather a vice to avoid at all costs, there is no plumbing the depths to which people will sink. The little town where I now live when in England transforms by night. By day, it is delightful; I live in a Queen Anne house that abuts a charming Elizabethan cottage near church grounds that look as if they materialized from an Anthony Trollope novel. By night, however, the average age of the person on the street drops from 60 to 20, with few older people venturing out. Charm and delight vanish. Not long ago, the neighborhood awoke to the sound of a young man nearly kicked to death by other young men, all of whom had spilled forth from a pub at 2 am. The driver of a local car service, who does only prearranged pickups, tells me that it is now normal (in the statistical sense) for young women to emerge from the bars and try to entice him to drive them home by baring their breasts, even pushing them against his windows if for some reason he has to stop in town.

I laughed when hearing this, but in essence it is not funny. The driver was talking not about an isolated transgressor of customs but about a whole manner of cultural comportment. By no means coincidentally, the young British find themselves hated, feared, and despised throughout Europe, wherever they gather to have what they call "a good time." They turn entire Greek, Spanish, and Turkish resorts into B-movie Sodoms and Gomorrahs. They cover sidewalks with vomit, rape one another, and indulge in casual drunken violence. In one Greek resort, 12 young British women were arrested recently after indulging in "an outdoor oral sex competition."

Serious question: do the native working and lower middle classes in Spain, France, Italy and Germany exhibit the same kind of degrading behavior? One never hears about this kind of thing in those countries. Is that simply a fact of lack of reportage in the English-language press, or are those countries' societies different?

UPDATE: There has been a jaw-dropping revelation by a former Labour adviser. Excerpt:

The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".

Critics said the revelations showed a "conspiracy" within Government to impose mass immigration for "cynical" political reasons.

Thank Tony Blair for the rise of the BNP?

Strong words from A.N. Wilson, the prominent Anglican revert, about Pope Benedict's overture to disaffected Anglican conservatives. Excerpts:

The numbers of practicing Catholics in England is greater than the number of practicing Anglicans. Within a generation, there will probably be more Muslims than practicing Anglicans in the British Isles. Britain will no longer be able to endure the absurdity of the laws relating to the religion of the monarch, the Act of Settlement and Royal Marriages Act, which among other things forbid the sovereign to marry a Catholic. Or the Coronation Oath, which promises to uphold the Protestant religion.

Britain has gone through a truly prodigious change in the last 30 years. It has moved from being a largely white culture with Christianity as its background religion to being a completely secular, multicultural society. The ease and good humor with which this revolution has occurred has made Britain -- and especially London -- an amazingly interesting place to be right now. A genial secularized liberalism is the new norm. ...In such a climate, the Church of England had no chance at all of surviving.

He goes on to explain that the C of E will have to be disestablished, because almost no one believes in it anymore. He goes on.:

The paradox is that a move by a conservative pope to ease the tender consciences of conservative-minded Anglicans will actually be a move toward the complete secularization of Britain, and an acceptance of its new multicultural identity.

It's a bit unclear exactly where Wilson stands on this. It seems that he's a liberal in politics and religion both, and so can't decide whether the pope has done a good or a bad thing. The headline on the NYTimes piece blames the Pope for splitting the Anglican Church. Writers don't choose their headlines, but if indeed that's what Wilson is saying, I think he's wrong. The Church of England was badly split before Pope Benedict offered a hand to traditionalist Anglican Christians. The Pope's move was a bold one, and, I imagine, one seen as hostile by more than a few Anglicans. But Benedict is doing what he can to save what can be saved of Christianity in Britain, and in Europe, or so it seems to me.

Now this is interesting: former CIA agent Robert Baer claims that Megrahi did not get a fair trial, and that evidence placing blame for the Lockerbie bombing on Iran was withheld. Explosive, if true. Excerpt:

A CIA terror expert who worked on the Lockerbie investigation has claimed Megrahi would have been freed on appeal.

In an exclusive interview, retired case officer Robert Baer has revealed details of the secret dossier of evidence Megrahi hoped would clear his name.

Baer claims the appeal, which he worked on, could have done serious damage to our legal system.

And he insists Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill had little option other than to release Megrahi.

Baer claimed: Key witnesses - including Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci - were "manipulated".

Vital details freely available to intelligence agencies were withheld from the original prosecution.

Megrahi's appeal papers would have proven beyond doubt the bombing was orchestrated by Iran.

During his 20-year CIA career, Baer worked "on assignment" across the globe and was investigated by the FBI for allegedly conspiring to assassinate Saddam Hussein.

His book See No Evil was the basis for the hit George Clooney movie Syriana. Clooney's character was based on Baer.

The 57-year-old, who lives in Colorado, said: "Your justice secretary had two choices - sneak into Megrahi's cell and smother him with his pillow or release him.

"The end game came down to damage limitation because the evidence amassed by his appeal team is explosive and extremely damning to your system of justice.

If Baer is correct, who withheld the information, and for what reason? Did Washington allow the British to go down this road blind, or was there collusion? More complete information in this report.

I think under any circumstances aside from grave doubts about his guilt, Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, ought to have been left to die in prison (what does a life sentence for mass murder mean if not life?). But I can understand, if not agree with, the argument that compassion requires releasing the terminally ill inmate to die at home.

It is emerging, though, that "compassion" was probably just a cover story for the British government's desire to do business with Libya. Excerpt from The Guardian's report:

Gordon Brown faced fresh questions tonight after it emerged that he discussed with Colonel Gaddafi detailed conditions for the Lockerbie bomber's return nearly six weeks ago, while senior Labour figures warned of an economic backlash from angry Americans "costing our country dear".

Downing Street released the text of a cordial letter sent to the Libyan leader on the day that Abdulbaset al-Megrahi was released, asking that the event be kept low key because a "high-profile" ceremony would distress his victims and their families.

But critically the letter also refers to a meeting between the two leaders six weeks earlier at the G8 summit in Italy, adding that "when we met [there] I stressed that, should the Scottish executive decide that Megrahi can return to Libya, this should be a purely private family occasion" rather than a public celebration.

Previously officials have said that the two men's conversation in Italy at the beginning of July was brief and that, while the Lockerbie case was raised, Brown merely stressed the matter was one for the Scottish government to decide.

However, the new letter, addressed to "Dear Muammar" and signed off by wishing him a happy Ramadan, suggests that the decision was well enough advanced and Brown well enough briefed to set terms for a homecoming - albeit unsuccessfully. A jubilant Libyan crowd, some waving Scottish flags, greeted Megrahi at the airport.

Col. Gaddafi's son indicates that this prisoner release was connected to Britain's desire to improve economic relations with Libya.

Gordon Brown and his incompetent government won't survive this one. Nor should they.

UPDATE: But look, can we please not go down the Boycott Scotland road? The US government has done things far more stupid, venal, offensive and consequential.