It is a reasonable bet that Starmer thinks that Rudakabana did what he did because he was not welcomed correctly into British society. Therefore the murders were implicitly the fault of the racist British people, with their primitive tribal hostility to foreigners.
What Starmer thinks is genuinely impossible to guess at, but you are definitely right that this is how the murders are being interpreted in polite, upper middle-class, right-thinking society (along with the - not entirely unfair - description of Rudakubana as a kind of variant of an incel killer).
Only the 'incel' label doesn't work, because incels are coded as angry white men. See the progressives weave around calling him a 'misogynist' while arguing that he is not a Jihadist, because Islam can't be labelled with any negative attributes.
I wonder how you might respond to what Starmer said after a previous murder by a violent Islamist.
> Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, told the Commons that “civility in politics matters” but “we must not lose sight of the fact that David’s killing was an [alleged] act of terror on the streets of our country”.
On the matter of whether the Southport attack was “a freak act of savagery perpetrated by a lone lunatic […] having nothing to do with wider trends,” one can’t help but notice that the act and others like it – such as, for example, targeted stabbings in England, France, and German, urban knife crime, the grooming scandal and violent sexual assault more broadly, and less severe concerns like disruptive or inconsiderate public behaviour, loitering around schools, petty theft, and so forth – are either entirely, overwhelmingly, or at the very very least, disproportionately committed by people who are not native to the countries in which such things take place.
It's absolutely right to say that “not all” X does Y. But it's also very difficult not to develop stereotypes or (dare I say) prejudices against the groups these individuals come from, when the patterns are as clear as they are. I would’ve been the first to argue against that, as a staunch individualist, but you must adapt to your environment.
It didn’t have to be this way. A controlled immigration policy would filter out the loons and leave only those individuals whose behaviours gave us a good impression of their group, or at least wouldn’t arouse suspicion, fear, or distaste. That’s not the world we live in, though. This was done to us, and we must respond accordingly. Suspicion is an act of self-defence.
See my other comment on how 'refugees', people needing shelter and freedom from persecution, were replaced with 'asylum seekers', i.e. people fleeing justice, in the form of prosecution.
Unfortunately the answer to the article's question may be no.
The Home Office report commissioned by Yvette Cooper and leaked last night contains elements of profound concern. it looks like the Southport and Gang Rape incidents are going to be used for even more clamp down on rights of free expression.
Perhaps the kitsch is being replaced by an Orwellian boot.
Thanks to Mrs Balls, we now know exactly what caused Rudakubana: it's all Amazon's fault for selling knives, because it would otherwise be impossible for anyone to get hold of a sharp object.
David, this article alone is worth the paid subscription!! Time after time your hammer has descended, unerringly, upon the nail that represents everything about the process of immigration which has transmogrified into the chaotic mess into which this and many other Western societies have fallen.
The globalist obsession with the destruction of national boundaries - as exemplified by the increasingly failing European Union - is being shown to be nothing more than a refusal to acknowledge the sheer complexity of humanity.
As someone who voted to leave the EU, the immigration issue was, at that time, a secondary one, but which has now clearly illustrated the fantasy world in which the majority of those gripped by ‘diversity kitsch’ exist. My reason for voting to leave was the sheer stupidity of the manner in which the Eurozone was created which was yet another fantasy vision.
Diversity kitsch is a superb description of the thinking process of those who, as you point out, do not regard the country in which they reside as ‘their home’.
Just a note here on the shift among committed Liberals. Here in Canada, all Liberals that I know and have spoken with over the past year feel that immigration has been grossly mismanaged. Somehow, those in government are unaware of this shift in public opinion. I'm guessing this will become clear in the next general election.
We’ve seen the results of multiculturalism, international economic forums, COVID lockdowns, and whispers of a return to the clammy embrace of the EU. We are beginning to resent the people who try and force us into unthinking compliance with diversity kitsch.
Our 'elite' have been able to pin the warm fuzzies to their sleeves because they have (mostly) not suffered loss, or faced competition for their jobs, or has to comprehend that some cultures live different lives - and like it that way.
Are the Powers That Be irredeemiable? I rather expect so, and until they share the cost with ordinary people they will remain 'safe' behind the walls of diversity kitsch.
As a fellow immigrant-married-to-immigrant, I share some of your 'betwixt worlds' perspectives here, although I am perhaps more open to an ideal of diversity, albeit one utterly divorced from this nonsensical version we are being forced to eat. A large part of the diversity ideal I have supported involves pushing back against the exclusion of Christian perspectives from just about every discourse.
Both your 'diversity kitsch' and the presumption of racism that it endeavours to contrast itself from are descended from Christianity (or, perhaps better, from Christendom). Diversity kitsch is what is left when you take the message of the Gospels and secularise it without noticing that the metaphysical bottom has dropped out of your canoe. Anti-immigrant racism is what happens when Christians ignore the message of the other Gospels and become monomaniacally obsessed with the 'secret club' aspects of the Gospel of John.
So many cultural problems in Britain today are rooted in the widespread hatred of Christianity that prospered as the moral impact of the New Testament was excised from its theology: despite the contemporary imperial message of brotherhood/sisterhood/themhood that animates the media organs of the globalist cobwebs of power, Christians are not to be included in this allegedly universal act of inclusion, being deplorable racists and 'far right'.
Did you catch my December letter "My Fellow Immigrants"...? Although addressed to the US, I believe it has relevance in the UK as well, and feels to me like a good companion piece to this one of yours:
"Diversity kitsch is what is left when you take the message of the Gospels and secularise it without noticing that the metaphysical bottom has dropped out of your canoe." Well put.
I would agree that Christianity is despised by the British ruling class, but that's nothing new. The Norman Conquest was essentially Viking, due to earlier settlement of northern France by pagan psychopaths. If you care to read the account of Henry VIII's henchmen and their punishment of the Abbot of Glastonbury, they really put the evil into mediaeval.
Love the invocation of the medieval here, Daniel - and the pun! 🙂 I hadn't thought about it in these more deeply historical terms (I tend to see this as a trend commencing around the 19th century, or at least accelerating then). I'll ponder this further. Thanks!
Hi Uncibal, I think you've conflated two different issues here. The post World War II alliance of western European nations which Churchill had advocated for was based on shared Judeo-Christian values, primarily the importance of peace, following the disasters of Nordic pagan national socialism and notionally atheist Bolshevism.
The European Union was once described as 'Fortress Europe' by critics on the British Left who wanted more immigration from Africa and Asia to break the electoral power of conservatives in urban areas, including the nationalist white working class which backed Thatcher, reasoning that migrants would vote with the Left to keep borders open for their relatives, or would be left-wing in their own politics.
In the 1990s, British Left lawyers who earned fees from migration, asylum and terrorism cases, and the complexities of international property and company law, successfully opened borders to migrants from war zones and failed states outside the EU, via politics, the courts and from within the civil service. Russian gangsters became established in Britain's wealthiest neighbourhoods, while the poorer neighbourhoods attracted asylum seekers avoiding justice back home, due to their participation in conflicts from Africa to the Middle East.
My neighbours in London were unashamed communists waiting for the right moment to go back to Turkey and fight. This had nothing to do with the EU, which Turkey was blocked from membership of in part because of the civil war with the Kurds.
Nor did the asylum seekers (we stopped calling people from war zones 'refugees' by then) from Somalia, Sudan or Rwanda, Iraq, Libya or Afghanistan have anything to do with the EU. Those asylum seekers were organising fellow political exiles from their new London bases, as Russian-speaking anarchists and communists had done a century before.
'Progressive' warm and fuzzy politics are an excellent cover story for the amoral lawyers who have been running Britain since 1997, Starmer included. They are of the hard left and want nothing less than the destruction of American hegemony, in retaliation for the popular uprising against European and Chinese communism in 1989. That requires the USA's key strategic allies of Britain and Israel to be defeated.
One of the misconceptions of the Vote Leave campaign to exit the EU was that the European Union was responsible for migration into Britain from war zones outside of the EU. I had one young voter tell me to my face that Brexit would "keep the ni**ers" out. As we know now, political co-operation with France is essential to prevent small boat crossings, and Britain was doing rather better at integration when the majority of immigrants were East European Christians with trade and professional skills to contribute.
Thanks for taking the time to comment. I take all of this on board, but I don't think I am conflating two issues. I'm aware of the effect leaving the EU had on immigration law. What I am talking about is - to repeat the point made in the post - the kitschified understanding of the issue that infects the selfsame class of people who were most ardently for remaining in the EU and who are now most ardently in favour of (de facto) open borders. It is the same worldview that animates both of those ideas because it is the same group of people (by and large) who believe in them. I'm not talking about facts or reason or, indeed, reality - I'm talking about what exists in the realm of dreams, fantasies, and daft ideals.
Thanks for the reply, but I disagree. The group most ardently in favour of remaining in the EU were the cross-European families who were directly and personally impacted by Brexit, followed by the business people who understood that Britain outside the EU could not have parity with the USA or China on the world stage.
I believe the group you're referring to, middle class, low-information, naive optimists who consider themselves progressive, were more influenced by melting-pot theories of the counterculture, the elimination of national and racial differences via 'free love'. This group was long hostile to the EU, which they considered racist and exclusionary.
It was only when white nationalist reactionaries became vehemently anti-EU under the influence of Teddy Goldsmith's Referendum Party that progressives began to worry about their French and Italian holiday homes. Let's recall that conservatives used to be pro-EU, for the trade benefits.
Also, with the left gaining seats in the European Parliament and money from EU institutions, they had significant funding to lose. For example, the Green Party of England and Wales did a hard about-turn in its policy on EU membership after winning MEP seats.
Sorry, Jimmy Goldsmith's Referendum Party. I always get the brothers mixed up. Teddy was the one behind the Ecologist magazine, following the Club of Rome report as I recall.
Not quite the same... Sneetches teaches the lesson that humans seek status, even if the status marker is a mere badge that can be put on and taken off at will. There were two definite groups, trying to use the star (or its absence) to maintain the higher status of a group. The book questions status-seeking.
There was no explicit intermarriage at the end, with many new babies bearing partial stars upon thars... Was there? Will re-read.
What I find interesting about the Smed/Smoo intermarriage producing purple babies is that probably, the author makes no distinction between how the two cultures previously built out their reproductive halves, assigning different responsibilities to each half in raising Smed babies or Smoo babies? Which would be in keeping with gender ideology in a post-Christian society: men and women have identical potential from birth.
A long way around for me to say -- it's one thing for a smed girl to marry a smoo boy and make a darling purple baby, but what about the smoo girl who marries a smed boy? Does he marry her, or is she plied with alcohol and passed around to his friends and her darling purple babies are aborted?
"...the people who are coming seem to have no interest in integrating".
As a historian, I look back across the centuries and millennia and notice that, very often if not even usually, "immigrants" looked at their new homes as places to conquer and exploit. Celts reaching Britain, then Angles, Saxons, Jutes and other Germanic peoples, did not think of "integrating with society". Instead, they killed those who resisted, took over all the property, and established a new royalty and aristocracy. Same with Europeans landing in the New World. Same with "barbarians" entering the Roman Empire.
The liberal consensus about race and migration flies in the face of what we know about human nature. Human beings will normally tolerate a few "others" as long as they are in a distinct minority. The incomers may even have rarity value and interest, as did Native Americans like Kandiaronk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondiaronk. Russia has historically welcomed black people with open arms, and some of them rose to the very top of society.
However it is basic human nature to be constantly evaluating potential threats; and strangers of noticeably different ethnicity or culture or religion are always perceived as potential, if not actual, threats. The potential starts to be seen as actual when the numbers of the strangers increase past a certain point, relative to "ourselves". British people began to be wary of black immigrants when they reached a certain proportion of the population. And of course immigrants themselves must always feel threatened by the far greater numbers of the indigenous people.
Such facts are ineluctable and must be understood and taken into account. Pretending that they do not exist is the eptiome of foolishness.
The proportion effect is highly localised. For example, at the time of the 1958 race riots in Notting Hill, the number of Afro-Carribean people in Britain was tiny, but they were concentrated in certain neighbourhoods. The same argument could be made about Tottenham, Harehills or Oldham.
Although I have no direct experience of the matter, and I am arguing purely in general and logical terms, it seems natural that people coming to a strange land to live should cluster together. That, too, seems what instinct would dictate. But once a small, dense community - resembling a ghetto although people are free to come and go - exists, surely it will be seen as somewhat threatening by the nearby indigenous people. And so it goes. If people from different backgrounds are to be mixed thoroughly, as some seem to desire, it must be done slowly and carefully if friction is to be avoided.
Jet travel has certainly accelerated the rate of mixing. Cities like Londinium have been settler colonies since day one, so the success of integration may depend on why people are there, what they do there and if they provide more benefits than costs to other communities. In the case of a Rwandan war criminal who settles in the UK, the main beneficiary is likely to be their human rights lawyer.
"Citizens of the world" belong nowhere and so don't care about anywhere. My daughter went to university with a load of wealthy foreign students. They didn't really "come" from anywhere, having been born in one place to parents from another with grandparents in yet another and then went to schools in several places and had so-called friends from everywhere. Consequently, they had no roots or loyalties to anywhere or anyone. They didn't see why it should matter where you came from or where you went. The same daughter is now married to a Greek who is very certain who he is and where he comes from! Amusingly (or not) he is a tall, dark, bearded man who people assume must be a Muslim - he's a devout Orthodox Christian and gets very cross! However, in rural Greece, my tall, blonde, blue-eyed daughter gets stopped in the street by people who think she is a Disney Princess and who want to stroke her hair! We here in the UK are a ridiculously tolerant people but we don't realise it. Unfortunately, the less pleasant immigrants are fully aware of it.
Luckily the Sprint Report appears to have been roundly rejected by Yvette Cooper, who might actually have joined the ranks of the aware for once.
The discomfort of scads of ministers denying the report's findings this morning on TV was striking. Maybe they've concluded that England would rise up like the Scots did with Humza Yousaf over the Hate Crime Bill, and Cooper would be innundated with 30,000 complaints on Day One about her previous stance on white privilege. I wish! Can't wait to see the back of all these incompetents, her and Reeves included.
"It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground".
in the old days ("the old days") foreigners would be checked and vetted by custom officers upon entering a foreign country. I could only live and work abroad because I was married to a foreigner and when visiting the UK I could sail through on my European passport while my husband had to queue with his non-European one. from school I still remember the grainy bl/w photographs in our history books of the millions of displaced persons and refugees after WWII: what's happened to Nüremberg's "Never Again"? it seems unvetted mass migration is an ugly business model with even darker policy roots - https://cynthiachung.substack.com/p/a-republic-if-we-can-phoenix-it-bret
As I see it, the 'grown up' view of diversity/multiculturalism is going to an Indian restaurant one night, an Italian the next and a Lebanese at the weekend. This, coupled with a hopelessly naive view that everyone is nice if you just give them enough love, is so far removed from reality as to be beyond comprehension. It frustrates me further that this is an area in which 'my truth' and 'lived experience' are worthless, if not likely to land me in trouble.
It is a reasonable bet that Starmer thinks that Rudakabana did what he did because he was not welcomed correctly into British society. Therefore the murders were implicitly the fault of the racist British people, with their primitive tribal hostility to foreigners.
What Starmer thinks is genuinely impossible to guess at, but you are definitely right that this is how the murders are being interpreted in polite, upper middle-class, right-thinking society (along with the - not entirely unfair - description of Rudakubana as a kind of variant of an incel killer).
Robots don't think, they are programmed to respond. Starmer does what his handlers tell him to do, nothing else.
Only the 'incel' label doesn't work, because incels are coded as angry white men. See the progressives weave around calling him a 'misogynist' while arguing that he is not a Jihadist, because Islam can't be labelled with any negative attributes.
I wonder how you might respond to what Starmer said after a previous murder by a violent Islamist.
> Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, told the Commons that “civility in politics matters” but “we must not lose sight of the fact that David’s killing was an [alleged] act of terror on the streets of our country”.
On the matter of whether the Southport attack was “a freak act of savagery perpetrated by a lone lunatic […] having nothing to do with wider trends,” one can’t help but notice that the act and others like it – such as, for example, targeted stabbings in England, France, and German, urban knife crime, the grooming scandal and violent sexual assault more broadly, and less severe concerns like disruptive or inconsiderate public behaviour, loitering around schools, petty theft, and so forth – are either entirely, overwhelmingly, or at the very very least, disproportionately committed by people who are not native to the countries in which such things take place.
It's absolutely right to say that “not all” X does Y. But it's also very difficult not to develop stereotypes or (dare I say) prejudices against the groups these individuals come from, when the patterns are as clear as they are. I would’ve been the first to argue against that, as a staunch individualist, but you must adapt to your environment.
It didn’t have to be this way. A controlled immigration policy would filter out the loons and leave only those individuals whose behaviours gave us a good impression of their group, or at least wouldn’t arouse suspicion, fear, or distaste. That’s not the world we live in, though. This was done to us, and we must respond accordingly. Suspicion is an act of self-defence.
See my other comment on how 'refugees', people needing shelter and freedom from persecution, were replaced with 'asylum seekers', i.e. people fleeing justice, in the form of prosecution.
Mark Steyn covers the Diversity Stabbing of the Week on his (excellent) website.
Unfortunately the answer to the article's question may be no.
The Home Office report commissioned by Yvette Cooper and leaked last night contains elements of profound concern. it looks like the Southport and Gang Rape incidents are going to be used for even more clamp down on rights of free expression.
Perhaps the kitsch is being replaced by an Orwellian boot.
Thanks to Mrs Balls, we now know exactly what caused Rudakubana: it's all Amazon's fault for selling knives, because it would otherwise be impossible for anyone to get hold of a sharp object.
And if everyone ate TV dinners as God intended, instead of "cooking", they wouldn't need knives.
David, this article alone is worth the paid subscription!! Time after time your hammer has descended, unerringly, upon the nail that represents everything about the process of immigration which has transmogrified into the chaotic mess into which this and many other Western societies have fallen.
The globalist obsession with the destruction of national boundaries - as exemplified by the increasingly failing European Union - is being shown to be nothing more than a refusal to acknowledge the sheer complexity of humanity.
As someone who voted to leave the EU, the immigration issue was, at that time, a secondary one, but which has now clearly illustrated the fantasy world in which the majority of those gripped by ‘diversity kitsch’ exist. My reason for voting to leave was the sheer stupidity of the manner in which the Eurozone was created which was yet another fantasy vision.
Diversity kitsch is a superb description of the thinking process of those who, as you point out, do not regard the country in which they reside as ‘their home’.
Thanks, Stephen.
Just a note here on the shift among committed Liberals. Here in Canada, all Liberals that I know and have spoken with over the past year feel that immigration has been grossly mismanaged. Somehow, those in government are unaware of this shift in public opinion. I'm guessing this will become clear in the next general election.
We’ve seen the results of multiculturalism, international economic forums, COVID lockdowns, and whispers of a return to the clammy embrace of the EU. We are beginning to resent the people who try and force us into unthinking compliance with diversity kitsch.
Our 'elite' have been able to pin the warm fuzzies to their sleeves because they have (mostly) not suffered loss, or faced competition for their jobs, or has to comprehend that some cultures live different lives - and like it that way.
Are the Powers That Be irredeemiable? I rather expect so, and until they share the cost with ordinary people they will remain 'safe' behind the walls of diversity kitsch.
Dear David,
As a fellow immigrant-married-to-immigrant, I share some of your 'betwixt worlds' perspectives here, although I am perhaps more open to an ideal of diversity, albeit one utterly divorced from this nonsensical version we are being forced to eat. A large part of the diversity ideal I have supported involves pushing back against the exclusion of Christian perspectives from just about every discourse.
Both your 'diversity kitsch' and the presumption of racism that it endeavours to contrast itself from are descended from Christianity (or, perhaps better, from Christendom). Diversity kitsch is what is left when you take the message of the Gospels and secularise it without noticing that the metaphysical bottom has dropped out of your canoe. Anti-immigrant racism is what happens when Christians ignore the message of the other Gospels and become monomaniacally obsessed with the 'secret club' aspects of the Gospel of John.
So many cultural problems in Britain today are rooted in the widespread hatred of Christianity that prospered as the moral impact of the New Testament was excised from its theology: despite the contemporary imperial message of brotherhood/sisterhood/themhood that animates the media organs of the globalist cobwebs of power, Christians are not to be included in this allegedly universal act of inclusion, being deplorable racists and 'far right'.
Did you catch my December letter "My Fellow Immigrants"...? Although addressed to the US, I believe it has relevance in the UK as well, and feels to me like a good companion piece to this one of yours:
https://strangerworlds.substack.com/p/my-fellow-immigrants
With unlimited love,
Chris.
"Diversity kitsch is what is left when you take the message of the Gospels and secularise it without noticing that the metaphysical bottom has dropped out of your canoe." Well put.
I would agree that Christianity is despised by the British ruling class, but that's nothing new. The Norman Conquest was essentially Viking, due to earlier settlement of northern France by pagan psychopaths. If you care to read the account of Henry VIII's henchmen and their punishment of the Abbot of Glastonbury, they really put the evil into mediaeval.
Love the invocation of the medieval here, Daniel - and the pun! 🙂 I hadn't thought about it in these more deeply historical terms (I tend to see this as a trend commencing around the 19th century, or at least accelerating then). I'll ponder this further. Thanks!
Hi Uncibal, I think you've conflated two different issues here. The post World War II alliance of western European nations which Churchill had advocated for was based on shared Judeo-Christian values, primarily the importance of peace, following the disasters of Nordic pagan national socialism and notionally atheist Bolshevism.
The European Union was once described as 'Fortress Europe' by critics on the British Left who wanted more immigration from Africa and Asia to break the electoral power of conservatives in urban areas, including the nationalist white working class which backed Thatcher, reasoning that migrants would vote with the Left to keep borders open for their relatives, or would be left-wing in their own politics.
In the 1990s, British Left lawyers who earned fees from migration, asylum and terrorism cases, and the complexities of international property and company law, successfully opened borders to migrants from war zones and failed states outside the EU, via politics, the courts and from within the civil service. Russian gangsters became established in Britain's wealthiest neighbourhoods, while the poorer neighbourhoods attracted asylum seekers avoiding justice back home, due to their participation in conflicts from Africa to the Middle East.
My neighbours in London were unashamed communists waiting for the right moment to go back to Turkey and fight. This had nothing to do with the EU, which Turkey was blocked from membership of in part because of the civil war with the Kurds.
Nor did the asylum seekers (we stopped calling people from war zones 'refugees' by then) from Somalia, Sudan or Rwanda, Iraq, Libya or Afghanistan have anything to do with the EU. Those asylum seekers were organising fellow political exiles from their new London bases, as Russian-speaking anarchists and communists had done a century before.
'Progressive' warm and fuzzy politics are an excellent cover story for the amoral lawyers who have been running Britain since 1997, Starmer included. They are of the hard left and want nothing less than the destruction of American hegemony, in retaliation for the popular uprising against European and Chinese communism in 1989. That requires the USA's key strategic allies of Britain and Israel to be defeated.
One of the misconceptions of the Vote Leave campaign to exit the EU was that the European Union was responsible for migration into Britain from war zones outside of the EU. I had one young voter tell me to my face that Brexit would "keep the ni**ers" out. As we know now, political co-operation with France is essential to prevent small boat crossings, and Britain was doing rather better at integration when the majority of immigrants were East European Christians with trade and professional skills to contribute.
Thanks for taking the time to comment. I take all of this on board, but I don't think I am conflating two issues. I'm aware of the effect leaving the EU had on immigration law. What I am talking about is - to repeat the point made in the post - the kitschified understanding of the issue that infects the selfsame class of people who were most ardently for remaining in the EU and who are now most ardently in favour of (de facto) open borders. It is the same worldview that animates both of those ideas because it is the same group of people (by and large) who believe in them. I'm not talking about facts or reason or, indeed, reality - I'm talking about what exists in the realm of dreams, fantasies, and daft ideals.
Thanks for the reply, but I disagree. The group most ardently in favour of remaining in the EU were the cross-European families who were directly and personally impacted by Brexit, followed by the business people who understood that Britain outside the EU could not have parity with the USA or China on the world stage.
I believe the group you're referring to, middle class, low-information, naive optimists who consider themselves progressive, were more influenced by melting-pot theories of the counterculture, the elimination of national and racial differences via 'free love'. This group was long hostile to the EU, which they considered racist and exclusionary.
It was only when white nationalist reactionaries became vehemently anti-EU under the influence of Teddy Goldsmith's Referendum Party that progressives began to worry about their French and Italian holiday homes. Let's recall that conservatives used to be pro-EU, for the trade benefits.
Also, with the left gaining seats in the European Parliament and money from EU institutions, they had significant funding to lose. For example, the Green Party of England and Wales did a hard about-turn in its policy on EU membership after winning MEP seats.
Sorry, Jimmy Goldsmith's Referendum Party. I always get the brothers mixed up. Teddy was the one behind the Ecologist magazine, following the Club of Rome report as I recall.
I was wrong again, The Ecologist was launched in 1970, Limits to Growth was published in 1972.
The book sounds pretty boring and indeed unoriginal. Dr Seuss did it more than 70 years ago with The Sneetches.
Why is it that talented authors often don't seem to be able to resist preaching?
Not quite the same... Sneetches teaches the lesson that humans seek status, even if the status marker is a mere badge that can be put on and taken off at will. There were two definite groups, trying to use the star (or its absence) to maintain the higher status of a group. The book questions status-seeking.
There was no explicit intermarriage at the end, with many new babies bearing partial stars upon thars... Was there? Will re-read.
What I find interesting about the Smed/Smoo intermarriage producing purple babies is that probably, the author makes no distinction between how the two cultures previously built out their reproductive halves, assigning different responsibilities to each half in raising Smed babies or Smoo babies? Which would be in keeping with gender ideology in a post-Christian society: men and women have identical potential from birth.
A long way around for me to say -- it's one thing for a smed girl to marry a smoo boy and make a darling purple baby, but what about the smoo girl who marries a smed boy? Does he marry her, or is she plied with alcohol and passed around to his friends and her darling purple babies are aborted?
Don't ask awkward questions in Smeds and Smoos world!
Yeah, I had the exact same thought when reading it. It's exactly the same thing as the Sneetches but less well-written.
"...the people who are coming seem to have no interest in integrating".
As a historian, I look back across the centuries and millennia and notice that, very often if not even usually, "immigrants" looked at their new homes as places to conquer and exploit. Celts reaching Britain, then Angles, Saxons, Jutes and other Germanic peoples, did not think of "integrating with society". Instead, they killed those who resisted, took over all the property, and established a new royalty and aristocracy. Same with Europeans landing in the New World. Same with "barbarians" entering the Roman Empire.
The liberal consensus about race and migration flies in the face of what we know about human nature. Human beings will normally tolerate a few "others" as long as they are in a distinct minority. The incomers may even have rarity value and interest, as did Native Americans like Kandiaronk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondiaronk. Russia has historically welcomed black people with open arms, and some of them rose to the very top of society.
However it is basic human nature to be constantly evaluating potential threats; and strangers of noticeably different ethnicity or culture or religion are always perceived as potential, if not actual, threats. The potential starts to be seen as actual when the numbers of the strangers increase past a certain point, relative to "ourselves". British people began to be wary of black immigrants when they reached a certain proportion of the population. And of course immigrants themselves must always feel threatened by the far greater numbers of the indigenous people.
Such facts are ineluctable and must be understood and taken into account. Pretending that they do not exist is the eptiome of foolishness.
The proportion effect is highly localised. For example, at the time of the 1958 race riots in Notting Hill, the number of Afro-Carribean people in Britain was tiny, but they were concentrated in certain neighbourhoods. The same argument could be made about Tottenham, Harehills or Oldham.
Although I have no direct experience of the matter, and I am arguing purely in general and logical terms, it seems natural that people coming to a strange land to live should cluster together. That, too, seems what instinct would dictate. But once a small, dense community - resembling a ghetto although people are free to come and go - exists, surely it will be seen as somewhat threatening by the nearby indigenous people. And so it goes. If people from different backgrounds are to be mixed thoroughly, as some seem to desire, it must be done slowly and carefully if friction is to be avoided.
Jet travel has certainly accelerated the rate of mixing. Cities like Londinium have been settler colonies since day one, so the success of integration may depend on why people are there, what they do there and if they provide more benefits than costs to other communities. In the case of a Rwandan war criminal who settles in the UK, the main beneficiary is likely to be their human rights lawyer.
"Citizens of the world" belong nowhere and so don't care about anywhere. My daughter went to university with a load of wealthy foreign students. They didn't really "come" from anywhere, having been born in one place to parents from another with grandparents in yet another and then went to schools in several places and had so-called friends from everywhere. Consequently, they had no roots or loyalties to anywhere or anyone. They didn't see why it should matter where you came from or where you went. The same daughter is now married to a Greek who is very certain who he is and where he comes from! Amusingly (or not) he is a tall, dark, bearded man who people assume must be a Muslim - he's a devout Orthodox Christian and gets very cross! However, in rural Greece, my tall, blonde, blue-eyed daughter gets stopped in the street by people who think she is a Disney Princess and who want to stroke her hair! We here in the UK are a ridiculously tolerant people but we don't realise it. Unfortunately, the less pleasant immigrants are fully aware of it.
Luckily the Sprint Report appears to have been roundly rejected by Yvette Cooper, who might actually have joined the ranks of the aware for once.
The discomfort of scads of ministers denying the report's findings this morning on TV was striking. Maybe they've concluded that England would rise up like the Scots did with Humza Yousaf over the Hate Crime Bill, and Cooper would be innundated with 30,000 complaints on Day One about her previous stance on white privilege. I wish! Can't wait to see the back of all these incompetents, her and Reeves included.
In the end one should never underestimate the importance of political survival to these people.
.... and the lengths they will go to in order to retain their position, including ideological U-turns and plain lying.
"It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground".
- H. L. Mencken
More concerning to me is the worldview of the authors, who will remain (no pun intended) in the Home Office and almost inevitably rise.
in the old days ("the old days") foreigners would be checked and vetted by custom officers upon entering a foreign country. I could only live and work abroad because I was married to a foreigner and when visiting the UK I could sail through on my European passport while my husband had to queue with his non-European one. from school I still remember the grainy bl/w photographs in our history books of the millions of displaced persons and refugees after WWII: what's happened to Nüremberg's "Never Again"? it seems unvetted mass migration is an ugly business model with even darker policy roots - https://cynthiachung.substack.com/p/a-republic-if-we-can-phoenix-it-bret
According to this evidence after 2030 those of British ethnic inheritance will become a minority in these islands https://open.substack.com/pub/therenwhere/p/holocaust-holodomor-why?r=jx6c3&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
As I see it, the 'grown up' view of diversity/multiculturalism is going to an Indian restaurant one night, an Italian the next and a Lebanese at the weekend. This, coupled with a hopelessly naive view that everyone is nice if you just give them enough love, is so far removed from reality as to be beyond comprehension. It frustrates me further that this is an area in which 'my truth' and 'lived experience' are worthless, if not likely to land me in trouble.