I think there are multiple aspects to the willful blindness of the ruling classes on this point:
1. Spatial - the average government minister doesn't live in the same neighbourhood as Somali gangs, for example, and is whisked across London by official car so doesn't tend to get mugged, and can't imagine their daughters being groomed because that only happens to those 'other' people up north, if they believe it happens at all.
2. Sociological - the alliance of social workers, teachers and Legal Aid lawyers we call 'Guardian readers' long ago reached the consensus that bodily autonomy exists but individual responsibility doesn't, which means the criminal is only ever a victim of circumstances. Therefore changed circumstances (actually, yet more public money for the preferred interventions of the Guardian-reading class) will fix any social problems.
3. Economic - in the absence of an industrial strategy, Britain is meant to be a service economy, which means a lot more servants are required to fill the demographic hole correlated with the Abortion Act 1967 and contraceptive pill use since then. Young male immigrants are more noticeable as they pass us on Just Eat and Deliveroo bikes, but there are a huge number of recent female immigrants working in care homes and hospitals, from countries such as the Philippines and Zimbabwe, most of which will have arrived legally rather than by small boats.
4. Geopolitical - the failure of 'progressive' regime change wars in Afghanistan and across the Middle East, and the messy end of traditional communism in Russia, Albania and so on has created a mobile class of organised criminals who are exploiting open borders and the cheap flights enabled by airport expansion to create international networks of unprecedented scale and complexity. The progressive answer is simply to decriminalise (drugs, prostitution and trafficking, money laundering etc) for the reasons above.
I believe Brexit is also a factor, because those very same progressives used to decry the 'Fortress Europe' mentality of the EU at a time when it was assumed white, former Communist citizens from new EU entrant states would fill the demand for servants in the more affluent member states. Now, Britain is the dumping ground for the EU's illegal entrants, which is a compounding problem because people with no paperwork will tend to go where they have networks of relatives to shelter them, if they can.
It's axiomatic that rights - if they are postulated - must at the very minimum be balanced against duties. But according to modern "progressive" thinking, everyone has dozens of rights and no duties.
It seems incoherent until we realise that postmodernists only use arguments strategically. If someone chooses a course of action which is not in their best interests, the theorist uses the 'bodily autonomy' argument. If that same person breaks the law, suddenly they have no autonomy, and are a victim of forces beyond their control. Obviously, if someone breaks the law while exercising bodily autonomy, these two contradictory positions can't be reconciled.
This was thrashed out in R v Brown [1994] AC 212 which established that consent of the victim was not a valid defence for a person accused of sadistic sexual abuse. This was confirmed by the failure of the Liberty Five case in the European courts.
See also the recent decriminalisation of abortion up to birth, which is something commercial abortion providers have been lobbying for over several decades. First to go was the law about women carrying out their own abortion by ingesting drugs. The second part of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 they want to delete is the crime of supplying the "poison or instrument" to that woman.
Further to this, I now believe 'bodily autonomy' is a social construct used to permit certain behaviours and not others, as desired by the state at any given time, rather than an authentic autonomy in the libertarian or anarchist sense. Therefore we can have a responsibility-free performative autonomy because the individual is just accepting a choice already made for them.
For example, if old and disabled people are costing the state too much money, or tend to vote for the wrong party, they can now 'choose' to be killed. If a military recruit runs away from the battlefield after choosing not to die, once caught they are imprisoned at the very least.
I've been researching the asylum seeker hotel contracts with the Home Office, and while small boat arrival migrants do get free 'initial accommodation' and pocket money, they aren't able to work legally, so they aren't doing well financially unless they break the law. Companies such as Holiday Inn are getting guaranteed occupancy for their buildings in less popular areas of the UK, and intermediaries such as Serco are clearly making a profit too.
My guess is that the hotel chains built too much capacity for the market, and so when the Home Office ran out of accommodation in disused Army barracks etc, Serco and the like were able to make deals. Obviously, the numbers of people arriving by small boat overloaded the existing asylum system.
" the failure of 'progressive' regime change wars in Afghanistan and across the Middle East, and the messy end of traditional communism in Russia, Albania and so on has created a mobile class of organised criminals who are exploiting open borders and the cheap flights enabled by airport expansion to create international networks of unprecedented scale and complexity. The progressive answer is simply to decriminalise (drugs, prostitution and trafficking, money laundering etc) for the reasons above."
That's factually inaccurate.
The first serious expansion in international drugs trafficking occurred between 1976 and 1983 (a hole of unaccounted transactions in the world balance of trade widened, from $30 billion to $110 billion) a history well-documented by McGill Economics History Professor R. T. Naylor https://archive.org/details/hot-money-and-the-politics-of-debt-r.-t.-naylor-1987
But the second expansion--over the previous 20 years-- has been largely driven by technology, and the opening of new markets. Internet advertising and gray markets, new regional consumer demand sectors, the dark web, the massive increase in parcel shipping that makes it practically impossible to intensively scrutinize even a small fraction of the parcels traveling to their destinations. The amounts seized around the world today almost defy comprehension. I'm not a "legalize everything "person. But not liberalizing some of the regulations simply allows criminals to control all of the franchise.
"The progressive answer is simply to decriminalise (drugs, prostitution and trafficking, money laundering etc) for the reasons above."
That's a strawperson caricature of a political position that you happen to oppose.
Support for "decrminalizing all victimless crimes" has NEVER been a proposal by any political party holding national-level institutional political power in the US--"progressive", neoliberal, social democrat, or otherwise. Support for officially decriminalizing all "victimless crimes" is a libertarian abstraction. Luxury belief theory.
You're just doing what axe-grinding ideologues always do with the War On Drugs: use it as a cudgel to propagandize for a different agenda.
The popular support for "decriminalizing drugs possession" per se evaporated in the Oregon locales where it was tried as a pilot project, once those who supported it realized that the way the law enforcement policy was carried out consisted of allowing open public drugs use, laissez faire non-enforcement of basic public health and safety laws, and de facto impunity for open-air retail drug dealers, while leaving the lucrative business of supply under the monopoly control of the criminal sector.
In terms of practical reality, the still-resilient cryptocurrency market has done more to "decriminalize money laundering" than any legislative proposal aimed at repealing more banking regulations. And credit should be due for old-fashioned rule of law liberals like Carl Levin and Henry Gonzalez; they took their duties seriously, and were responsible for plugging the holes that they've found in the maze of regulations. Although they were not successful at plugging all of those loopholes, which must be frustrating.
I don't know of anywhere in the US that has decriminalized prostitution--outside of the state of Nevada, that is, where it's been legal for over a century. Legal and also regulated and accountable. Still not a model that any American politician I know of has advocated.
Literally the last political leader anywhere in the would I knew of who proposed decriminalizing prostitution (along with legalized abortion) was Juan Peron, in the 1950s. Peron was bounced out of office soon thereafter, having been excommunicated from the Catholic Church by the Pope. (Licio Gelli and his crew later negotiated with another Pope to get that edict rescinded, in order for Peron to return to Argentina in 1971. Newly eligible to be re-elected as President, or Conductor, or whatever it was, on account of his newly regained Catholic status; the Argentine Constitution of the era reserved that office for Roman Catholics.)
Literally nobody speaks of "legalizing sex trafficking" as if it were a victimless crime.
There is a huge drive to decriminalise prostitution across Europe, led by, amongst others, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as a not-inconsiderable number of MEPs.
ah, thanks for the tip. I'll look into it. Wasn't aware of that situation in Europe. Other than knowing that there are European countries--nation-states, as if were--where it's long been either officially legal or discreetly indulged, within limits. But globalization really has changed that economic sector.
Here in the US, vocal support for legalizing prostitution is farther out on the fringe than trans advocacy.
I'm interested to know what I'll find from reading HRW and Amnesty. There are several ways to modify prostitution laws. I'm interested in learning what they might favor.
I will say this, from studying history: find a gilded age of wealth stratification and precarity, and you get a boom market in prostitution. Increase in poverty, big increase in prostitution. The US has been a place where the majority of prostitutes are in the drugs life, as addicts or as frequent users reliant on their dealers. Or, at the Sparklepony, upper end of the scale, on their sugar daddies. The fashion business. But in times when people are facing absolute poverty--or worse, like being trafficked without papers--no drug dependency is required. At least at the outset. Although getting a drug habit does tend to become a more attractive option, the longer someone is in the life.
I realize that your post refers to the UK, and there's only so much of relevance I can speak to there. I thought I'd add some US context to the comment that I originally replied to.
Thanks for your replies. I would agree that organised crime, drug and people trafficking and prostitution are hardly new. However in the British context, they have been turbocharged since 1997 to the extent that the results are obvious on the streets.
The progressive elite solution is simply to accommodate these problems using taxpayer money through de-facto decriminalisation. For example 'small boat migrants', actually, organised crime trafficked illegal immigrants, get free hotel accommodation for an average of five months (according to evidence from recent case law) before being moved into free social housing.
That policy has made the British state an accomplice in organised crime because it is providing a significant incentive for trafficking, compared to how national governments in countries such as the USA now treat illegal migrants. It is also driving the resentment of the white working class, which the Labour Party used to rely on but no longer pretends to care about.
While drug use remains technically illegal, the UK has moved from arresting people who were obviously using or carrying drugs, to requiring drug tests for people employed in responsible blue-collar jobs, or who crash their cars. Drug use among white-collar workers, academics and self-employed people, including most of the construction industry, is endemic, and the fragrance du jour of the social housing project is skunk weed.
Based on my experience in the London Borough of Haringey, I'd say the Blair regime prototyped its legal approach in local government before applying it across the UK. Prostitution, trafficking, drug smuggling and trading were long tolerated in the working class neighbourhood of Tottenham, which also experienced severe rioting on more than one occasion.
The grooming gang scandal in Britain's northern cities run by the Labour Party is now well-known about, but perhaps similar exploitation was going on in every urban borough that Labour controlled. The Conservatives made law and order a key policy pledge, but Labour only ever paid lip service to it.
Labour's core supporters were more likely to make their living defending or excusing criminals, including legal aid lawyers, school teachers and social workers. And of course, Marxist academics and agitators who supported Labour strategically because they thought a soft left government would not deploy tanks against the imminent Revolution.
thank you for the detailed reply. Your situation resembles the "worst of both worlds" policy non-solution that has also made appearances in different parts of the US: a legal regime that criminalizes and prohibits the illicit drugs trade effectively enough that no one other than career criminals would engage in it, while enforcing the laws so unevenly that drug dealers were confidently able to retail forbidden substances in open-air markets, and some urban areas were de facto "zoned for dysfunction", with all sorts of technically illegal conduct indulged by the police and courts. City blocks and city parks, ceded to addicts as their uncontrolled maintenance non-treatment option.
And yes, this really does unmask all too much of 21st century Establishment Liberalism as a set of attitudes rather than a principled ideology; liberalism constituted not as a coherent set of policies, but as laziness, obliviousness, and cowardice. Faced with an array of difficult policy choices, postmodern liberalism opts for none of them. The legislature and/or chief executive would call for a review of the illegal drugs laws (I have a good idea of how I'd set up drugs policy in the US, but I only know enough about the UK to say that it's different, and for the UK to figure out), and meanwhile ensure that the streets in every part of the city are safe, clean, walkable, and not unofficially zoned as the illegal drugs dealing district/drug addict residential zone. With malum in se crimes promptly identified as such, and those laws enforced diligently. Including littering.
There's no excuse for not accomplishing both goals: granting decriminalization/confiscation and a legal market in cannabis (I think THC content is worth regulating), along with cleaning up the streets. The liberals won't do either one. In my country, they don't even know how to take a layup (after 50 years, "Trump Administration Bans Animal Testing On Beagles." To unanimous applause.)
The problem with the conservatives is that while they understand the absolute imperative of ensuring the safety of even the most vulnerable citizens in their neighborhoods and on the streets where they live, their support for the status quo criminalized drug use breeds delinquency and criminality. The drug statutes as currently written--and we definitely need some--overshoot the mark so badly that they're iatrogenic. This is a matter of economics. The illicit drugs trade is so lucrative that it represents an alternate economy. Not an alternative one--an alternate one, that's very much a feature of the status quo. There's also the fact of user criminalization--a policy rarely used in history, and only in a few scattered cases. Except in Islam.
My country, the US, experimented with Alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s. (Back when the UK and its Commonwealth countries, from Canada to Bermuda, were the principal source of imported supply!*) The simple use and possession of a bottle of booze was never a Federal criminal offense. A few places--very few, it seems--had an ordnance. But it was rarely enforced, and often selectively.* Whereas US federal law still criminalizes personal possession of illegal drugs, including marijuana. I've met people who were rung up for the equivalent of possession of an empty beer bottle in their backpack. Many states maintain much the same policy. How are things in your town?
Ponder the implications of that.
So I don't think anyone should be subjected to arrest for personal possession, even of fentanyl or meth--as long as that's their only offense. Any other offense, the "drug involvement" counts. Noted as associated with dysfunctional conduct. DUI, shoplifting, trespassing. You've put yourself on notice with the judicial system henceforth. And confiscation should remain policy. Just trying to encourage everyone to be on their best behavior, there.
But beyond that, I get that attitudes of casual disrespect try to test the law with minor offenses. I agree with stringency about community norms.*** I follow it myself. I wouldn't drop a gum wrapper on the ground. In my country, the US, the liberal othodoxy is all phony about the enforcement of those laws as racist, as if no black people want them enforced.
[*this brings up the conspiracy hypothesis that perhaps the US Prohibition Party, the WCTU, and the other political constituencies that achieved the passage of the Volstead Act as a covert profiteering project by Elites in Great Britain. lol, the Reality is so much more complicated. (G. K. Chesterton: "smh")
Watch the Ken Burns documentary Prohibition. Especially recommended to UK residents reading this, because all that history will look extra special bizarre to you. It will also put you one-up on most Americans, who still maintain a two-sentence idea of the Prohibition Era. Burns based his 6-hour series on the book Last Call, by Daniel Okrent. I also recommend The War On Alcohol, by Lisa McGirr, and The Great Illusion, an Informal History of Prohibition, by Herbert Asbury.]
[**Laws forbidding substances always favor the privileged. Laws allowing their markets require a lot of diligent regulation. Money talks there, too.]
[***the problem of the illegal drug trade in a poor neighborhood is that the dealers are the success stories. Win or lose, win and lose... Drugs are the way that kids learn how easy it is to break the law and get away with it. 15 to 25-year old males, and pirate fiefdoms.]
I would agree that prosecuting drug users is usually counterproductive. The problem I forsee in official decriminalisation is that the existing street gangs wouldn't switch into legitimate businesses; they'd find other criminal niches.
Excellent piece. The last paragraph is especially relevant. When I began renting out a flat a few years ago, I realized that when it is our own space that is on the line and when we are the ones defining the criteria that will determine who is allowed in, we do not mindlessly rehearse the approved slogans - Refugees welcome! Wir schaffen das! No one is illegal! On the contrary, with very little to go on, we look very carefully for signs of dependability, which include age, sex, dress (people who care about how they look are more likely to take care of a property) and basic civility. Interestingly, what I also discovered is that despite what we are constantly told, race is not a factor.
David, you have a knack for elucidating difficult points, I’m going to read more. I’m definitely more basic outlook than you e.g. I completely get what you say about male immigrants and the parallel with ex pats is interesting and rings true to some extent . However, the parallel seems to assume that the cultures from which these men emerge are a bit like European cultures, when invariably that is not the case, and instead we are usually dealing with something consistently and radically different, including eg that many do not have a concept of rape as westerners would frame it. And it is the assertion of those cultures in Britain, rather than crime rates and public safety which concerns me most about immigration.
That is literally the case for the ruling class, though. For example, one family I know of has property in New York, London, Paris and Venice. Each home is stuffed with antiques and paintings as a long-term store of wealth going back centuries.
Works of art have discounted import tariffs, supposedly to help museums and galleries, which make fine art a good mobile asset class for the ultra-wealthy. The reason why certain paintings and sculptures sell for tens of millions of dollars then makes perfect sense.
If you can threaten export and then persuade a government to 'save' an artwork for the nation, you can turn it back into cash. See for example the manufactured controversy over the propsed export by the Getty family of the 'Three Graces' sculpture by Canova from the UK. It's a 19th century Italian copy of another commission which in turn was on a classical Greek theme. There's nothing British about it, except that it was once owned by a British duke. https://www.artfund.org/our-purpose/art-funded-by-you/the-three-graces
Having no particular ties to any one country is a good long-term wealth preservation strategy. If your country of choice is overtaken by revolutionaries of whatever kind, religious zealots or incompetents, you simply fly to one of your other homes.
The East African Asian community learned this the hard way when Idi Amin took over in Uganda, and deported them with only the clothes they stood in. Even their suitcases were stolen by airport baggage handlers. That's why gold jewellery is their asset class of choice, because you can carry it on your person while fleeing.
And we make this type of judgment every day, often subconsciously, dozens of times perhaps, in the name of survival. If I am walking down the street, and on one side is an 80-year-old woman hobbling along on a walking frame, on the other a large drunken youth with a shaven head, tattoos, singing an obscene song, which side am I going to choose?
This is discrimination in the true sense of the word, of discriminating between one thing and another. That is, until the "Anointed", to use Thomas Sowell's term, got hold of the word discrimination and changed its meaning.
However you leave out the major reason the UK is the destination of choice for these young men.
The UK 'capital' owners want a non stop supply of cheap labour. If its illegal it comes very cheap and is very controllable. Of course indigenous labour suffers and the overall cost to society increases, but those benefiting from the cheap labour continue to get richer.
This happens to some extent across most of Europe, but is starkly magnified in the UK.
We have a very divided society which economically depends on the cheapest available labour. The very idea that the UK economy will 'benefit' from AI is laughable.
Something that I now think is that all of this accrued wealth (becoming a billionaire via hotels for asylums) can easily be confiscated by a new Regime. Happened before, will happen again.
This is why hotel and other business owners use offshore ownership, hire expensive counsel and promote the adoption of international dispute settlement regulations, to limit the extent to which national governments can seize assets. I believe a substantial chunk of London's legal income is from settling international claims. See also the current UK sanctions on Russian assets.
That is just the skim off the top. The UK has been/is built on cheap labour, the recent immigration of illegals and a lot of legals is just the continuation of something that has happened for a long time. Indigenous rurals to towns, slaves, various waves of 'empire' immigrants and now brown/black skinned immigrants , desperate or otherwise.
'cheapest available labour': with no training, a barely basic level of education, these critters might end up doing minimally paid menial tasks a machine/robot can and soon will do. trying to eke out a living at a miserable, unhealthy subsistence level with no support from the social networks the indigenous poor might rely on. they might die young (which, in a most dystopian sense, would be a relief, wouldn't it). indeed: 'The very idea that the UK economy will 'benefit' from AI is laughable', and worse: anything dependent on Ai is unstable in the long run.
Thoroughly enjoyed, David: entertaining and thought provoking. I do have a couple of insights here you may appreciate. Telling that you compare a 50-year-old woman to a 20-year-old male. While, like you, I do believe there are differences between the sexes, 20-year-old females from liberal societies can be as rebellious, loud, obnoxious, drunk, and stoned as any male of the same age... especially in their own backyards. They will shoplift and engage in all manner of deviant behaviour. Our stats won't reflect this because we let them off easier, and we also seem to repress female deviance psychologically. In fact, between the ages of 16 and 19, growing up in Canada, my experience was that the young ladies in our midst tended to pick the fights and egg the boys on to fisticuffs by proxy, and not only to fisticuffs, but also to shoplifting. Left to their own devices, the boys were happy to loiter in parks past curfew smoking cigars and cigarettes and drinking beer (underage), cursing and insulting each other in good fun. Granted, the girls who hung out with these boys, smoking and drinking past curfew, weren't the "nice" ones, but they did come from decent homes and did grow up to be professionals. I mention these things because stereotypes are rampant in these conversations and too often ignore female aggression and the role that women play in the hormonal life of our youth.
Another point of interest is where the immigrants are coming from. I immigrated to Israel from Canada at age 19. That is, I moved from a liberal, permissive, gentle, polite, and apologetic society to a dangerous, aggressive, and necessarily conservative one. Although those who grew up there knew where they could push boundaries, a newcomer from fairyland, Canada, knowing little of social aggression (even coming from a rough neighbourhood -- in Canadian terms) would not behave as you describe. Now reverse that scenario. Take someone from the Magreb, Mexico or India and place them in Canadian or UK society (and yes, especially a young man) and they're going to think it's a joke. They will perceive the men around them as weak and the women as easy, and both as fair game for dominating, since the natives of polite society are too stupid to be afraid of those who come from aggressive societies with unforgiving rules. They will play the system, all the while laughing at the naive nature of these societies.
Now, I've generalized in ways that are too often troubling, since when I was teaching college, I found the better behaved and studious students tended to come from strict, immigrant homes, while the worst came from local homes. The latter were entitled little jerks with no sense of their duties and obligations, but only of their rights. Again, I generalize. I also noticed that young men from towns and villages tended to be wonderful human beings. Cities and their anonymity cause social damage of all kinds, in my estimation.
In short, a lot of the trouble comes from city life in general. Immigration is being mismanaged because our societies are bringing in masses and settling them in one location, often in cities. In their own neighbourhoods, they are well behaved, while outside, in the anonymous mass, they can act out. Integration happens (if it's going to happen) when you welcome a new family from abroad into a small town. It ain't rocket science. If you bring in 100 or 1000 families from the same place into an area, they won't integrate; in fact, they'll create their little expat community and make the locals feel displaced. Social resentment will follow and you get what we're witnessing now.
Just going on holiday for 2 weeks to, say, a Greek island is enough for a bunch of young men to behave like absolute dicks! There is a lot to be said for insisting all young men be sent to boarding schools until aged 18 then put in the army until 24 then allowed to go to university! By the time they get to about 27 they are just about civilised enough to enter polite society!
Sadly, western elites refuse to see immigrants as young men, they only see imaginary oppressed black people fleeing to the safe arms of, weirdly, oppressive white people. There was a documentary years ago about Romanians coming to the UK and being amazed to get money for free from a hole in the wall and getting their teeth fixed for free. My cousin said it made her proud to be British - what a caring nation. What a nation of suckers and naive idiots, was my opinion.
It would be so easy to simply round up all the single young men from third world countries and deport them. No ifs or buts. If they fled to safety but left their mothers behind they are not refugees. If they don't pay tax but do take benefits, if they have criminal records, if they don't speak English - deport them. Really simple. If only there was the political will to do it!
In my opinion fighting age men can never be refugees - men have to fight for their countries, as our men did in 1914 and 1939 (they were duped, again in my opinion, but the lies were spun and believed and they willingly went abroad to fight and didn’t escape to some ‘safe’ country to avoid conscription and milk that country’s taxpayers. You make a very good point about mothers - escaping and leaving your mother or sister behind? Then you are either a coward or a fraud, likely both.
Interestingly the question of immigration is coming up in the current Japanese elections and this is causing a certain amount of angst amongst members of the commentariat. I think that Japan is likely to tighten immigration requirements and crack down on some of the loop holes that many (the Chinese particularly) seem to be exploiting
Interesting. I tend to be more optimistic about Japan's prospects when it comes to integration because Japanese culture is so intrinsically attractive and because most Japanese people take pride in it. That is a good driver of integration.
That's an interesting thought. Are you suggesting that British culture is not attractive and therefore there is no pride in it? I've never thought about the value of the culture being a bulwark against unsuccessful, immigration integration.
No - what I mean is that Britain nowadays for the most part trashes its own culture and history. So why would non-natives want to integrate? Why would you want to be part of something that even the native population despise?
My view entirely, if you say something often enough people start to believe it. If you teach in school that your country is the most evil thing ever, you shouldn't be surprised that those people reject the social contract.
how does accepting foreigners into one's society depend on one's culture, even if it "is so intrinsically attractive and because most [Japanese] people take pride in it..."? (not a rhetorical question). as elsewhere, even (perhaps particularly) in Japan, any foreigner stands out, no matter how well one speaks the speak, walks the walk, or weds a partner, because of that pesky detail of differences in appearance. integration is far more complicated than just acculturation.
Great article. There is also a pertinent economic dimension to gracefully vacating the public space - you need economic resources to do this. I’ve given up on public swimming pools in recent years (since I moved to East London, in fact) and pay a monthly subscription to a gym. I noticed recently that an analysis of NHS waiting lists showed a class bais - and guessed that those with money were dropping out of the waiting lists by going private (again, I’ve done this). So the costs of the ‘vacating’ falls mostly on those without the wherewithal to ‘vacate’ - not of course people like Diane Abbott who can afford to ‘vacate’ state schools and send their kids to private schools.
In the eyes of the socialist opting out of the universal State provided service is sinful. Expect VAT on private doctors’ fees to follow the VAT on school fees.
True. I also worry that the NHS might find ways to discriminate against white, middle class, higher-rate taxpayers. Bumping them off a bit younger might appeal as a way to progress social justice, given that they live, statistically, unfairly longer lives. Always easier to level-down than level-up.
I agree with it, but I can tell you where the 12-month stranger housemate analogy fails. It requires the concept of home. But the liberal technocrat sees their country as a project.
I am also "squishy" on immigration. I am married to an immigrant, who isn't even a full citizen yet, and of immigrant stock (150 years ago, my ancestors were scattered across Central and Eastern Europe).
Despite this, I agree with what you have written, and have written quiet a bit myself about the dangerous Rousseauian ideals of the governing class, which affect foreign policy as well as immigration policy ( https://danielgsaunders.substack.com/p/the-diasporisation-of-israe ).
A further dangerous elite belief is that, not only are all people assumed to be good, but it is seen as racist to believe that culture affects behaviour, except inasmuch as white cultures are all assumed to be racist. Cultural differences and "diversity" apply to cuisine and art, but not to behaviour. To suggest that, say, Japanese culture socialises young men to behave differently to the way Pakistani culture socialises its young men is to be a racist.
This is hugely problematic in terms of immigration policy, because it prevents any kind of recognition that some cultures will be easier to absorb at scale than others. The Irish Catholic and Jewish immigration of the nineteenth century, although somewhat disruptive at the time, did not cause the same kind of long-term social issues we see now because Irish and Jewish ethics and culture were similar enough to Protestant English ethics and culture, for all that many English people at the time would have denied this. Moreover, Jews in particular were expected to conform to English culture in the event of a culture clash, hence the many Jews who stopped keeping the Sabbath because their employers expected them to work Monday to Saturday, not Sunday to Friday (the alternative, of course, was self-employment, which was also popular and has influenced subsequent Jewish employment patterns). There were no Jewish "radicals" determined to impose Judaism on Christians. There were, of course, Irish nationalists who wanted an independent Ireland, but they did not want to conquer or colonise the British mainland.
This is without even mentioning that, for thousands of years, Jews have been socialising their young men to behave in ways that most cultures would read as feminine, which I have also written about.
on an individual level it is difficult for a black person to integrate in to a white culture, and vice versa: for a white person it's difficult to integrate into an Asian or African culture. one's always recognisably different, no matter how hard one tries, and those of the host country will hold certain discriminative ideas. real integration takes both a lot of goodwill and time, at least 3 generations: by the time there are adult grandchildren their off-spring might be fully accepted.
Our country no longer exists as our borders are porous. We’ve seemingly been punished by the EU for Brexit by becoming the dumping ground for all the migrants sadly created by wars we helped start and pursue. I agree David that we need to have a proper calculus of who is allowed to reside on this island, otherwise the problems seen on the continent will manifest and proliferate here too. For instance, we’ve scored an own goal and are taking in 26k Afghans, never mind that Johnny Mercer said only 1k helped us, and I think it was the Daily Telegraph that had a graphic the other day showing by far the worst culprits for sexual assault in the U.K. was Afghan men. I’d like to think this denuding of our country is due to our low grade rulers ineptitude, but it’s very much deliberate and someone is gaining at our misfortune!
I didn’t preclude other leaders promoting this, think Mutti in Germany, but it’s hard not to see our immigration plight as in part facilitated by leaders on the continent, such as Macron taking the money but steering the boats to the rendezvous point of the RNLI. During the Brexit negotiations it was clear the EU was determined to make our attempt at regoverning ourselves difficult otherwise other countries would emulate us and leave. Our current leader is clearly moving us ever closer into the orbit of the EU, and perhaps open borders is part of his negotiation to get us back under EU control!
'illegal' immigration actually means the host country is not able (for whatever reason) to properly be vetting the newcomer(s), the more so in the case of mass immigration. from not-so-ancient newsreels we know of the massive numbers of displaced persons that had to be resettled after WWII. also that immigrants from former colonies were, later, taken in by several European countries. in many of these cases the immigrants tried their best at integration into the host country. so why does integration fail in so many other cases? are there many foreigners who actually want to integrate in Japan? many questions on many levels, as well as the push-and-pull between personal choice and state regulations.
Genuinely very hard to say but I suppose the perception of permanence is a big one. The displaced people moving around after WWII, or immigrants from former colonies, were moving specifically to settle for good. So it was natural to want to integrate. Now, immigration feels a lot more transient.
many authors at the Brownstone Institute write well, and initially I wanted to react to your comment, by refering to a hilarious speech by Bret Weinstein (2024) in which he was prescribing a cure for the West’s "...'demented' 'senility'- where death and destruction were the 'hidden solution' and that we 'just happen to have the ingredients' for. The ingredients for a crisis that is to see the West burn. And we have Bret’s brother Eric who has played a leading role in manufacturing the migrant crisis hitting the United States as we speak to thank for those very 'ingredients'..." - https://cynthiachung.substack.com/p/a-republic-if-we-can-phoenix-it-bret
having noticed that you, Weinstein and some of the others of the so-called Intellectual ("intellectual") Dark Web are all colleagues at Brownstone, Inc., it's now time to move on. peace out.
I suspect cheap flights are a big part of that. You can now fly around the world for less than the cost of a month's rent on a basic London flat. Labour's announcement of a third runway for Heathrow back in January will only exacerbate casual migration.
You brought to mind a long forgotten memory: a coach load of 16 year old boys and girls on a week long school activity trip to Germany. Goodness knows what the educational pretext was. Anyway, in short, we were a real bunch of herberts, noisily criticising the local population, loud and obnoxious. I don't remember much control being exerted by the teachers; I suspect they were more interested in the local beer, which was also our target.
Not a shining moment of glory from my youth but now your Japanese recollection makes me feel less bad (but only slightly).
I recently read Caitlin Moran's What About Men?, which was as silly, irritating, ill-informed and plain stupid as you would imagine, but interesting in that it reveals the workings of the typical midwit liberal feminist brain and the numerous contradictions it encounters as it tries (and fails) to articulate a coherent train of thought and resolve the contradictions inherent in its worldview.
Ms Moran stresses that women are constantly terrified of the threat posed by male sexual violence. Not being a woman I don't know whether she is somewhat exaggerating here, but I can certainly appreciate that women have a very legitimate reason to be wary of the wrong kind of men. She also argues that the problem is fundamentally cultural - not a problem with men per se, a biological matter, but a product of men not being taught by society how to be gentle, sensitive and caring (because of, you know, the manosphere, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Donald Trump etc).
Well, if that is true, the absolute last thing feminists should welcome is thousands of deracinated young men, from countries with far more misogynistic and violent cultures than our own, entering Britain en masse, without wives or mothers or elders to restrain them. But when do you hear liberal feminists making this point? Never - because only nasty, hate-filled right-wingers can point out these things, and are demonised for doing so.
I used to make it a point to read as widely as possible all the articles posted on the various socials, but over time have whittled this down to just a few people and you are always a must read for me. Something of interest but no surprise I guest - I remember working for the Immigration and Nationality Directorate as a civil servant in the publicity and press office in Croydon during the mid Blair era. We were an arm of the Home office and so all press and publicity initiatives by us were vetted by the Whitehall Home Office press team. Whenever we pleaded with them to let us say something ANYTHING about the work we were doing, we were slapped down by the Home Office head honchos who said that the Cabinet had decided that all issues relating to immigration were not a subject the Labour government were going to comment on. Rarely if At all. They knew it was going horribly wrong way back then and knew it was a disastrous vote loser.
I think there are multiple aspects to the willful blindness of the ruling classes on this point:
1. Spatial - the average government minister doesn't live in the same neighbourhood as Somali gangs, for example, and is whisked across London by official car so doesn't tend to get mugged, and can't imagine their daughters being groomed because that only happens to those 'other' people up north, if they believe it happens at all.
2. Sociological - the alliance of social workers, teachers and Legal Aid lawyers we call 'Guardian readers' long ago reached the consensus that bodily autonomy exists but individual responsibility doesn't, which means the criminal is only ever a victim of circumstances. Therefore changed circumstances (actually, yet more public money for the preferred interventions of the Guardian-reading class) will fix any social problems.
3. Economic - in the absence of an industrial strategy, Britain is meant to be a service economy, which means a lot more servants are required to fill the demographic hole correlated with the Abortion Act 1967 and contraceptive pill use since then. Young male immigrants are more noticeable as they pass us on Just Eat and Deliveroo bikes, but there are a huge number of recent female immigrants working in care homes and hospitals, from countries such as the Philippines and Zimbabwe, most of which will have arrived legally rather than by small boats.
4. Geopolitical - the failure of 'progressive' regime change wars in Afghanistan and across the Middle East, and the messy end of traditional communism in Russia, Albania and so on has created a mobile class of organised criminals who are exploiting open borders and the cheap flights enabled by airport expansion to create international networks of unprecedented scale and complexity. The progressive answer is simply to decriminalise (drugs, prostitution and trafficking, money laundering etc) for the reasons above.
I believe Brexit is also a factor, because those very same progressives used to decry the 'Fortress Europe' mentality of the EU at a time when it was assumed white, former Communist citizens from new EU entrant states would fill the demand for servants in the more affluent member states. Now, Britain is the dumping ground for the EU's illegal entrants, which is a compounding problem because people with no paperwork will tend to go where they have networks of relatives to shelter them, if they can.
I hadn't thought of it in this way before but the consensus 'that bodily autonomy exists but individual responsibility doesn't' is real, and curious.
It's axiomatic that rights - if they are postulated - must at the very minimum be balanced against duties. But according to modern "progressive" thinking, everyone has dozens of rights and no duties.
It seems incoherent until we realise that postmodernists only use arguments strategically. If someone chooses a course of action which is not in their best interests, the theorist uses the 'bodily autonomy' argument. If that same person breaks the law, suddenly they have no autonomy, and are a victim of forces beyond their control. Obviously, if someone breaks the law while exercising bodily autonomy, these two contradictory positions can't be reconciled.
This was thrashed out in R v Brown [1994] AC 212 which established that consent of the victim was not a valid defence for a person accused of sadistic sexual abuse. This was confirmed by the failure of the Liberty Five case in the European courts.
See also the recent decriminalisation of abortion up to birth, which is something commercial abortion providers have been lobbying for over several decades. First to go was the law about women carrying out their own abortion by ingesting drugs. The second part of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 they want to delete is the crime of supplying the "poison or instrument" to that woman.
Further to this, I now believe 'bodily autonomy' is a social construct used to permit certain behaviours and not others, as desired by the state at any given time, rather than an authentic autonomy in the libertarian or anarchist sense. Therefore we can have a responsibility-free performative autonomy because the individual is just accepting a choice already made for them.
For example, if old and disabled people are costing the state too much money, or tend to vote for the wrong party, they can now 'choose' to be killed. If a military recruit runs away from the battlefield after choosing not to die, once caught they are imprisoned at the very least.
And where they're lavished with free stuff.
I've been researching the asylum seeker hotel contracts with the Home Office, and while small boat arrival migrants do get free 'initial accommodation' and pocket money, they aren't able to work legally, so they aren't doing well financially unless they break the law. Companies such as Holiday Inn are getting guaranteed occupancy for their buildings in less popular areas of the UK, and intermediaries such as Serco are clearly making a profit too.
This seems very pertinent, but not discussed.
My guess is that the hotel chains built too much capacity for the market, and so when the Home Office ran out of accommodation in disused Army barracks etc, Serco and the like were able to make deals. Obviously, the numbers of people arriving by small boat overloaded the existing asylum system.
" the failure of 'progressive' regime change wars in Afghanistan and across the Middle East, and the messy end of traditional communism in Russia, Albania and so on has created a mobile class of organised criminals who are exploiting open borders and the cheap flights enabled by airport expansion to create international networks of unprecedented scale and complexity. The progressive answer is simply to decriminalise (drugs, prostitution and trafficking, money laundering etc) for the reasons above."
That's factually inaccurate.
The first serious expansion in international drugs trafficking occurred between 1976 and 1983 (a hole of unaccounted transactions in the world balance of trade widened, from $30 billion to $110 billion) a history well-documented by McGill Economics History Professor R. T. Naylor https://archive.org/details/hot-money-and-the-politics-of-debt-r.-t.-naylor-1987
But the second expansion--over the previous 20 years-- has been largely driven by technology, and the opening of new markets. Internet advertising and gray markets, new regional consumer demand sectors, the dark web, the massive increase in parcel shipping that makes it practically impossible to intensively scrutinize even a small fraction of the parcels traveling to their destinations. The amounts seized around the world today almost defy comprehension. I'm not a "legalize everything "person. But not liberalizing some of the regulations simply allows criminals to control all of the franchise.
"The progressive answer is simply to decriminalise (drugs, prostitution and trafficking, money laundering etc) for the reasons above."
That's a strawperson caricature of a political position that you happen to oppose.
Support for "decrminalizing all victimless crimes" has NEVER been a proposal by any political party holding national-level institutional political power in the US--"progressive", neoliberal, social democrat, or otherwise. Support for officially decriminalizing all "victimless crimes" is a libertarian abstraction. Luxury belief theory.
You're just doing what axe-grinding ideologues always do with the War On Drugs: use it as a cudgel to propagandize for a different agenda.
The popular support for "decriminalizing drugs possession" per se evaporated in the Oregon locales where it was tried as a pilot project, once those who supported it realized that the way the law enforcement policy was carried out consisted of allowing open public drugs use, laissez faire non-enforcement of basic public health and safety laws, and de facto impunity for open-air retail drug dealers, while leaving the lucrative business of supply under the monopoly control of the criminal sector.
In terms of practical reality, the still-resilient cryptocurrency market has done more to "decriminalize money laundering" than any legislative proposal aimed at repealing more banking regulations. And credit should be due for old-fashioned rule of law liberals like Carl Levin and Henry Gonzalez; they took their duties seriously, and were responsible for plugging the holes that they've found in the maze of regulations. Although they were not successful at plugging all of those loopholes, which must be frustrating.
I don't know of anywhere in the US that has decriminalized prostitution--outside of the state of Nevada, that is, where it's been legal for over a century. Legal and also regulated and accountable. Still not a model that any American politician I know of has advocated.
Literally the last political leader anywhere in the would I knew of who proposed decriminalizing prostitution (along with legalized abortion) was Juan Peron, in the 1950s. Peron was bounced out of office soon thereafter, having been excommunicated from the Catholic Church by the Pope. (Licio Gelli and his crew later negotiated with another Pope to get that edict rescinded, in order for Peron to return to Argentina in 1971. Newly eligible to be re-elected as President, or Conductor, or whatever it was, on account of his newly regained Catholic status; the Argentine Constitution of the era reserved that office for Roman Catholics.)
Literally nobody speaks of "legalizing sex trafficking" as if it were a victimless crime.
There is a huge drive to decriminalise prostitution across Europe, led by, amongst others, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as a not-inconsiderable number of MEPs.
ah, thanks for the tip. I'll look into it. Wasn't aware of that situation in Europe. Other than knowing that there are European countries--nation-states, as if were--where it's long been either officially legal or discreetly indulged, within limits. But globalization really has changed that economic sector.
Here in the US, vocal support for legalizing prostitution is farther out on the fringe than trans advocacy.
I'm interested to know what I'll find from reading HRW and Amnesty. There are several ways to modify prostitution laws. I'm interested in learning what they might favor.
I will say this, from studying history: find a gilded age of wealth stratification and precarity, and you get a boom market in prostitution. Increase in poverty, big increase in prostitution. The US has been a place where the majority of prostitutes are in the drugs life, as addicts or as frequent users reliant on their dealers. Or, at the Sparklepony, upper end of the scale, on their sugar daddies. The fashion business. But in times when people are facing absolute poverty--or worse, like being trafficked without papers--no drug dependency is required. At least at the outset. Although getting a drug habit does tend to become a more attractive option, the longer someone is in the life.
I realize that your post refers to the UK, and there's only so much of relevance I can speak to there. I thought I'd add some US context to the comment that I originally replied to.
Thanks for your replies. I would agree that organised crime, drug and people trafficking and prostitution are hardly new. However in the British context, they have been turbocharged since 1997 to the extent that the results are obvious on the streets.
The progressive elite solution is simply to accommodate these problems using taxpayer money through de-facto decriminalisation. For example 'small boat migrants', actually, organised crime trafficked illegal immigrants, get free hotel accommodation for an average of five months (according to evidence from recent case law) before being moved into free social housing.
That policy has made the British state an accomplice in organised crime because it is providing a significant incentive for trafficking, compared to how national governments in countries such as the USA now treat illegal migrants. It is also driving the resentment of the white working class, which the Labour Party used to rely on but no longer pretends to care about.
While drug use remains technically illegal, the UK has moved from arresting people who were obviously using or carrying drugs, to requiring drug tests for people employed in responsible blue-collar jobs, or who crash their cars. Drug use among white-collar workers, academics and self-employed people, including most of the construction industry, is endemic, and the fragrance du jour of the social housing project is skunk weed.
Based on my experience in the London Borough of Haringey, I'd say the Blair regime prototyped its legal approach in local government before applying it across the UK. Prostitution, trafficking, drug smuggling and trading were long tolerated in the working class neighbourhood of Tottenham, which also experienced severe rioting on more than one occasion.
The grooming gang scandal in Britain's northern cities run by the Labour Party is now well-known about, but perhaps similar exploitation was going on in every urban borough that Labour controlled. The Conservatives made law and order a key policy pledge, but Labour only ever paid lip service to it.
Labour's core supporters were more likely to make their living defending or excusing criminals, including legal aid lawyers, school teachers and social workers. And of course, Marxist academics and agitators who supported Labour strategically because they thought a soft left government would not deploy tanks against the imminent Revolution.
thank you for the detailed reply. Your situation resembles the "worst of both worlds" policy non-solution that has also made appearances in different parts of the US: a legal regime that criminalizes and prohibits the illicit drugs trade effectively enough that no one other than career criminals would engage in it, while enforcing the laws so unevenly that drug dealers were confidently able to retail forbidden substances in open-air markets, and some urban areas were de facto "zoned for dysfunction", with all sorts of technically illegal conduct indulged by the police and courts. City blocks and city parks, ceded to addicts as their uncontrolled maintenance non-treatment option.
And yes, this really does unmask all too much of 21st century Establishment Liberalism as a set of attitudes rather than a principled ideology; liberalism constituted not as a coherent set of policies, but as laziness, obliviousness, and cowardice. Faced with an array of difficult policy choices, postmodern liberalism opts for none of them. The legislature and/or chief executive would call for a review of the illegal drugs laws (I have a good idea of how I'd set up drugs policy in the US, but I only know enough about the UK to say that it's different, and for the UK to figure out), and meanwhile ensure that the streets in every part of the city are safe, clean, walkable, and not unofficially zoned as the illegal drugs dealing district/drug addict residential zone. With malum in se crimes promptly identified as such, and those laws enforced diligently. Including littering.
There's no excuse for not accomplishing both goals: granting decriminalization/confiscation and a legal market in cannabis (I think THC content is worth regulating), along with cleaning up the streets. The liberals won't do either one. In my country, they don't even know how to take a layup (after 50 years, "Trump Administration Bans Animal Testing On Beagles." To unanimous applause.)
The problem with the conservatives is that while they understand the absolute imperative of ensuring the safety of even the most vulnerable citizens in their neighborhoods and on the streets where they live, their support for the status quo criminalized drug use breeds delinquency and criminality. The drug statutes as currently written--and we definitely need some--overshoot the mark so badly that they're iatrogenic. This is a matter of economics. The illicit drugs trade is so lucrative that it represents an alternate economy. Not an alternative one--an alternate one, that's very much a feature of the status quo. There's also the fact of user criminalization--a policy rarely used in history, and only in a few scattered cases. Except in Islam.
My country, the US, experimented with Alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s. (Back when the UK and its Commonwealth countries, from Canada to Bermuda, were the principal source of imported supply!*) The simple use and possession of a bottle of booze was never a Federal criminal offense. A few places--very few, it seems--had an ordnance. But it was rarely enforced, and often selectively.* Whereas US federal law still criminalizes personal possession of illegal drugs, including marijuana. I've met people who were rung up for the equivalent of possession of an empty beer bottle in their backpack. Many states maintain much the same policy. How are things in your town?
Ponder the implications of that.
So I don't think anyone should be subjected to arrest for personal possession, even of fentanyl or meth--as long as that's their only offense. Any other offense, the "drug involvement" counts. Noted as associated with dysfunctional conduct. DUI, shoplifting, trespassing. You've put yourself on notice with the judicial system henceforth. And confiscation should remain policy. Just trying to encourage everyone to be on their best behavior, there.
But beyond that, I get that attitudes of casual disrespect try to test the law with minor offenses. I agree with stringency about community norms.*** I follow it myself. I wouldn't drop a gum wrapper on the ground. In my country, the US, the liberal othodoxy is all phony about the enforcement of those laws as racist, as if no black people want them enforced.
[*this brings up the conspiracy hypothesis that perhaps the US Prohibition Party, the WCTU, and the other political constituencies that achieved the passage of the Volstead Act as a covert profiteering project by Elites in Great Britain. lol, the Reality is so much more complicated. (G. K. Chesterton: "smh")
Watch the Ken Burns documentary Prohibition. Especially recommended to UK residents reading this, because all that history will look extra special bizarre to you. It will also put you one-up on most Americans, who still maintain a two-sentence idea of the Prohibition Era. Burns based his 6-hour series on the book Last Call, by Daniel Okrent. I also recommend The War On Alcohol, by Lisa McGirr, and The Great Illusion, an Informal History of Prohibition, by Herbert Asbury.]
[**Laws forbidding substances always favor the privileged. Laws allowing their markets require a lot of diligent regulation. Money talks there, too.]
[***the problem of the illegal drug trade in a poor neighborhood is that the dealers are the success stories. Win or lose, win and lose... Drugs are the way that kids learn how easy it is to break the law and get away with it. 15 to 25-year old males, and pirate fiefdoms.]
I would agree that prosecuting drug users is usually counterproductive. The problem I forsee in official decriminalisation is that the existing street gangs wouldn't switch into legitimate businesses; they'd find other criminal niches.
Excellent piece. The last paragraph is especially relevant. When I began renting out a flat a few years ago, I realized that when it is our own space that is on the line and when we are the ones defining the criteria that will determine who is allowed in, we do not mindlessly rehearse the approved slogans - Refugees welcome! Wir schaffen das! No one is illegal! On the contrary, with very little to go on, we look very carefully for signs of dependability, which include age, sex, dress (people who care about how they look are more likely to take care of a property) and basic civility. Interestingly, what I also discovered is that despite what we are constantly told, race is not a factor.
A big part of the problem is that our 'elites' do not think of the country as a home, and actually consider such an idea to be barbaric and outmoded.
David, you have a knack for elucidating difficult points, I’m going to read more. I’m definitely more basic outlook than you e.g. I completely get what you say about male immigrants and the parallel with ex pats is interesting and rings true to some extent . However, the parallel seems to assume that the cultures from which these men emerge are a bit like European cultures, when invariably that is not the case, and instead we are usually dealing with something consistently and radically different, including eg that many do not have a concept of rape as westerners would frame it. And it is the assertion of those cultures in Britain, rather than crime rates and public safety which concerns me most about immigration.
Thanks, John.
That is literally the case for the ruling class, though. For example, one family I know of has property in New York, London, Paris and Venice. Each home is stuffed with antiques and paintings as a long-term store of wealth going back centuries.
Works of art have discounted import tariffs, supposedly to help museums and galleries, which make fine art a good mobile asset class for the ultra-wealthy. The reason why certain paintings and sculptures sell for tens of millions of dollars then makes perfect sense.
If you can threaten export and then persuade a government to 'save' an artwork for the nation, you can turn it back into cash. See for example the manufactured controversy over the propsed export by the Getty family of the 'Three Graces' sculpture by Canova from the UK. It's a 19th century Italian copy of another commission which in turn was on a classical Greek theme. There's nothing British about it, except that it was once owned by a British duke. https://www.artfund.org/our-purpose/art-funded-by-you/the-three-graces
Having no particular ties to any one country is a good long-term wealth preservation strategy. If your country of choice is overtaken by revolutionaries of whatever kind, religious zealots or incompetents, you simply fly to one of your other homes.
The East African Asian community learned this the hard way when Idi Amin took over in Uganda, and deported them with only the clothes they stood in. Even their suitcases were stolen by airport baggage handlers. That's why gold jewellery is their asset class of choice, because you can carry it on your person while fleeing.
Very glad to have found your essays.
And we make this type of judgment every day, often subconsciously, dozens of times perhaps, in the name of survival. If I am walking down the street, and on one side is an 80-year-old woman hobbling along on a walking frame, on the other a large drunken youth with a shaven head, tattoos, singing an obscene song, which side am I going to choose?
This is discrimination in the true sense of the word, of discriminating between one thing and another. That is, until the "Anointed", to use Thomas Sowell's term, got hold of the word discrimination and changed its meaning.
I'm fond of saying that we need more rational discrimination and less irrational prejudice.
Everything you say is true.
However you leave out the major reason the UK is the destination of choice for these young men.
The UK 'capital' owners want a non stop supply of cheap labour. If its illegal it comes very cheap and is very controllable. Of course indigenous labour suffers and the overall cost to society increases, but those benefiting from the cheap labour continue to get richer.
This happens to some extent across most of Europe, but is starkly magnified in the UK.
We have a very divided society which economically depends on the cheapest available labour. The very idea that the UK economy will 'benefit' from AI is laughable.
Something that I now think is that all of this accrued wealth (becoming a billionaire via hotels for asylums) can easily be confiscated by a new Regime. Happened before, will happen again.
This is why hotel and other business owners use offshore ownership, hire expensive counsel and promote the adoption of international dispute settlement regulations, to limit the extent to which national governments can seize assets. I believe a substantial chunk of London's legal income is from settling international claims. See also the current UK sanctions on Russian assets.
That is just the skim off the top. The UK has been/is built on cheap labour, the recent immigration of illegals and a lot of legals is just the continuation of something that has happened for a long time. Indigenous rurals to towns, slaves, various waves of 'empire' immigrants and now brown/black skinned immigrants , desperate or otherwise.
'cheapest available labour': with no training, a barely basic level of education, these critters might end up doing minimally paid menial tasks a machine/robot can and soon will do. trying to eke out a living at a miserable, unhealthy subsistence level with no support from the social networks the indigenous poor might rely on. they might die young (which, in a most dystopian sense, would be a relief, wouldn't it). indeed: 'The very idea that the UK economy will 'benefit' from AI is laughable', and worse: anything dependent on Ai is unstable in the long run.
Thoroughly enjoyed, David: entertaining and thought provoking. I do have a couple of insights here you may appreciate. Telling that you compare a 50-year-old woman to a 20-year-old male. While, like you, I do believe there are differences between the sexes, 20-year-old females from liberal societies can be as rebellious, loud, obnoxious, drunk, and stoned as any male of the same age... especially in their own backyards. They will shoplift and engage in all manner of deviant behaviour. Our stats won't reflect this because we let them off easier, and we also seem to repress female deviance psychologically. In fact, between the ages of 16 and 19, growing up in Canada, my experience was that the young ladies in our midst tended to pick the fights and egg the boys on to fisticuffs by proxy, and not only to fisticuffs, but also to shoplifting. Left to their own devices, the boys were happy to loiter in parks past curfew smoking cigars and cigarettes and drinking beer (underage), cursing and insulting each other in good fun. Granted, the girls who hung out with these boys, smoking and drinking past curfew, weren't the "nice" ones, but they did come from decent homes and did grow up to be professionals. I mention these things because stereotypes are rampant in these conversations and too often ignore female aggression and the role that women play in the hormonal life of our youth.
Another point of interest is where the immigrants are coming from. I immigrated to Israel from Canada at age 19. That is, I moved from a liberal, permissive, gentle, polite, and apologetic society to a dangerous, aggressive, and necessarily conservative one. Although those who grew up there knew where they could push boundaries, a newcomer from fairyland, Canada, knowing little of social aggression (even coming from a rough neighbourhood -- in Canadian terms) would not behave as you describe. Now reverse that scenario. Take someone from the Magreb, Mexico or India and place them in Canadian or UK society (and yes, especially a young man) and they're going to think it's a joke. They will perceive the men around them as weak and the women as easy, and both as fair game for dominating, since the natives of polite society are too stupid to be afraid of those who come from aggressive societies with unforgiving rules. They will play the system, all the while laughing at the naive nature of these societies.
Now, I've generalized in ways that are too often troubling, since when I was teaching college, I found the better behaved and studious students tended to come from strict, immigrant homes, while the worst came from local homes. The latter were entitled little jerks with no sense of their duties and obligations, but only of their rights. Again, I generalize. I also noticed that young men from towns and villages tended to be wonderful human beings. Cities and their anonymity cause social damage of all kinds, in my estimation.
In short, a lot of the trouble comes from city life in general. Immigration is being mismanaged because our societies are bringing in masses and settling them in one location, often in cities. In their own neighbourhoods, they are well behaved, while outside, in the anonymous mass, they can act out. Integration happens (if it's going to happen) when you welcome a new family from abroad into a small town. It ain't rocket science. If you bring in 100 or 1000 families from the same place into an area, they won't integrate; in fact, they'll create their little expat community and make the locals feel displaced. Social resentment will follow and you get what we're witnessing now.
Yes, there’s a lot of nuance to this - thanks for the comment!
Just going on holiday for 2 weeks to, say, a Greek island is enough for a bunch of young men to behave like absolute dicks! There is a lot to be said for insisting all young men be sent to boarding schools until aged 18 then put in the army until 24 then allowed to go to university! By the time they get to about 27 they are just about civilised enough to enter polite society!
Sadly, western elites refuse to see immigrants as young men, they only see imaginary oppressed black people fleeing to the safe arms of, weirdly, oppressive white people. There was a documentary years ago about Romanians coming to the UK and being amazed to get money for free from a hole in the wall and getting their teeth fixed for free. My cousin said it made her proud to be British - what a caring nation. What a nation of suckers and naive idiots, was my opinion.
It would be so easy to simply round up all the single young men from third world countries and deport them. No ifs or buts. If they fled to safety but left their mothers behind they are not refugees. If they don't pay tax but do take benefits, if they have criminal records, if they don't speak English - deport them. Really simple. If only there was the political will to do it!
In my opinion fighting age men can never be refugees - men have to fight for their countries, as our men did in 1914 and 1939 (they were duped, again in my opinion, but the lies were spun and believed and they willingly went abroad to fight and didn’t escape to some ‘safe’ country to avoid conscription and milk that country’s taxpayers. You make a very good point about mothers - escaping and leaving your mother or sister behind? Then you are either a coward or a fraud, likely both.
Interestingly the question of immigration is coming up in the current Japanese elections and this is causing a certain amount of angst amongst members of the commentariat. I think that Japan is likely to tighten immigration requirements and crack down on some of the loop holes that many (the Chinese particularly) seem to be exploiting
Interesting. I tend to be more optimistic about Japan's prospects when it comes to integration because Japanese culture is so intrinsically attractive and because most Japanese people take pride in it. That is a good driver of integration.
That's an interesting thought. Are you suggesting that British culture is not attractive and therefore there is no pride in it? I've never thought about the value of the culture being a bulwark against unsuccessful, immigration integration.
No - what I mean is that Britain nowadays for the most part trashes its own culture and history. So why would non-natives want to integrate? Why would you want to be part of something that even the native population despise?
My view entirely, if you say something often enough people start to believe it. If you teach in school that your country is the most evil thing ever, you shouldn't be surprised that those people reject the social contract.
how does accepting foreigners into one's society depend on one's culture, even if it "is so intrinsically attractive and because most [Japanese] people take pride in it..."? (not a rhetorical question). as elsewhere, even (perhaps particularly) in Japan, any foreigner stands out, no matter how well one speaks the speak, walks the walk, or weds a partner, because of that pesky detail of differences in appearance. integration is far more complicated than just acculturation.
Great article. There is also a pertinent economic dimension to gracefully vacating the public space - you need economic resources to do this. I’ve given up on public swimming pools in recent years (since I moved to East London, in fact) and pay a monthly subscription to a gym. I noticed recently that an analysis of NHS waiting lists showed a class bais - and guessed that those with money were dropping out of the waiting lists by going private (again, I’ve done this). So the costs of the ‘vacating’ falls mostly on those without the wherewithal to ‘vacate’ - not of course people like Diane Abbott who can afford to ‘vacate’ state schools and send their kids to private schools.
So true.
In the eyes of the socialist opting out of the universal State provided service is sinful. Expect VAT on private doctors’ fees to follow the VAT on school fees.
True. I also worry that the NHS might find ways to discriminate against white, middle class, higher-rate taxpayers. Bumping them off a bit younger might appeal as a way to progress social justice, given that they live, statistically, unfairly longer lives. Always easier to level-down than level-up.
I agree with it, but I can tell you where the 12-month stranger housemate analogy fails. It requires the concept of home. But the liberal technocrat sees their country as a project.
Absolutely correct.
I am also "squishy" on immigration. I am married to an immigrant, who isn't even a full citizen yet, and of immigrant stock (150 years ago, my ancestors were scattered across Central and Eastern Europe).
Despite this, I agree with what you have written, and have written quiet a bit myself about the dangerous Rousseauian ideals of the governing class, which affect foreign policy as well as immigration policy ( https://danielgsaunders.substack.com/p/the-diasporisation-of-israe ).
A further dangerous elite belief is that, not only are all people assumed to be good, but it is seen as racist to believe that culture affects behaviour, except inasmuch as white cultures are all assumed to be racist. Cultural differences and "diversity" apply to cuisine and art, but not to behaviour. To suggest that, say, Japanese culture socialises young men to behave differently to the way Pakistani culture socialises its young men is to be a racist.
This is hugely problematic in terms of immigration policy, because it prevents any kind of recognition that some cultures will be easier to absorb at scale than others. The Irish Catholic and Jewish immigration of the nineteenth century, although somewhat disruptive at the time, did not cause the same kind of long-term social issues we see now because Irish and Jewish ethics and culture were similar enough to Protestant English ethics and culture, for all that many English people at the time would have denied this. Moreover, Jews in particular were expected to conform to English culture in the event of a culture clash, hence the many Jews who stopped keeping the Sabbath because their employers expected them to work Monday to Saturday, not Sunday to Friday (the alternative, of course, was self-employment, which was also popular and has influenced subsequent Jewish employment patterns). There were no Jewish "radicals" determined to impose Judaism on Christians. There were, of course, Irish nationalists who wanted an independent Ireland, but they did not want to conquer or colonise the British mainland.
This is without even mentioning that, for thousands of years, Jews have been socialising their young men to behave in ways that most cultures would read as feminine, which I have also written about.
on an individual level it is difficult for a black person to integrate in to a white culture, and vice versa: for a white person it's difficult to integrate into an Asian or African culture. one's always recognisably different, no matter how hard one tries, and those of the host country will hold certain discriminative ideas. real integration takes both a lot of goodwill and time, at least 3 generations: by the time there are adult grandchildren their off-spring might be fully accepted.
Our country no longer exists as our borders are porous. We’ve seemingly been punished by the EU for Brexit by becoming the dumping ground for all the migrants sadly created by wars we helped start and pursue. I agree David that we need to have a proper calculus of who is allowed to reside on this island, otherwise the problems seen on the continent will manifest and proliferate here too. For instance, we’ve scored an own goal and are taking in 26k Afghans, never mind that Johnny Mercer said only 1k helped us, and I think it was the Daily Telegraph that had a graphic the other day showing by far the worst culprits for sexual assault in the U.K. was Afghan men. I’d like to think this denuding of our country is due to our low grade rulers ineptitude, but it’s very much deliberate and someone is gaining at our misfortune!
Germany, France etc have been punished with just the same amount of 'new blood' as us - so I am not sure it is a Brexit punishment.
I didn’t preclude other leaders promoting this, think Mutti in Germany, but it’s hard not to see our immigration plight as in part facilitated by leaders on the continent, such as Macron taking the money but steering the boats to the rendezvous point of the RNLI. During the Brexit negotiations it was clear the EU was determined to make our attempt at regoverning ourselves difficult otherwise other countries would emulate us and leave. Our current leader is clearly moving us ever closer into the orbit of the EU, and perhaps open borders is part of his negotiation to get us back under EU control!
'illegal' immigration actually means the host country is not able (for whatever reason) to properly be vetting the newcomer(s), the more so in the case of mass immigration. from not-so-ancient newsreels we know of the massive numbers of displaced persons that had to be resettled after WWII. also that immigrants from former colonies were, later, taken in by several European countries. in many of these cases the immigrants tried their best at integration into the host country. so why does integration fail in so many other cases? are there many foreigners who actually want to integrate in Japan? many questions on many levels, as well as the push-and-pull between personal choice and state regulations.
Genuinely very hard to say but I suppose the perception of permanence is a big one. The displaced people moving around after WWII, or immigrants from former colonies, were moving specifically to settle for good. So it was natural to want to integrate. Now, immigration feels a lot more transient.
many authors at the Brownstone Institute write well, and initially I wanted to react to your comment, by refering to a hilarious speech by Bret Weinstein (2024) in which he was prescribing a cure for the West’s "...'demented' 'senility'- where death and destruction were the 'hidden solution' and that we 'just happen to have the ingredients' for. The ingredients for a crisis that is to see the West burn. And we have Bret’s brother Eric who has played a leading role in manufacturing the migrant crisis hitting the United States as we speak to thank for those very 'ingredients'..." - https://cynthiachung.substack.com/p/a-republic-if-we-can-phoenix-it-bret
more on this revealing speech - https://neveragainisnowglobal.substack.com/p/benjamin-franklin-urged-keep-the
having noticed that you, Weinstein and some of the others of the so-called Intellectual ("intellectual") Dark Web are all colleagues at Brownstone, Inc., it's now time to move on. peace out.
I suspect cheap flights are a big part of that. You can now fly around the world for less than the cost of a month's rent on a basic London flat. Labour's announcement of a third runway for Heathrow back in January will only exacerbate casual migration.
So many nails hit squarely on the head!
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
Thank you for another great article.
You brought to mind a long forgotten memory: a coach load of 16 year old boys and girls on a week long school activity trip to Germany. Goodness knows what the educational pretext was. Anyway, in short, we were a real bunch of herberts, noisily criticising the local population, loud and obnoxious. I don't remember much control being exerted by the teachers; I suspect they were more interested in the local beer, which was also our target.
Not a shining moment of glory from my youth but now your Japanese recollection makes me feel less bad (but only slightly).
Yes, I think lots of us have experiences like this, or have witnessed it.
I recently read Caitlin Moran's What About Men?, which was as silly, irritating, ill-informed and plain stupid as you would imagine, but interesting in that it reveals the workings of the typical midwit liberal feminist brain and the numerous contradictions it encounters as it tries (and fails) to articulate a coherent train of thought and resolve the contradictions inherent in its worldview.
Ms Moran stresses that women are constantly terrified of the threat posed by male sexual violence. Not being a woman I don't know whether she is somewhat exaggerating here, but I can certainly appreciate that women have a very legitimate reason to be wary of the wrong kind of men. She also argues that the problem is fundamentally cultural - not a problem with men per se, a biological matter, but a product of men not being taught by society how to be gentle, sensitive and caring (because of, you know, the manosphere, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Donald Trump etc).
Well, if that is true, the absolute last thing feminists should welcome is thousands of deracinated young men, from countries with far more misogynistic and violent cultures than our own, entering Britain en masse, without wives or mothers or elders to restrain them. But when do you hear liberal feminists making this point? Never - because only nasty, hate-filled right-wingers can point out these things, and are demonised for doing so.
Yes, it will make for a funny time - as reality intrudes, they must twist themselves into Soviet knots.
I used to make it a point to read as widely as possible all the articles posted on the various socials, but over time have whittled this down to just a few people and you are always a must read for me. Something of interest but no surprise I guest - I remember working for the Immigration and Nationality Directorate as a civil servant in the publicity and press office in Croydon during the mid Blair era. We were an arm of the Home office and so all press and publicity initiatives by us were vetted by the Whitehall Home Office press team. Whenever we pleaded with them to let us say something ANYTHING about the work we were doing, we were slapped down by the Home Office head honchos who said that the Cabinet had decided that all issues relating to immigration were not a subject the Labour government were going to comment on. Rarely if At all. They knew it was going horribly wrong way back then and knew it was a disastrous vote loser.
Thanks Marek. I appreciate the morale boost! That is an interesting story and it fits the pattern - just contempt for honesty.
Yet another superb, informative essay 👏