In spite of a change in UK law in 2014 to criminalise forced marriage, and although some victims who resist are threatened by kidnapping and death, it has been found that very few convictions have been made in relation to the size of the problem. These crimes are all associated with immigrant communities. It is estimated that well over 13,000 people are in slavery today in the UK (indeed some estimates go up to 30,000). People are currently being trafficked into Britain from Albania, Vietnam, Nigeria, Romania and Poland. Their forced labour situations involve seasonal agricultural work, the construction industry, prostitution, begging, cannabis production and car washes (see antislavery.org). One in four is a child. Threats are made against them for defection, which include rape, violence and loss of accommodation. Many are living in illegally overcrowded conditions. The Modern Slavery Act had to be passed in 2015 to address this very problem. To the cost of policing must be added the costs of providing safe housing for victims, counselling and other support. The International Labour Office in fact estimate that today 40 million people worldwide are in slavery (ILO, 2017).
It is acknowledged too that the annual Notting Hill Carnival which attracts hundreds of thousands of revellers to a traditional Caribbean street event in London causes damage to local property, spawns many crimes, is high-risk regarding crowd density and possible crushing, and costs a great deal to police. Yet to oppose it or suggest moving it to a safer venue is resisted as racist. Its very inception soon after the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, initiated by white Teddy Boys, stands as a historical marking point. Quite differently, concern about the growth of violent drug dealing by Albanians can be silenced by mentioning the r word — you are racist. And yet this is a real threat as identified by the National Crime Agency (Weaver, 2017). There are thought to be up to 100,000 ethnic Albanians in the UK, many having masqueraded as Kosovan refugees, or genuinely fleeing blood feuds. Albania has high levels of corruption, unemployment and crime, yet is a candidate for EU membership, but even without that facility of free movement its mafia-style criminals have no difficulty in doing business here. Judah (2016) is told about ‘Poles who went to work for Albanians [in London] only to be beaten into a coma when they asked for their wages’.
SJWs object that these crimes are no worse than crimes committed by indigenous white citizens, or their extent is exaggerated by racists. They may even argue that the victims of these crimes (or even the perpetrators) have no alternatives because capitalism, right-wing governments or racism force them into this invidious position. SJWs manage to minimise the seriousness of these crimes while at the same time constantly accusing Westerners of historical slavery. In August 2017 The Guardian published the story about a ‘UK family found guilty of enslaving homeless and disabled people’. The article refers to them as a Lincolnshire family of eleven ‘who were based on Traveller sites’. Yet clearly this was a Traveller family, the Rooneys, of Irish origin, whose 18 victims were virtually imprisoned for up to 26 years and made to labour at paving driveways and patios and other tasks while being kept like animals, and extortion and fraud were also used. A very similar story had come out in 2012, involving the Connors family. Any hint of stereotyping was studiously avoided by The Guardian. Indeed, there are sharply divided views on the immigration and crime nexus, with the left-wing media and academia often producing arguments and evidence contradicting the narrative of immigrants causing crime increases. The Guardian, drawing on an LSE study, even argued that immigration was associated with falling crime (Townsend, 2013).
The Labour politician David Lammy has drawn attention to a disproportionate rate of arrests, prosecutions and imprisonment of BAME people (Lammy, 2017). In some ways, but not all, this reflects the American experience. It is thought that BAME defendants more frequently than whites plead not guilty, where a guilty plea can reduce a sentence to community punishment instead of imprisonment. Black men disproportionately come from single-parent families. But much of Lammy’s report is about institutional racism. Although he notes the disparity between black, Asian and indeed between Caribbean and African offenders (Caribbeans have higher rates of offending, particularly involving drugs and violence) and the very high rates of black youth offending, Lammy’s main focus is on the perceived unfairness of the criminal justice system and how it should be changed. In contrast to headline accusations of institutional racism, a rate of three white prisoners to one non-white die in custody. Blacks are four times more likely to be victims of murder than whites but much of this is due to black-on-black violence involving guns and knives. While the figure for employment of BAME police officers is 6%, nineteen percent of Crown Prosecution staff are BAME and 21% of Ministry of Justice staff are BAME, which is much higher than the national BAME population (MoJ, 2017). The picture is more mixed than Lammy wants us to believe. Reviews like his focus on selected statistics and emotional-cultural themes, with government expected to shoulder blame and pay for changes. Little mention is made in his 35 recommendations of BAME responsibilities, of biology, testosterone, IQ or attitude, or research into any of these.
Another area in which we see growing social problems is health. Immigrants tend inevitably to bring physical and mental health problems with them. No-one can be blamed for being beaten, raped and witnessing family members being horrifically killed in Syria and other war zones, and subsequently fleeing for their lives and enduring the agonies of post-traumatic stress disorder. But tragically PTSD and other mental health problems can lead to anti-social behaviour, and understandable calls on the UK’s health services. Among the diseases associated with ethnic minorities are sickle cell disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and galactosemia. Cardiovascular disease including diabetes affects ethnic minority groups disproportionately. It was found that immigrants to Italy showed rates of Scabies at over 10% and for Hepatitis C at around 25% (Farrell, 2015). Relatively high rates of HIV, TB, enteric fever and malaria have been found in migrants to the UK (Wagner et al., 2014). Bangladeshi men have the highest rates of coronary heart disease. Chronic use of the drug khat among Somalis is associated with mental health problems. Psychosis is much more prevalent among black Caribbean people, who also experience stroke more often. The risks of infectious disease are increased, and tuberculosis made a worrying reappearance a few years ago. In 2016, the incidence of TB was 3.2 per 100,000 people among the UK-born, but 49.4 among the non-UK-born; 74% of cases were in those born abroad (Public Health England, 2017). London and the West Midlands incur the highest rates of TB, and countries where most TB sufferers come from are India, Pakistan, Somalia and Bangladesh respectively.
Sexually transmitted diseases are found at significantly higher rates among blacks in the USA, with whites having relatively low rates and Asians having the lowest rates (CDC, 2016). It is speculated that this may be correlated with access to health services but in England, which has universal free healthcare, similar patterns are found, with people of Caribbean ethnicity having the highest rates, mixed ethnicity next, then whites and Asians (Public Health England, 2016). Common first-cousin marriages among Muslims causes many genetic problems. One study in Bradford found a 63% rate of cousin marriages among Pakistani mothers, and it is thought that between 6% to 30% of Pakistani children may suffer from related genetic problems (Goodhart, 2014; Wynne-Jones, 2011). Increased immigration also naturally leads to further burdens on an already overstretched NHS. As well as treatment, translation services must be provided. But we also have to reckon with so-called health tourism. Deliberate abuse of the NHS may cost up to £280 million annually, and incidental use by tourists who fall ill about £1.8 billion. The former category includes the foreigner who travels to the UK to seek kidney dialysis which is too expensive in their own country. A large proportion of NHS abusers are foreign pregnant women who travel to Britain to give birth, sometimes aided by ‘fixers’ (Adams, 2017).
Leach and Donnelly (2012) reported on the basis of freedom of information searches that cases against NHS doctors resulting in being struck off the General
Medical Council register show that the foreign-trained are five times more often struck off for negligence (63% foreign-trained being struck off, 37% British-trained). Those from India, followed by Egypt, Nigeria and Pakistan, featured most prominently in the relevant statistics. Doctors from Hong Kong by contrast had no complaints filed against them. In 2010, graduates from several Nigerian medical schools were barred from practice in the UK due to concerns about standards, and bribery was implicated in Indian medical practice. Complaints and serious cases of malpractice and negligence often involve poor English language skills and social skills as well as medical competencies, a claim that The Guardian naturally rejects (Williams, 2015). Figures for 2017 show that 64% of NHS doctors were trained in Britain, 20% trained in Asia, 9% in other EU countries, and 6% in Africa (Baker, 2017).
Reactions of SJWs to the immigration and health problem — including human rights organisations like Médicins sans Frontières and Doctors of the World — often centre around indignation that it could even be an issue, with the right to universal health care being cited in defence. Prevalence of certain diseases is often ascribed to poverty rather than ethnicity, and hence to institutional racism. Complaints against foreign doctors are often attributed to racism on the part of litigious patients. Health workers are usually left-leaning in their sympathies and dislike pressure to identify foreign patients to be charged for their care. As we are endlessly told too, a relatively high proportion of NHS staff are first- or second-generation immigrants (as if they are doing the rest of us a favour). 18% of NHS staff are non-white, and 41% are doctors from ethnic minorities (Audickas & Apostolova, 2017). SJWs also try to balance the books by citing the health needs of Britons living abroad (mostly in Spain); this attempted balancing is also used about crime, many expat British criminals as is well-known living in Spain and elsewhere.
Professional white Brits of my age have benefited from globalisation and cheap travel. The following are all in their sixties. Mark is a businessman who regularly travels to the four corners of the earth, returning to his businesswoman wife in their remarkably modest house in a large northern city in Britain. They have always voted Labour. Paul lives in one major British city and flies on a weekly basis to his job in another, in a neighbouring country. He is some sort of educational consultant, and his wife, also a globetrotter, is a professor. They would not dream of ever supporting the Tories. Tony is a well-off ex-senior social worker, a second generation east European immigrant with deep leftist sympathies. He and his wife have an African refugee living with them in their large house in London. Peter spends a lot of time in Spain, where his professional adult daughter lives, or on holidays in different parts of the world, when he isn’t at home reading The Guardian. Gerry is a retired education manager who occasionally jets off on short breaks and cruises. In spite of being a confirmed atheist, he is friendly with a Muslim doctor who is both highly liberal and conventional in different spheres of his life. Gerry is married but has no children, is a lifelong Thatcher-hating Labour man, and already has his membership of Dignitas arranged for when he chooses to take that final grim trip to Switzerland. Stephanie is a retired professor, married to Bill; as well as their large house in an English city, they have a ‘very small place’ in France and enjoy skiing and sailing holidays; Stephanie often attends international conferences and sometimes speaks on themes of anti-racism and intercultural sensitivity. William regularly commutes between England and Norway, where his partner lives and he does some consultancy, and spends his time as a flaneur/urban anthropologist while visiting many coffee shops and also looking at the world through his laptop. Most of these people have working class or humble roots but profited from free higher education in the 1960s and 70s, became successful middle-class professionals, married people like themselves, live comfortably in the leafy, mostly white parts of town; and they spend a lot of time literally above it all, detached from interethnic tensions, or in airport lounges with other mobile professionals. They are all nice, thoughtful, sensitive, left-leaning, cosmopolitan people.
Compare these with Jill, an originally working class white woman from west London now in her seventies, living on a meagre state pension in a south London suburb. Divorce and circumstances see her living extremely frugally in an outwardly smart semi-detached, expensive house; she rarely has a holiday. Her neighbours on one side are Indian doctors who are often away in India, and Jill finds them aloof. On the other side is a professional family from Botswana, who work in pharmaceuticals and keep to themselves. In the same, long and plush road there is a grammar school attended mainly by BAME young people who are being hot-housed for academic success and future professional and business affluence. Jill’s grandson, in his thirties, lives with his partner and two small children (all white) in an uncomfortably small council flat in a London borough where the local schools are predominantly attended by BAME children; they wish they could move. In the same extended family, Bob is a grumpy lorry driver in his late fifties, who lives alone in a flat he has worked hard to pay for. He freely jokes about the ‘coons’ and ‘Pakis’ he sees in the course of his work. His sister, also in her fifties, lives on state benefits in a shared ownership flat in Thamesmead, and often complains about the ‘Chinks’, Poles and Africans who predominate in her area, whose white population is just 33%.
These examples could be extended indefinitely. The point is of course about class, education, income and life chances. Older, affluent professionals, academics and politicians, tend to live good, long lives for the most part detached from irritating and stressful intercultural chafing and economic resentment. They can from on high pontificate on the ills of anti-racism and the glories of the EU, from which they benefit. They correspond roughly to Goodhart’s (2017) category of Anywheres, with the other being his category of Somewheres. Somewhat similarly, many artists have moved from their own country to another, seeking inspiration from new and exotic locations, and some intellectuals have declared themselves to be free of the small-mindedness of nationality. Adventurous young people may travel and live cheaply, but it is still mainly the middle-class graduates who do this. But the majority (the Somewheres) do not and cannot abandon their roots, due to personal attachments, limited economic and linguistic means, and preference for the status quo. But this is no crime.
When the Empire Windrush arrived in 1948, carrying those 500 Caribbean immigrants whose labour had been sought by the British government, they should have been welcomed courteously and provided for better than they were. But when higher numbers of visible immigrants were evident in the 1960s and public disquiet was expressed, in part through Powell’s famous speech, the Tory government of the day should have listened rather than punishing Powell and ignoring the people. When in the 1990s the Labour government wilfully increased immigration by hitherto unknown proportions, there should not have been the dishonesty and propaganda there was. For example, the Commission for Racial Equality published in 1997 (Frow, 1997), an account of immigration that was one-sided and dishonest. West (2013) cites some significant lines from it: ‘people with different histories, cultures, beliefs, and languages have been coming here since the beginning of recorded time. Logically, therefore, everyone who lives in Britain today is either an immigrant or the descendant of an immigrant’. Since this line is constantly trotted out by multiculturalism-defending SJWs, West points out like Goodhart (2014) that it is not true. Genetic records going back at least 6,000 years show Britons to have a very long, largely unbroken lineage (Sykes, 2007). Among many efforts to retrospectively colour Britain, Kaufmann, M. (2017) focuses on black citizens in Tudor times, but has to admit there were perhaps only about 360.
Indigenous Brits were entitled to express concern about excessive immigration but it probably wasn’t until 2015, after waves of propaganda and anti-racist legislation that their concerns began to register; and the 2016 EU Referendum, while not specifically about immigration, did provide the chance for this expression to make itself felt democratically. Misinf
ormation and incompetency have concealed the true proportions of immigration but it is beginning to be clarified, and illegal entry angers the public. Africans and others who were colonised, kidnapped for slavery, and subjected to apartheid, were right to be extremely angry and to resist as forcefully as possible, but that time is long past. Now Britons have every right to be angry about the scale of immigration, illegal entry, and false claims to refugee status, all of which feel like a deeply troubling invasion; and protests, distortions of truth, and smothering of free speech by naïve or militant xenophiles only adds insult to injury.
Most of those indigenous whites who feel strongly about mass immigration tend to keep it to themselves, or maintain decency in the way they express themselves. The PC line on whiteness is that it’s good to examine your whiteness in terms of white privilege, and white guilt is the proper attitude. Black pride is good, even necessary, all ethnic minority groups should resist any pressure to assimilate, and they should retain and promote their own cultural identities. Blacks should celebrate their ‘woke’ state. However, a minority of whites are militantly dedicated to the ‘white cause’. This is much more advanced in the USA, where organisations like American Renaissance publish such material, even arguing for a white ethnostate to preserve diminishing white identity. Most pro-white discourse and visible ‘white politics’ lies with small, vociferous working class white nationalist groups who are portrayed as fascist organisations, who are easily dismissed, and often banned, both online and off. Even UKIP, with open political status and aims, is mocked and belittled. This picture of a far-right white minority may be partly due to middle-class avoidance of any such public stance, since they have been forcefully shamed and learned about the perils of coming out and the risks to their reputations and careers.
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