This isn’t going to surprise many people on the left either. From the way similar legislation passed by the Republicans in America worked to deny the vote to Blacks, the poor and students – the parts of the population which tends to vote Democrat – this was always going to be the intention behind their introduction in Britain by the Tories. Now an official government report has found that the Voter ID laws were racially discriminatory as well as disenfranchising the disabled. The pro-democracy organisation Open Britain is in no doubt that this is another Tory attack on democracy.
‘Dear David,
A new report published today brings concerning news about the impact of the government’s voter ID laws that were required for the first time in May’s local elections.
The report from the all-party parliamentary group on democracy and the constitution found evidence that these laws led to racial and disability discrimination at polling stations.
The report cites examples such as polling clerks being less likely to process IDs of voters from ethnic minorities properly and a woman being denied the right to vote because she refused to remove her face mask due to being immunocompromised.
The report’s key findings included the following:
The voter-ID system is a “poisoned cure” in that it disenfranchises more electors than it protects.
The inherent ambiguity in the regime creates a real risk of injustice and potential discrimination.
The regime lacks the flexibility necessary to avoid injustices.
This is outrageous and undermines the foundations of our democracy. The right to vote should never be impeded due to someone’s race or disability. Yet this report indicates thousands were denied the vote simply because they lacked the narrow range of ID documents the government accepts.
The government claimed these laws were needed to prevent voter fraud, yet there have been barely any instances of such fraud. It seems their real intent is to disenfranchise certain groups from exercising their democratic rights.
This builds on a pattern of policies that have made it harder for many to participate in our democracy – from gerrymandered constituency boundary changes to increased police powers to curb protests and restrictions on what journalists can report without fear of reprisal.
At Open Britain, we have long campaigned against these undemocratic voter ID laws. This report vindicates our stance and shows just how damaging their impact has been.
Consider how this is likely to play out at the next general election when many times more people will be casting a vote, and the resources of the electoral authorities will be spread more thinly.
We must keep up the pressure on the government to scrap these laws before even more people are denied their right to vote.
I’ve just started reading Vince Cable’s Money & Power, in which he discusses 16 leading politicians and economists and their policies. These include Edmund Hamilton, Bismarck, Lenin, Roosevelt, Erhard, the architect of the German Wirtschaftswunder, Tage Erland, who was responsible for much of the SDP’s success in Sweden, Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore, Park of South Korea, India’s Manmohan Roy, Juan Peron, Shinzo Abe, and Donald Trump. There’s also Maggie Thatcher, of course, though I’m definitely putting off reading the chapter on her. These are important politicians and economists, but they also seem to reflect Cable’s own views on privatisation and the free market. The SDP did well in Sweden by largely keeping the economy private and using its profits to fund the country’s welfare state. Manmohan Roy liberalised the state economy after years of socialist planning, which had created an economic disaster by the mid-70s under Indira Gandhi. Erhard was a liberal, who championed the free market and small businesses against nationalisation, big business and socialism. He liberalised the German economy from the strict economic controls imposed on a defeated Germany that had had its economy and manufacturing destroyed by the war. Abe revitalised the Japanese economy, moving it away from the strict war time controls geared to export through a mixture of Keynesian public works and various fiscal stimuli. Although the gaol still seems to be to maintain the country’s focus on export. As for Trump, his economic ideas are contradictory. He’s a small-government republican, who distrusts trade deals because he thinks they’re a zero-sum game which America will lose. He doesn’t like trading blocs, because he feels he can get a better deal through one on one negotiation.
I’ve glanced at the chapter on Thatcher. It concludes by noting one of the New Labourites that ‘we’re all Thatcherites now’ and that her main legacy is nationalism. Well, that’s one, obvious part of it. But in fact her legacy is an utterly wrecked economy, failing welfare services and an impoverished working class. Privatisation is massively unpopular, but continues to be promoted by the political, media and corporate elite. Mind you, Cable also asserts that Corbyn was wiped out electorally because he was returning the party to Marxism. The Labour party, as a whole, has never been a Marxist party although some of the early socialist groups that initially formed it were. And neither was Corbyn, despite the screams of the press. As for Thatcher, I prefer this assessment of Thatcher by Seumas Milne in his book, The Revenge of History: The Battle for the 21st Century (London: Verso 2012)
‘Not only in former mining communities and industrial areas laid waste by her government, but across Britain Thatcher is still hated for the damage she inflicted – and for her political legacy of rampant inequality and greed, privatisation and social breakdown. Now protests are taking the form of satirical e-petitions for the funeral (Gordon Brown wanted a state funeral for her) to be privatised: it is goes ahead there are likely to be demonstrations in the streets.
This is a politician, after all, who never won the votes of more than a third of the electorate; destroyed communities, created mass unemployment; deindustrialised Britain; redistributed from poor to rich; and, by her deregulation of the City, laid the basis for the crisis that has engulfed us twenty-five years later.
Thatcher was a prime minister who denounced Nelson Mandela as a terrorist, defended the Chilean fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet, ratcheted up the cold war, and unleashed militarised police on trade unionists and black communities alike. She was Britain’s first woman prime minister, but her policies hit women hardest, like Cameron’s today.
A common British establishment view – and the implicit posi8tion of The Iron Lady (the filmography of her with Meryl Streep) – is that while Thatcher took harsh measures and ‘went too far’, it was necessary medicine to restore the sick economy of the 1970s to healthy growth.
It did nothing of the sort. Average growth in the Thatcherite ’80s, at 2.4 per cent, was exactly the same as in the sick ’70s – and considerably lower than in the corporatist ’60s. Her government’s savage deflation destroyed a fifth of Britain’s industrial base in two years, hollowed out manufacturing, and delivered a ‘productivity miracle’ that never was, and we’re living with the consequences today.
What she did succeed in doing was to restore class privilege, boosting profitability while slashing employees’ share of national income from 65 per cent to 53 per cent through her assault on unions. Britain faced a structural crisis in the 1970s, but there were multiple routes out of it. Thatcher imposed a neoliberal model now seen to have failed across the world.
It’s hardly surprising that some might want to put a benign gloss on Thatcher’s record when another Tory-led government is forcing through Thatcher-like policies – and riots, mounting unemployment and swingeing benefit cuts echo her years in power. The rehabilitation isn’t so much about then as now, which is one reason why it can’t go unchallenged. Thatcher wasn’t a ‘great leader’. She was the most socially destructive prime minister of modern times.’ (pp. 247-8).
That was published, according to the book’s notes, on 5th January 2012. People aren’t rioting today, but they are protesting and striking. And the myth of Thatcher as the great leader needs to be assaulted and destroyed to bring her wretched policies and their legacy to an end, both by the Tories themselves and by New Labour entryists like Starmer.
Just caught this headline – I’m afraid I can’t remember the source – on my newsfeed tonight. Okay, I’m acting like a zoomer, who’re worrying the press and punditry ’cause they get most of their news from social media, and only read the headlines. I didn’t read any more than the headline, because it appeared to tell me all I need to know: Blair is now far more right-wing than Rishi Sunak, who’s being accused of Communism and ‘consocialism’ from the mad, Brexiteer right. This is the man, who headed off to a Republican convention in America with his best bud and fellow war criminal George Dubya Bush. The man whose financial affairs are an impenetrable maze of holding companies owning other holding companies to legally avoid paying tax. A man whose administration was, in the words of Peter Mandelson, extremely relaxed about getting rich, and which slithered up to embrace every celebrity and billionaire it could. A man who believed the state should serve big corporations, not society as a whole and not ordinary people. A man, who raised his head a few days ago to say that the NHS should make greater use of private healthcare.
Peter Hitchens, who is definitely a man of the right and who himself has some very strange ideas, has always had a principled objection to the war in the Iraq because of its illegality and cost in the lives of courageous, patriotic men and women. He calls him ‘the Blair creature’. I think it’s a fair description. Blair is doctrinaire in his stupid, inflexible Thatcherism, and his administration became notorious for lies and spin. So much so that people started calling him ‘Bliar’. He did some good tackling poverty, for which he should receive credit, and under him the NHS was properly funded. But it also had a poisonous attitude towards Labour members and politicians who were not ‘on message’, like Claire Short. If you were out of Tony’s favour, you could expect to be attacked by ‘negative briefing’ against you. Cherie Blair was a lawyer with Matrix chambers, which boasted of its human rights work. But this was ditched when profit called. The traditional chiefs of Fiji staged a military coup that overthrew the Indian prime minister, who had been democratically elected. The new dictatorship then hired Matrix chambers as their lawyers.
I’m fed up with him kibitzing, a good Yiddish word meaning to offer unwanted advice. His economic and political views are just trite, outmoded free trade nonsense. He was also rather keen, if I remember, on secret courts and biometric IDs, both real threats to British democracy that have been picked up in their turn by the Tories. He started the work capabilities tests, which have thrown genuinely deserving disabled people off the benefits they need, and contributed to the humiliating treatment of benefit claimants. And he went much further in privatising the NHS than the Tories ever dared.
He cannot let go of power, and so keep treating us to his nasty opinions. Just like Thatcher couldn’t stop interfering after she was ousted and replaced by John Major.
He deserves to be utterly ignored. Unfortunately, Starmer is his political child, with the same noxious policies and attitudes. A little while ago the Labour store was even selling Blair merchandise. Yeah, like I want to buy that and remember him.
But now that Starmer looks like winning, it seems that Tory Tone thinks he can make a political comeback. After all, the Labour leadership in the southwest were charging members £120 quid for a dinner with Peter Mandelson.
This comes from the article in this fortnight’s Private Eye for the 14th to 27th July 2023, ‘Happy 75th Birthday NHS from MD!’, and the section ‘Compassionate Re-disorganisation’
All universal healthcare systems are feeling the pinch post-pandemic, but the NHS more than most.
According to the OECD, the UK is 18th out of 19 countries for the number of MRI and CT scanners per million population, and second worst for avoidable deaths. Funding via central taxation is fair and efficient, but fails when it put politicians in charge who know nothing about healthcare and usually dislike funding it.
Since MD entered medical school, there have been 19 novice health secretaries. In that time, the number of people over 85 has increased and the population has increased by 10m. A vast number of new, effective but expensive treatment have been developed. Most chronic diseases have mushroomed, from diabetes to depression to dementia. The political solution to these inevitable pressures is usually “reform”.
In my professional lifetime, the NHS had to endure the purchaser-provider split, GP fundholding, competitive tendering, Trusts Foundation Trusts, Primary Care Trusts, Health Improvement Plans, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the Healthcare Commission, the Commission for Health Improvement, Practiced-Based Commissioning, Polyclinics, NHS Commissioning Boards, NHS England, Monitor, Healthwatch, the Care Quality Commission, GP Pathfinder Consortia, Clinical Commissioning Groups, Clinical Support Units, the NHS Trust Development Authority, Public Health England, NHS Improvement, Sustainability and Transformative Plans, Primary Care Networks, Integrated Care Systems and Integrated Care Boards. NHS staff are suffocated by organisational changes and demands. At least current health secretary Steve Barclay is not advocating more reform.
Continuous reform has chewed up money the NHS doesn’t have. In the decade up to the pandemic, real-terms health spending increases per head average 0.4 per cent a year and included four years in which spending per head fell. Unsurprisingly, waiting lists were at 4.5m. In 2021/2022 GP practices were paid an average of £163.65 per registered patient for an entire year’s care, however often you attend. A single private appointment can cost you even more’.
All this increased bureaucracy is a product of Tory and New Labour piecemeal privatisation, which has pushed administration costs up to that of American private healthcare at 40 per cent.
Only Corbyn had the proper answer: renationalisation.
Starmer is just recycling Blairite privatisation policies. And the Dear Leader himself has crawled out from under his rock to advocate more privatisation. Yeah, that’s right: George Dubya’s good old English best buddy and poodle, whose interventions in the Middle East have definitely not displaced 2 million, destroyed whole nations and contributed massively to the refugee crisis. This is the same Tony Blair who invited Thatcher round for tea the day he got his pestilential arse into No. 10, and also went off with Bush to a Republican Convention. But wouldn’t say if he was a true convert to the Republican faith.
Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How To Set It Right (Gibson Square 2013)
Ed West, so the blurb on the back cover says, is a journalist who has written for the Times, Daily Telegraph, Standard and Spectator. He was deputy editor of the Catholic Herald, and is now deputy editor of Unherd. He’s definitely a man of the right, and this is his attack on one of the long-term targets of the right, mass immigration and multiculturalism. The book argues that far from benefiting the country, mass immigration instead does not bring economic prosperity, technological or cultural innovation and dynamism, but instead has created more poverty, division and social isolation. It has weakened the social solidarity supporting the NHS and welfare state. Thanks to the social stresses it has created, multiculturalism has to be supported by a massive increased bureaucracy dedicated to creating racial and cultural equality and to convince an increasingly sceptical general public that this is all beneficial. These strains have also resulted in repressive and authoritarian legislation intended to stamp out any sign of racial or religious friction, legislation which are a direct danger to free speech. Mass immigration and multiculturalism have also formed a pretext for the radical attack on traditional British institutions such as the monarchy and the Christian churches. It has actively harmed the White working class and previous generations of immigrants, who have seen their jobs taken away by new waves of immigrants. It does, however, benefit big business and the anti-racist middle classes by providing them with cheap labour they can exploit while congratulating themselves on their liberalism and anti-racism.
Migrant Experience of Racism
This is not a racist book, however. West describes the racist hostility all too many immigrants faced when coming to the UK. One of these was Eric Braithwaite. Braithwaite was a Guyanese man, who had risked his life for the mother country as an RAF pilot during the War. He was also highly educated with a physics degree. This was at the time when only 2 per cent of the British population went on to university. But when he returned to Britain after the War, he found every door shut in his face when his prospective employers found out he was a man of colour. Eventually he got a job teaching in a sink school. Braithwaite is clearly the type of immigrant Britain should have been glad to receive, and it is a gross injustice that he was the victim of such prejudice.
The book also describes how immigrants and ethnic minorities also take the blame for controversial decisions taken by the radical left to secularise British culture in their name. For example, one of the London boroughs decided that serving Easter biscuits in school meals at Easter was unfairly promoting Christianity in modern, multicultural British society. They therefore took it off the menu. Muslims generally have a high view of Christianity, and so two of the main Muslim organisations complained about the decision and the way they were being blamed for it when they had nothing to do with it.
The Anti-Slavery Movement and the White British Working Class
The book also describes the anti-racist, anti-slavery attitudes of the British White working class in the 19th century. For example, a banquet was given in honour of General Eyre in Southampton following his brutal suppression of the Morant Bay rebellion in the 1860s. But there was an even larger protest against Eyre by the horny handed sons and daughters of toil the other side of the river. The cotton weavers in the Lancashire mills also behaved selflessly during the American Civil War. Much of the cotton they wove was American and produced by slaves. It was in their economic interests to weave it. But they didn’t, preferring to act ethically against a huge moral evil and suffer for it. After the North won, they sent a message to Abraham Lincoln congratulating him on his victory against slavery, to which the victorious president sent a gracious reply of appreciation. And the great Black American anti-slavery campaigner and author, Frederick Douglass, noted the profound opposition to slavery from Britain’s working people. This contrasts with the venom and sneers at the White working class today by members of the self-aware anti-racist middle class, such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. He quotes her describing the White working class as drunken, violent, ignorant, pot-bellied and racist. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that as well as writing for the I and Independent, she also writes articles lamenting modern morals for the Daily Heil.
Not Wanting Your People to Be a Minority Is Not Racist
West further argues that wanting your people to remain the majority ethnic group in your country and that they should also retain their traditional culture is not racist. Nor are White majority areas. Multiculturalists recognise that Black and ethnic minorities settle in the same areas because of their need for the company and social support of their own ethnic groups. Whites should also be allowed to do the same, but are criticised if they do. He also argues, using polls, that restricting immigration tends to reduce racism, not promote it. America was most united across racial lines after the end of the wave of mass immigration in the 1920s and before the removal of the restriction on immigration from other parts of the world than northern Europe in the 1960s. At the same time, polls about immigration in other countries show the same people desiring to end immigration also having a positive view of immigrants themselves.
New Labour and Mass Migration
The book believes that the modern wave of mass immigration in the 21st century was started by Blair’s New Labour as part of an attempt to restructure British demography and society. This is based on civil servant Andrew Neather’s infamous article stating that Blair opened up immigration in order to ‘rub the Tories’ noses in it’. Neather later retracted this statement, but an early copy of the speech Blair or one of his minions made about the decision to increase immigration to the UK contained several paragraphs about the supposed social benefits this would bring, which were cut from the final speech which only mentioned the supposed economic advantages.
No Economic Benefits from Mass Immigration
Supporters of mass immigration and diversity argue that it has massively boosted the economy. In America, this is supposed to constitute billions if not trillions of dollars. But other economists have also concluded that the economic benefits are small, if any. And British stats showing that immigration has benefited the country have failed to include the costs, such as the resources needed to integrate them, the extra infrastructure that needs to be built to house and service them. Social housing is a major element of this. 80 per cent of British population growth, at times, has been drive through immigration. Because of their poverty, many of them are given social housing in preference to the traditional White inhabitants of an area, who may have waited years for a council house. When one London borough adopted a policy where the children of people in council homes inherited its tenure from their parents, it was attacked in the Guardian for creating an all-White area.
Immigration also isn’t introducing the technical or cultural innovations expected of it. While some immigrants are skilled and educated professionals, a very large percentage are unskilled and therefore condemned to lives on welfare. They don’t bring any technological or industrial innovations nor necessarily do they spread any deep knowledge of their culture’s arts and literature either. When they meet and talk to their White friends, it’s more likely to be about contemporary music and the games on the X-box. At the same time, mass immigration isn’t necessary for cultural and technological diffusion across continents. This was done in previous centuries through only a few individual travellers, and through publishing and mass communications.
Mass Immigration Creating Racial Division
And mass immigration is creating more racial division and intolerance. Thanks to satellite broadcasting and the internet, German Turks can spend their entire lives in Germany immersed in Turkish culture. Immigrants are no longer forced to integrate and assimilate due to the distance from their homelands. Contact with their relatives and former compatriots back home is no longer a problem thanks to modern air travel. And some ethnic groups are very careful to send their children back home for extended periods in order to prevent them becoming British. This was one of the issues discussed in an infamous article by the headmaster of a northern school published by a right-wing magazine, the Salisbury Review, in the 1980s. The headmaster was bitterly attacked as a racist and driven out of teaching, even though contemporary research says he was absolutely right. It is probably significant here that there was a poll of West Indians and Asians before they immigrated to Britain. 87 per cent of West Indians felt they were British, and were naturally horrified when they weren’t treated as such when they finally arrived. But only two per cent of Asians said they felt British, and only six per cent said they would be happy with their children identifying as British.
Muslims Alienated by Sexual Permissiveness
The alienation many ethnic minorities, particularly Muslims, feel towards modern British society is also due in part to the new sexual morality. The book quotes Muslim immigrants, who speak fondly of the British society they remember from the arrival. They and their children had White friends. But they don’t want their children to befriend Whites, thanks to the new British culture of sexual permissiveness. This also adds a wrinkle to the demands that immigrants should adopt British values. Citizenship education contains images of a topless woman on a beach and gay men kissing as examples of British values, that immigrants must adopt. But Muslims aren’t the only people not happy with public sexual displays. A number of indigenous Brits do too. So what are these ‘British values’ that immigrants are expected to adopt? He also argues that the decline of Christianity and its traditional attitudes to sex have harmed Black West Indian immigrants. There was already a permissive attitude towards sex due to slavery, but this was counteracted by the Christian faith of their peoples. However, Christianity in Britain was collapsing. As the new immigrants in turn became secular, the taboos against sex outside marriage also decline and the number of fatherless families increased. He also argues that the establishment of what in Britain is called Family Allowance also caused similar destruction of the Black family on the other side of the Pond. Mothers were given benefit only so long as they had children to bring up, and so there developed a trend for unmarried women to give birth to children in order to continue to receive money to support them.
Muslims Identification Growing
As ethnic minority communities have grown, so they have become more distant. This has been exacerbated by attempts to integrate and promote them by adopting leaders from within those communities as their political spokespeople. This was, again, introduced by Blair’s New Labour. But the number of people entering the forums and organisations set up to represent them are small. These organisations act as platforms for immigrant groups to compete against each other for state funding. It was supposedly competition between Blacks and Asians over this which caused the 2001 race riots between them. It is also one of the causes the Muslim community has become more religious. While relatively few Muslims actually attend the mosque, the majority strongly identify as Muslim and stress the importance of Islam to them. The first generation of post-War migrants were much more secular. The book argues that this has occurred because it was religious, observant Muslims who put themselves forwards as their community’s leaders. A parallel process is also seen in the White population in and around Muslim areas. While they remain secular in practice, they are more likely to identify as Christian than the rest of White Britain. These increasingly segregated communities are often served by racially segregated schools. West describes this occurring in one northern town, where two different communities sent their children to two different schools. Both schools, however, had excellent grades. The local authorities tried to break down barriers between them by closing and demolishing the two schools in favour of a new school which would serve both. This was a disaster. Grades plummeted and the students fought each other. The violence only stopped with the installation of CCTV cameras.
Violent Crime
Mass immigration has also brought with it an increase in violent crime, to the extent that three London boroughs now have armed police on regular patrols, breaking the long tradition of unarmed policing. While there are a number of other factors involved, the various Caribbean nations from which these immigrant communities come have murder rates far higher than the average British. It’s therefore not an accident that three London boroughs have regular patrols of armed police.
Repressive Laws to tackle Increasing Racial Friction
In order to combat racial friction and violence, the authorities have passed increasingly repressive legislation. This includes the various laws passed after the MacPherson report, which made it illegal to say anything racist or otherwise bigoted even in your own home. This legislation now classes as illegal any comment which another person may find offensive, leaving what may be construed as racist or offensive dangerously vague. At the same time, the search for racist motives in crime may resemble a medieval inquisition or Maoist interrogation. He gives as an example of this the investigation of the police responsible for investigating the murder of Stephen Lawrence. They initially concluded that the four accused weren’t guilty and so released them. The four were then investigated again, contrary to the law of double jeopardy, which says you can’t be tried twice for the same offence. Again, they were released without charge. The police themselves were then subject to an investigation. When they were summoned to court, the prosecution was so desperate to find a racist motive that they were even asked what thoughts were going through their minds. This is probably one of the most controversial sections of a controversial book. I don’t doubt that Stephen Lawrence was the victim of a racist murder, and that there is a problem with racism in the Met police. But this section argues that the attempt to find that racism has broken the traditional legal principles protecting ordinary Brits from state persecution.
Eurabia
These issues are going to get worse as the White population declines and the non-White grows. Projections indicate that Whites are to become a minority by 2066. The book discusses ‘Eurabia’, the idea suggested by the scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, that the greater fertility of the Muslim population will result in Europe becoming majority Muslim by the end of this century. In fact, the Muslim birth rate around the world is falling, but the differential between it and White births will be greater because of the much lower White birth rate, which is below the level of population replacement. The British population with immigration may rise to 90 million, but without it, it would decline to 57 million.
Britain is therefore faced with the problem of supporting and caring for an increasingly elderly population. In order to do this, it is suggested that more immigrants should be imported. But then we would also have to face the problem of importing more people to care for them in their turn. When applied to Europe as a whole, you’re looking at billions of people being needed. The solution the book recommends is to raise the retirement age. The Japanese, meanwhile, have also been spurred to innovate technologically and create robots to do this job, something that may not happen here if cheap immigrant labour is available. Similarly, the introduction of immigrants to solve labour shortages also is no solution. These shortages are generally short term, but immigrants, once settled, can’t be sent back home. Which is guest worker schemes are always failures.
Mass Immigration Benefits Big Business and the Middle Class Elite
So who benefits from mass immigration? Big business and the woke middle classes. Big business has demanded more immigration, because they benefit from cheap labour. And immigration does not raise wages. Studies have found that wage rises due to immigration are very modest at around half a percent or so. This is except for the lowest tenth of the working population, whose wages are actually depressed. A few years ago the Black Caribbean community in London complained that they were losing work thanks to immigrant Polish workers. The woke middle classes benefit, because they can rave about the new cuisine the immigrants bring with them, as well as cheap domestic help. And there seems to be an element of hypocrisy here. These groups are wealthy, and this insulates them from the worst effects of mass immigration. They often don’t live in ethnic areas. The non-Whites they know are also wealthy, which seals them off from the rest of the population. These middle class liberals look down on and sneer at working class Whites because of their continued adherence to and support for traditional British institutions like the Crown and Christianity. The highly educated elites see no need for these to exist, but their education and wealth prevents them from being damaged by those institution’s absence.
Decline in Trust between People
At the same time mass immigration is reducing social capital, the social solidarity holding society together. Here the book cites the research of the American liberal scholar, Putnam, who found that the highest levels of trust in American communities were in monocultural areas, or areas in which there were few people of different ethnicity. Not only did trust decline between communities in multicultural areas, but it also declined between people of the same ethnic group. This has dangerous implications for the welfare state and the NHS. People support welfare benefits when they believe they’re being spent on people like them. Public support for welfare spending dropped markedly after Thatcher’s election. While the book acknowledges that she might have had something to do with it, he also argues that it was the result of mass immigration. Similarly, the NHS was set up during a period of great British social solidarity. But it is questionable if the same amount of social solidarity exists today to support it, if it was being founded now. And this goes for the social capital that underpins key British institutions as a whole. The book speculates that we may be running on the last remaining reserves of social capital that our ancestors built up. As for the woke middle class who support multiculturalism and decry traditional British culture, these include people like the folksinger Billy Bragg. Bragg gave a speech against racism in one of the London boroughs, before moving to Somerset, one of the Whitest areas of the country, because of its superior quality of life.
The Wars and Loss of Confidence in Western Culture
The book also tells the history of post-War immigration and the consequent controversies and conflicts, as well as the events that led to the catastrophic loss of conflict in traditional European culture that saw European intellectuals look to solutions in the mass movement of people from outside the continent. This began with the horrors of the First World War, which convinced writers like Somerset Maugham, speaking through one of his characters, that British culture was all ‘bunk’. This was followed by the Second World War and the Holocaust, which made European intellectuals turn against racism and has also acted to rule out any discussion of the detrimental effects of mass immigration.
Post-War Immigration and Labour and Conservative Attitudes
The post-War wave of mass immigration began with the Empire Windrush. At the time, however, this was considered to be only a minor event. A navy ship did follow it, and there were discussions in the House whether such a large number of non-Whites should be allowed to come to Britain, but most people expected them to stay only for a short while before leaving. Most of the opposition to the new non-White immigration at the time came from the trade unions and Labour, who were afraid of non-White migrants taking White workers jobs, as well as the disruption to British society through the influx of so many non-Whites. The Tories were the most tolerant towards mass immigration, influenced by imperial paternalism but also the view that such immigration would only be temporary and would not change the demographic nature of the country. West doesn’t mention the Conservative fringe that supported the rising anti-immigration and Fascist movements, or the infamous Conservative election poster with its slogan ‘If you want a n***er for a neighbour, vote Labour’. Instead he mentions Lord Altrincham as an example of those Tories opposed to immigration. Altrincham had radical views which were very odd for a man of the right. He wanted to abolish the monarchy and ended up writing for the Observer. The Left’s stance on immigration has now been reversed with the trade unions calling for more immigration. The book then goes on to discuss the mass immigration of Asians to this country through their expulsion first from Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya and the Uganda by that thug Idi Amin. Britain was not required to take them in, but did so as under the imperial and commonwealth agreements with India Britain had assumed the role of their protector in Africa. Another critical episode was the 1948 Canadian Nationality Act. Before this, anyone who was a citizen of any British colony or territory was automatically a British citizen. The Canadians revised their nationality laws, forcing Britain to define its own. Britain did so by granting citizenship to commonwealth citizens, which unintentionally contributed to further mass immigration by migrants seeking work in the mother country.
The Fascist Fringe
The book also describes the rise of the far right in Britain, and makes a number of claims that I haven’t read elsewhere and which I think need checking. It states that Arnold Leese and his League of Empire Loyalists founded the National Front, and that the BNP was founded by John Tyndall. This is true, as is the statement that Tyndall used to dress as a Nazi. However, he states that Leese wasn’t an anti-Semite and threw Tyndall and his goons out of the NF because he didn’t like Nazis. This is the bit I haven’t heard before. This was defeated, the book claims, by Tyndall’s Nazis infiltrating the NF.
The book also covers the emergence of the English Defence League, which it says is anti-racist and has the slogan ‘Black and White Unite and Fight’. This is true of their public stance, but later investigation has shown that it was stuffed full of former BNP Nazis, including its founder, Tommy Robinson.
Enoch Powell and the ‘Rivers of Blood’
Then comes Enoch Powell and his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Brian, one of the great commenters here, has warned me against being taken in by the claims that Powell himself wasn’t racist. I’ve heard contrasting claims about Powell in this regard. The book claims he wasn’t personally racist. He had himself saved a Jewish German from Nazi persecution by obtaining for him asylum in Britain. In Africa he refused to stay in a hotel which had a colour bar and wouldn’t allow in a Black friend he was with. He could also speak fluent Urdu. Powell was motivated to make his speech by letters he had received from his constituents, one of whom could not be found later. I’ve heard that Powell started out by believing that Britain had a duty to look after its subordinate peoples and that he had been a member of organisations dedicated to helping non-White immigrants settle in the UK. According to this account, it was indeed his constituents’ letters that caused him to reverse his opinion on this matter. When checked, these incidents hadn’t occurred. I was told that they were largely the fantasies of a deranged old woman, who was actually supported by the Black family that lived next door. On the other hand, his speaking Urdu doesn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t racist. Powell had been a civil servant in India, and they received more money if they had an Indian language. Regardless of these arguments, what shocked people was the virulent tone. Powell was sacked from the Tory government by Ted Heath, and became the target of a campaign of vilification and intimidation. His house had swastikas scrawled on it, and crowds chanted ‘Disembowel Enoch Powel at him. The book also discusses the rise of the anti-Islam politicians Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders. Fortuyn was a gay, Marxist sociology lecturer, who turned against Islam because of its vicious intolerance to homosexuality. And both he and Wilders have been subject to the same campaigns to silence and intimidate them as Powell. The book notes that Heath won the next election after Powell’s infamous speech, which he believes was responsible for it. But you could also say it was due to a number of factors which had nothing to do with it, or that Heath won precisely because he sacked Powell.
The Growth of Militant Islam
The book goes on to discuss the particular threat from parts of Islam, such as the murder of Theo van Gogh by a Moroccan immigrant angry at his polemical film, Fitna, and the Danish cartoons controversy. The Muslim who started the campaign against them was an asylum seeker, who’d been thrown out of a number of Arab countries. He‘d chosen to emigrate to Denmark as the Danes had treated his son for a serious health condition. The dossier of offensive cartoons with which he toured the Muslim world to inflame opinion against the Jyllands Aftenbladet, the local paper that had published them, included several that the paper had not published. The paper had taken the decision to publish drawings of the Prophet because the author of a respectful, mainstream book about him had been told that she couldn’t include any drawings of him, even though these were intended to be respectful. Since these events and the 7/7 bombings in London, we’ve had the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the murder of Thomas Patie in France for showing the Hebdo cartoons to his class, and a British teacher being forced into hiding for doing the same. British cinemas have also been forced to withdraw a film about the Prophet made from the Shi’a point of view following mass demonstrations of angry Muslims claiming that it was blasphemous. There has thus been considerable discussion of the threat of Islam, but the book argues that this is the only area where criticism of the multicultural consensus is possible. Radical secularists have been moved by these incidents to demand the removal of religion from the public square, but their targets are always Christianity. One such radical group staged an exhibition of blasphemous art in Dublin. This was all directed against and mocking Christianity. There was nothing about Islam, despite the fact that Christians weren’t assassinating people, doubtless for the good reason that the organisers and artists didn’t want to spend their life hiding under armed guard.
The book also criticises British education policy for creating division with some of its unworkable recommendations. This includes the 1970s Bullock report, which recommended that ethnic children should be encouraged to speak their own languages at school, and that teachers should be prepared to speak to West Indian children in Creole.
Politics Fracturing Along Racial Lines
Much of this legislation has been pushed through by the Labour party, who benefited from the support of ethnic minorities. Most of these support Labour as against a small proportion that vote Tory. This brings with it the possibility that British politics will fracture along racial lines. In the US, the Democrat party is an alliance of rich Whites with Blacks and other ethnic minorities, while the Republican party has garnered the White vote. Something like this could happen in Britain with the Labour dependent on ethnic votes while White Brits support the Tories. I’m not quite so sure this could happen, as the Tories are reaching out to ethnic minorities with their selection of Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister and various ethnic members of the cabinet. I think its because of this that some Tories seem to be turning to Tice’s Reform Party and Reclaim. A distinctly Muslim party, Respect, has also emerged following Lutfur Rahman’s removal from the Labour party for corruption. Rahman’s Bangladeshi, and the party is heavily supported by them. This was repeated last year when Rahman was again expelled from Labour to found the Aspire party, again largely confined to London Bangladeshi Muslims.
Universalism
The book also tackles the supporting attitudes and ideologies behind multiculturalism. This includes universalism, the idea that people are the same everywhere and that humanity has somehow outgrown the need for nation states and borders. This view demands the creation of supranational bodies like the EU and for the free movement of peoples across nations and continents. But this is very much a utopian vision. National borders and identities are still very much supported by the majority of people.
Britain Not a Nation of Immigrants
He also takes aim at the view that Britain is a nation of immigrants. In fact, the bulk of British genetic identity was formed in the late Palaeolithic and early Mesolithic. Subsequent waves of incomers have added very little since, not even the Neolithic settlers who brought farming to Britain. Nor have Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Normans substantially changed the British genome. This aboriginal genetic material is found in various proportions throughout the peoples of the UK. It’s highest in Cornwall and Ireland at 87 per cent and lowest in the English with 67 per cent. Besides this, the subsequent incomers -Romans, Saxons and Normans – were invaders, not immigrants. The historic immigrant communities to Britain were numerically tiny. The Huguenots, who are often cited as an example of mass immigration before the present day, numbered only 40.000 – 50,000 and their immigration to Britain following Louis XIV’s persecution was spread out over a century. This modern mass immigration is unprecedented in its scale.
He also contrasts the culturally separatist stance and hostility of parts of the immigrant community to White British culture with the Jewish community. When one of the first Jewish schools opened in London, it had the specific object of producing proud Jews, who were also proud Englishmen. And they wanted to be English, because the English were proud. Now multiculturalism has the aim of destroying that pride.
White Youth and Black Rap Culture
The book also claims that British culture is also being adversely affected through the worst aspects of Black youth culture. He talks about the numbers of Whites who have affected ‘Jafaican’ accents so they behave like Ali G. The rapper and DJ Tim Westwood, who comes from a very establishment family, is an example of this. He supports David Starkey’s claim that the White rioters in the 2012 riots were ‘culturally Black’. But it’s difficult to suggest there is a direct connection between Whites consuming Black rap music and fashion and rioting. Also, the study of the left-behind White community in Dagenham and Barking revealed that some Whites joined the riots as an expression of protest and despair against the government they felt had ignored them. This may have included individuals who were racist, and so had nothing to do with the influence of Black culture. Besides which, this study noted that some members of this left-behind community supported themselves through theft and other crimes as part of their way of life. These are the kind of people, who may well have joined the riot without any connection to, and in many ways opposed, to Black urban culture.
The Growth of Quangos to Enforce Multiculturalism
It is also concerned to shut down debate through a network of quango and regulatory bodies set up to implement it and convince the public that multiculturalism and diversity are very good things. There are 240 such organisations, all funded by the government. The only group opposed to mass immigration, Migration Watch, receives no official funding whatsoever.
The book ends with a number of recommendations for tackling the problem. These include an end to mass immigration; and only permitting immigrants with a certain amount of wealth to settle. Interestingly, after bashing the Labour throughout the book, it states that Labour’s working-class traditions might provide the solution to this problem as well.
Conclusion
It is clear that we really do need a proper debate about mass immigration. 80 per cent of the population are opposed to it, but they are ignored by the authorities. The treaties permitting it were drafted in an age when the world was still divided up between the great empires and travel between countries and continents was far more difficult than today. I don’t doubt that mass immigration is creating problems for Britain and the west, and think that West has a point when he compares the official attitude to multiculturalism with that of Communism in the former Soviet Union. There, if there were failures in the system, it was held to be due to not enough Communism. But people still acted as capitalists, despite the ideology. Similarly, when multiculturalism causes problems, it is not because of multiculturalism but because there is too little of it. More multiculturalism is needed.
But a clampdown on mass immigration raises awkward moral problems, particularly towards asylum seekers. Few moral people wish to deny sanctuary to the genuine victims of terrible persecution, quite apart from the accusations of racism that accompany any attempt to reduce immigration. This is no doubt one reasons why decent politicians don’t want to tackle the issue, nor do they wish to be seen to be giving ideological aid to the far right. A few weeks ago comic actor and game show host Asil Nadir presented a show intended to persuade the British public to accept more asylum seekers, who had ‘come from really horrible countries’. There are no programmes presenting the opposite view.
The book presents a convincing case that mass immigration is harming this country and that it very much needs tackling before the problems get significantly worse.
Justin Gest, The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Uncertainty (Oxford: OUP 2016).
The White working class in this study refers to manual workers without college degrees. These are people who were previously in the 20th century at the centre of British and American politics when the manufacturing industry was still the basis for much of the economy. The book examines two communities, Dagenham and Barking in east London in the UK, and Youngstown, Ohio in the US, as examples of these communities and what they may say about the wider, White working class in both countries. There are significant differences between the two, but also profound similarities. They enjoyed good wages and conditions secured by the unions as well as welfare benefits, and a privileged position compared to ethnic minorities due to their skin colour and shared racial origins with the majority population. Both communities were hit hard by deindustrialisation after the 1970s. In Dagenham and Barking, the factories opened when the area was built as a garden suburb earlier in the 20th century closed. Many workers were particularly affected by the mass redundancies at the Ford motor factory. Youngstown, Ohio, had been built as a steel town, and was one of the major centres of that industry in America. It too went into steep economic decline when the mills closed, as manufacturing moved overseas where labour was cheaper. The section of the White working and middle classes that could moved out to the suburbs, and were replaced by non-Whites moving into the area because of the cheaper housing. This affects multiculturalism as a whole. Although people in Britain and America have accepted it, in practice White and ethnic communities are segregated from each other in separate spaces. As neoliberalism became the dominant economic theory, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic concentrated their attention on those segments of society, like the middle class, that has successfully adapted to it and the rising immigrant and ethnic minority communities.
Barking and Dagenham
These communities as a result have become acutely marginalised. They feel alienated from mainstream politics as, in their view, the mainstream, establishment politicians do not seek their opinions and actively ignore them. They are also acutely resentful of what they feel is the favour given to ethnic minorities, who they feel are now above them in the social hierarchy. The result of this in Dagenham and Barking is widespread support for radical right groups such as UKIP, the English National Association and the BNP, who had 12 members elected to Tower Hamlets council in 2005 with over 30,000 votes. These councillors were voted out four years later due to absenteeism and incompetence. Nevertheless, support for the BNP at that election was actually higher.
The book also examines the marginalisation of the White working class as it complicates notions of marginalisation based on race. The White communities studies are definitely marginalised, despite sharing the skin colour of the dominant ethnicity. The book also examines some of the general attitudes and social codes defining White working class identity. In Britain its understood in terms of heritage and bloodline, partly due to the remaining influence of the aristocratic conceptions underpinning British society. In Barking and Dagenham there was an active hostility to social ambition combined with a virulent anti-intellectualism. Gifted children were actively discouraged from thinking about going to university because ‘that wasn’t for the likes of us’. There is a story of parents destroying their children’s school coursework. Those who do try to become a little better off may be resented. At the same time, people are considered to remain working class even if they ascend to the middle classes. Thus, former working class people will retain their local, working class accents and speech as well as style of dress. This means that they will be discriminated against in favour of people from the upper and middle classes by their employer. One of the men interviewed works for the Scum, a newspaper aimed at the Tory working class. He describes how he is, nevertheless, given lower status jobs at the paper thanks to his working class origins than his co-workers from higher up the social hierarchy.
Many of residents are in council housing, and this, according to the book, is partly the cause of the high rate of unmarried motherhood in the community. Children live with their parents unless they have children, when they become entitled to council accommodation. As a result, many young women become pregnant simply to move away from their parents. However, family ties remain strong and children remain in constant touch with their parents, not least to benefit from the help they give in childrearing. At the same time, the social infrastructure of the White community is weak, centring around a few remaining pubs. The borough is a Labour stronghold, though this has not brought its people many benefits. Margaret Hodge, the Labour MP for Barking, is the Rt. Hon. Margaret Hodge, due to her marriage to the owner of Britain’s largest private steel foundry. A wealthy woman, she lives outside the area in Islington. Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham, also lives in a much wealthier area, Notting Hill. There is a similar problem with local civil servants. These are better educated than the local people and identify with the wider attitudes of middle class public sector workers, and so look down on the people they are meant to serve.As a result, working class involvement in politics is minimal. Rather than serve on the council, working class Whites instead become active in their local resident’s associations.
And although it’s a Labour safe-seat, there is a actually little difference in attitude towards ethnic minorities between Labour and BNP supporters. The book reproduces a letter one woman wrote to David Cameron complaining about conditions there which included comments on the behaviour and conduct of members of the local ethnic minorities. There are also similar remarks from others, prefaced by ‘I’m not racist, but’. Some of these are complaints that ethnic minority business owners will not give jobs to Whites, nor will the Asian landlords let accommodation to them. Here I wonder if these claims should be investigated to see whether there is something in these allegations, and if the racism is all just on the side of the Whites. There is also an interview with a young man, a member of the BNP. He has hated Blacks since he was brutally mugged by a group of them when he was 17, as well as impressed by the militarism and racism of Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious propaganda film about one of Hitler’s despicable Nuremberg rallies. This shows you how powerful Riefenstahl was a film-maker, and how Nazi propaganda can still exert its foul influence today. The man himself, however, is interesting in that he is of mixed ethnic origins – a Muslim Turkish Cypriot father and a White English mother.
These sentiments are not shared by the younger generation, who have grown up in a multiracial society, and who have Black and Asian friends and romantic partners. However, these more tolerant children believe that the settled population should receive state aid and benefits before immigrants. The book concludes that race in itself isn’t the defining factor in marginalisation here, but concern for social status, which includes race along with social class.
Although many of the people in the community are on state benefits, they look down as shirkers and scroungers long-term benefit claimants. And while whiteness has been a privilege, it can also be a burden when the status and prosperity they expect it to bring does not materialise. Another problem of the community’s mindset is nostalgia for the past. The people wish for the restoration of the old order of manufacturing and factories. Unlike the people of Youngstown, brought up in the American ideology of limited government and self-sufficiency, they also see the state as a provider, though one whose attitudes and decisions are inscrutable.
Youngstown
Although similar in many ways to Barking and Dagenham, Youngstown differs in having a history of real, overt institutional racism and massive corruption. It was very much an American factory town, where the mills also provided their workers with much of the social infrastructure, largely due to bitter struggle by the town’s strong trade unions. Workers at the mills were also graded and given different types of work according to their ethnic origins. At the top were English and Anglo-Americans, who were given management jobs. Other ethnicities, such as Italians, Hungarians and Greeks, were given successively lower paid and worse jobs. The very lowest, at the furnace, were given to Blacks. Blacks also lived in segregated housing separate from White areas, and banks would not lend to Blacks wishing to purchase property there. Race relations were also harmed when the factory management took on Black workers as scab labour in order to break the White unions. While the Blacks did not know that they were being used, there is still considerable resentment about this even today. The situation is not helped by the aggressive, antagonistic attitude of local Black politicians, who have angrily declared that it’s their time now. Some of the Whites also complain about the aggressive, hostile behaviour of the Black families that have moved into the area, and of Black youths entering it to cause trouble.
With the closure of the mills, much of the social infrastructure also collapsed. As with Barking and Dagenham, those who could, got out, leaving many homes abandoned. Many of them are being deliberately demolished by the council, or burnt down by vigilantes, in order to stop them being used as drug dens, or by prostitutes or for storing stolen goods. Other, less aggressive forms of vigilante action include residents coming together to plant gardens and trees on the area’s streets.
Americans have a strong work ethic, and these people want to be self-reliant. Many are working two jobs. Others are scrappers, collecting waste material and objects that they repair and sell on. There is a problem, in that those claiming benefits have to walk a tight-rope so that they do not earn too much not to qualify for food stamps and medicaid. As with the people of Barking and Dagenham, they look down on those on full time benefits, such as the people in the trailer site as well as Blacks, who are also seen as benefit scroungers. They draw a difference between cash and cashless benefits. Blacks are seen as drawing cash benefits, and so count as scroungers while Whites on medicare and food stamps are not.
The area has also suffered from a long history of corruption and domination by the mob. The mob ran the politicians and negotiated with the mill owners and unions, so that the town was governed through backroom deals. Nobody objected to this when times were good. Now those times are gone, this corruption is actively harming the town. One example given of this is the poor tarmacking of the streets due to the mob raking off most of the money needed to do a proper job. At the centre of this corruption, allegedly, was the Cafaro family, who owned the steel mills and dictated to the local politicians, although many are naturally reluctant to name them. A few years previously, the mayor, local sheriff, prosecutor and other local dignitaries were all convicted of corruption and similar charges. Even now, local councillors may charge bribes of $3,000 to $4,000 for their services. And many things get done through personal favours to the right people, such as the man who runs a coffee shop and so has acquired the nickname of ‘the Godfather’. Those members of the various council services, who weren’t corrupt, were placed under considerable pressure. One woman, a building inspector, recalls how the mayor frequently gave orders to overlook violations of building regulations and to continue working on buildings that were unsafe. She states that this affected her so much she used to have anxiety attacks before going to work, and used to joke about getting a mirror on a stick so that she could look underneath her car to see if it had been tampered with.
Since the closure of the mills, Youngstown has tried to attract other employers. The desperation to find someone to fill the vacancy left by the mills has resulted in the town’s exploitation by incoming companies, who have taken the opportunity to negotiate extremely favourable contracts that give the community little in return. Despite the dangers, many Youngstowners also look to the fracking companies to set up and provide work.
The book also considers that the local people are further hindered in tackling their poverty through their belief in the American Dream. As in Britain, social mobility has ceased. But Youngstown’s people believe that if they only work hard enough, one day they’ll finally prosper. They thus tend to blame themselves for their misfortunes, rather than the economy and local situation. The equation of status with income, rather than class, means that they have a more flexible attitude towards social mobility and class boundaries than their counterparts in Barking and Dagenham.
Unlike Barking and Dagenham, however, there is little, if any, local support for the radical right. While some radical right organisations have support in the neighbouring counties, there is no support for the Klan, the Sovereign Citizen’s movement and the like in Youngstown. However, questioning revealed that many Youngstowners would support a hypothetical third party like Britain’s BNP, with a policy of cutting immigration, countering Islam and supporting Christianity. Youngstown is similar to Barking and Dagenham in that it is a safe seat. The area consistently votes Democrat. Independent candidates either don’t win, or are swiftly absorbed by the Democrat party. As with the Labour party in Barking and Dagenham, this lack of competition means that Democrat politicians effectively govern as they wish with little interest in what their community really wants or needs. Some of those interviewed believe that the local politicos are only there to enrich themselves anyway. There is also hostility and suspicion towards the White landlords outside the area, whom they blame for letting properties in the area to Blacks.
The book is partly concerned to explore why White working class people, in similar circumstances, take different attitudes towards politics. Some join pro-system political activities, which means becoming involved through democratic institutions such as signing a petition or joining a union. Others become anti-system, joining radical, anti-state organisations like the BNP. Others still may become temporarily inactive politically, but are waiting for the time when circumstances are more favourable. Others see no point in political activity at all, and become politically withdrawn. The book seeks to investigate whether particular forms of marginalisation result in different forms of political activity. It seems that political marginalisation and the indifference of politicians can make people join democratic and anti-system forms of political activity. However, social deprivation is the motive behind support for Trump and the Tea Party. He also considers why working class voters often vote against their own interests. The answer is that White working class Americans are economically liberal but socially conservative. The Republicans therefore obtain their support by campaigning on social and moral issues. But Trump’s own, ambiguous stance on issues like abortion and gay rights has not prevented American Roman Catholics from supporting him.
He also examines the changing nature of the various ethnic groups considered White. This could be extremely narrow – in the past it was only Whites from northwest Europe. However, it has since been broadened to include southern Europeans, Slavs and even Lebanese, Armenians and people from the Levant. Despite living in America for generations, these ethnicities still have an attachment to their homelands and cultures, often celebrating them in special days. This, in his view, makes Whiteness a poor identity, as it consequently doesn’t mean much, and advises instead that people organise along lines of class or sexuality. And in both Britain and America he sees the stress on a separate White identity and hostility to non-Whites as dividing the working class as a whole and preventing working class Whites from finding class allies among other ethnic groups.
The book ends with a series of recommendations on how politicians can appeal to the White working class, who are still a large and powerful political constituency.
Since the book was published the political landscape has changed. Trump has been and gone, though he may yet return. UKIP has imploded, and has been replaced by a number of other right-wing populist parties, Richard Tice’s Reform and Laurence Fox’s Reclaim. Many working class Brits, it has been considered, voted ‘Leave’ in the EU referendum, not because they wanted to leave the European Union, but because they wanted to send a message to shock the complacent governing elites. Jeremy Corbyn, whom the book mistakenly characterises as a ‘far left socialist’ – has been ousted from the leadership of the Labour party by Keir Starmer’s New Labour Thatcherites. The ‘red wall’ Labour constituencies in the north of England were also breached as the communities there voted Tory against the stagnant politics of areas that had consistently voted Labour.
This book helps explain these developments and give a wider understanding of White working class alienation in Britain and America. It notes that politicians have found it difficult to appeal to these communities without alienating other supporters, like the ethnic minorities the book considers to be the future of the Labour party in Britain. Keir Starmer has announced that the White working class, along with ethnic minorities and women, are a group he wants to see given greater representation in politics with the proposed appointment of a diversity tsar. Whether this is anything other than an empty promise, given his record of breaking so many and the fact that New Labour is solidly middle class neoliberal, is a good question.
I notice that Angela Rayner and the Labour party have announced that if they get into power, they will launch a ‘diversity tsar’ to remove obstacles preventing ethnic minorities, women and the working class entering politics. This sort-of ties in with one of the books I’ve been reading this past week, Justin Gest’s The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (Oxford: OUP 2016). This is a study of two left-behind White working class communities, Barking and Dagenham in east London, Britain, and Youngstown in the US. These are part of the wider White working class community who were previously at the centre of British and American politics. However, their power and influence has declined due to the decline of domestic manufacturing industry and its movement abroad, the rise of ethnic minorities and immigrants, the aspirant working and middle class moving out of their areas and adapting to the neoliberal political order. As a consequence of these changes, the mainstream parties have moved their attention away from them to the other social groups. As a result, they feel abandoned and that their opinions and views are ignored by politicians and civil servants. One result of this is the climate of racism, which saw Derek Beacon and his BNP storm-troopers get elected on Tower Hamlets council. Extremist racist groups like the Klan are absent, or largely absent, in Youngstown. White working class America is far more likely to vote for Trump and the Tea Party as the radical alternatives.
The book is an exhaustive sociological study, with particular attention to the question of marginalisation. These are marginalised communities, although they belong to the dominant ethnic group, and so complicate models that see marginalisation in terms of race. In the final chapter, however, Gest offers some suggestions for how the mainstream political parties in Britain and the US and can appeal to the White working class and integrate them once more into conventional politics. They are:
Recruit candidates from the ranks of the non-elites. It is not sufficient to hammer the excesses of big business and cast the other side as the keepers of an elitist plutocracy. Working class voters want to see candidates with working-class backgrounds. Democrats should not simply assume that their opposition will always be led by a private equity tycoon – a circumstance which made them look working class by comparison in 2012. In fact, the media net worth of Democratic Members of the House of Representatives has risen substantially, up nearly $200,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars just between 2004 and 2009 (Center for Responsive Politics 2013). Meanwhile, the media net worth of Republican House Members was down by nearly the same amount over that time period, closing the gap between the parties to less than $100,000 (ibid.) In Britain, election laws allow official to represent constituencies in which they do not reside. Barking’s Margaret Hodge lives in a posh neighbourhood of Islington, while Dagenham’s John Cruddas resides in Notting Hill. The white working class understands that politicians likely won’t have calloused hands, but they also yearn to see their own reflection in a representative who understands manual labour. It’s not enough to produce candidates who attempt to connect with the middle class based on their ancestry-for example, by indicating that at some point in their family lineage, someone was middle or working class. The African-American, Latino, and lesbian and gay communities can all see visible representation in party leadership; the white working class wants no less.
Employ working class narratives. When candidates are not working class themselves, they can still show signs of empathy by channeling the language and lifestyle on constituents. That means making reference to their realities of unstable jobs, declining wages and benefits, and a greater strain on family life because of these burdens. It also means emphasising the common goal that everyone should be able to work one job, forty hours a week, and take care of their families. Working class voters see the parties doing visible outreach to other constituent communities and they want the same consideration and thought put toward wooing them. They will listen for language that explicitly includes them and lifts them up, favouring politicians who try to earn their vote over those who simply assume they have it.
Do not conflate the working class with the helpless. Most working class people are not earning the minimum wage, nor do they think of themselves as reliant on government welfare programs (even when they are benefiting from many of them). They want to be seen as independent, self-sufficient, and hard-working, and as such, they won’t be satisfied by a candidate or party who simply promises to protect or expand poverty assistance programs or raise the minimum wage. They want to know that their political leaders both understand their struggles, and distinguish them from those of people who are another rung down on the income ladder.
Do not assume unions are synonymous with the working class. Times have changed, and most working class people are not unionised anymore. Both parties and candidates must eschew shortcuts, address their constituents directly, and stop simply depending on unions as interlocutors-especially given that unions’ status with many of these voters is questionable at best, as this book shows.
Challenge nostalgia with hope. This book has demonstrated the mobilising power of nostalgia, but also its destructive consequences. No party will ever deliver on promises to turn back the clock, so leaders must seize the challenge to envision a future that incorporates white working class people into the global economy and into coexistence with other minorities. There is an opportunity waiting for leftist leaders who can appeal to white working class voters in these ways, especially if they go hand in hand with pursuing labour standards and strengthening social protections. There is also an opportunity for rightists who believe in egalitarian meritocracy that rewards hard work and enterprise, especially if they demonstrate a new commitment to ensuring that everyone who works hard can succeed, despite their status at birth.’
The book concludes:
‘Ultimately, contrary to conventional portrayals, white working class voters are rational. They seek representatives who care about their grievances. They respond to parties and organisations that invest in them with time, resources and candidates. This is not different from any other branch of the electorate. The difference is that, in both the United States and the United Kingdom, social and economic forces have isolated the white working class as a political constituency, to the extent that many in this demographic feel like a peripheral afterthought in a country they once defined. A group with a powerful vote has thus been neglected, and populists are beginning to take notice.’
I intend to review the book later. As I said, it was published in 2016. Since then Trump has been and gone, though he still haunts American politics from the wings. UKIP has also collapsed, but we now have its successors Reform and Reclaim. The Tories make populist appeals to the White working class while doing nothing about the real causes of their poverty and discontent. And I’m sceptical that Starmer will do anything for them. New Labour concentrated very much on the swing voters, who had adapted and were profiting from neoliberal economic policies. They looked down on the working class, hence Owen Jones’ defence of them, Chavs, can be read as partly a rebuttal of the Labour right. Jeremy Corbyn offered the working class as a whole proper solutions to their problems, but he’s been expelled along with his supporters.
It remains to be seen whether this diversity initiative to promote ethnic minority, female and working class candidates is anything but a mere gesture to a party that is now, in its MPs, very much wealthy middle class.
Yesterday I put up a piece wondering if gay Americans and Brits were abandoning Pride and some of the mainstream gay organisations. This followed a video on YouTube of the operations manager of the group Gays Against Groomers angrily tearing apart the gay flag. Gays Against Groomers was set up to combat the gender ideology being taught to children, which they feel is a form of indoctrination and sexual predation. Instead of the Pride flag, the man pointed to the American flag as the banner which represented gays and all Americans.
Barry Wall, the EDIJester, and Clive Simpson and Dennis Kavanagh of the Queens’ Speech podcast, are gender critical gay YouTubers. They are extremely critical of the mainstream organisations for their focus on trans rights to the exclusion of ordinary gay men and women. They also feel that the trans ideology has become a new form of eugenics and gay conversion therapy by encouraging gender nonconforming young people, who in most cases would pass through their dysphoria to grow up to be ordinary gays, to transition, rather than accept their natal sexual identity. And many gays are also saying that they aren’t going to Pride marches because of the overt displays of kink and fetish.
JP, one of the great commenters on this blog, posted his perspective on this issue from across the Pond. He writes
‘Well yea, I haven’t been to a Pride parade in … over a decade. The weekend of events were drunk Allies and naked people walking streets. I imbibe and defend adult’s choosing to go to nude beaches and the like, but when those happen in public … where children are brought by their parents these parades?! Mardi Gras in New Orleans was more tame than Pride in Chicago, and Mardi Gras isn’t tauted as being a posterchild of family-friendly events. Pride events weren’t something to be proud about if the intention is to support family-friendly storytime.
Don’t be too surprised by LGBs in America not all supporting a liberal agenda. So-called Log Cabin gays have been politically active conservatives for decades. It was the Log Cabins who challenged President Clinton in court over his Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for the US military. The irony with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is that “liberals” went along with an anti-liberal policy. It’s another example of how liberal parties do not defend democratic freedoms. It’s good to hear that some LGBs are aware and don’t just fall in-line stereotyped gender and sexuality politics.
The problem for straights in these debates is not seeing similar politicing, like supporting so-called “family values”. Jim Crow laws defended the “family values” of banning interracial marriages in the US. Hopefully today’s straights would not fall in-line with mid-20th century politics about that.’
There’s a gay American writer and blogger, whose name escapes me at the moment, who has stated that as a demographic group, gays are largely Conservative, believe very much in fiscal responsibility and have a strong sense of loyalty to the companies that employ them. He called this ‘the Smithers Syndrome’, after Mr Burns’ intensely loyal secretary from The Simpsons. This is very different from the image of the gay milieu given by radical gay groups, such as the mock order of nuns, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who were at the centre of controversy a day or so ago when they were disinvited from appearing with the Dodgers’ sports team.
Related to this, the American chain store Target has been forced to scale down its display of trans clothing. Part of the scandal there is that the clothes were designed by a Satanist, and included messages like ‘Satan Loves You’ and ‘Satan Loves Your Pronouns’. The stores were ordered to take this merchandise to a room a third of the planned display in size. They were afraid the controversial clothing would result in them being on the receiving end of the same kind of boycott that has knocked billions of sales off Bud Light after the brewery made the mistake of choosing transwoman Dylan Mulvaney to promote it.
The Satanism here seems to come from the Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple, neither of which believe in Satan as a real, personal force of supernatural evil. Instead they identify Satan with the promotion of the self and its desires, which they view as liberating. The Satanic Temple has been around for years performing stunts intended to infuriate Conservative Christians. After the community in one American town put up a stone inscribed with the 10 Commandments in front of their courthouse to symbolise justice, they put up a statue of Baphomet. When another American town put up a crib to celebrate Christmas, they put up one with a baby Satan. They come across as a radical atheist/secularist group determined to attack the Christian right and the public promotion of Christianity. I also wonder if the clothing’s Satanism was also partly inspired by the rapper Lil Nas. Nas is gay, and is another pop star who has cultivated a Satanic image. One of his videos has him twerking in front of Lucifer in hell. I did wonder if Target had launched the clothing hoping capture the market offered by young, edgy LGBTQ+ peeps who listen to him and similar pop artists. If so, all they’ve succeeded in doing, it seems to me, is provoke a reaction against the store, especially as it came after the controversy that erupted a few days earlier when it was revealed that several of the speakers at a Satanist convention were trans rights activists. I can understand some of this desire to insult and provoke. It’s a reaction to the splenetic homophobia in sections of the Christian right, though to be fair, the Republican party as a whole seems to have become quite pro-gay and now accept gay marriage.
As for Bill Clinton and his sort-of legalisation of homosexuality in the US armed forces, this was intensely controversial for the Christian right when it was passed. I can remember reading a passage in the book Mind Siege, which is all about the way left-wing ideas are taking over America. This accused Clinton of ‘sodomizing the American military’. This boggled my mind! What! All of them! Where did he get the energy? And what do Hillary and Monica Lewinsky have to say about it? Of course, they then explain that they mean it metaphorically, not literally. It is interesting hearing another perspective on this issue, and I hadn’t known he was challenged about it by the Log Cabin Republicans.
As for the family and family values, I very much believe that the traditional family needs strengthening. The statistics for Britain, like America, show that children from fatherless homes generally perform less well at school, progress as well economically or professionally and are more likely to become criminals, do drugs and engage in promiscuous sex. Of course, this is a general view – there are also any number of single mothers, who have done an excellent job of raising their kids. But I believe that it is possible to do this without promoting homophobia or prejudice or discrimination against gays. I recall that something similar was done a few years ago to a family values group in Yorkshire. This was reformed so that it genuinely worked to strengthen family after they’d kicked out the old guard, who had ‘some funny ideas’ and seemed to have used it as a tool for attacking gay rights.
The EDIJester in one of his videos also sharply criticised one of the trans rights activists, who appears on TickTock. This individual told his audience of young people, that if their families didn’t accept their gender identity, they should cancel them and having nothing more to do with them. The Jester was furious because young gays have been hurt by their parents disowning them, and considered this grossly irresponsible. There were gay organisations in Bristol that worked to help young gays left homeless after being thrown out by their parents. And some of the best stories from gay YouTubers have been about how young gay people were able to keep the love and support of their parents after coming out, or had succeeding in reconciling themselves and their families. Obviously, there should be more of this than victimisation and prejudice.
As for the stifling of civil liberties and freedom of speech, I see this as coming from both the left and the right. In Britain the Conservatives are trying to pass laws severely limiting the freedom to protest and for workers to strike. At the same time, the hate speech laws have been expanded so that they’re severely limiting what may be said in public. Today’s news has included coverage of the case of Kathleen Stock, a lesbian and a gender critical feminist academic. She lost her place at one university due to student protests that branded her transphobic, and there were similar protests when she spoke at the Oxford Union. As a result, Oxford Student Union has cut ties with the Oxford Union. And other academics and ordinary women with similar views have also suffered similar protests and harassment. James Lindsay, who is one of a group of academics alongside Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, who are particularly active fighting woke ideology, has said that this intolerance is no accident. It comes from the ‘repressive tolerance’ advocated by the ’60s radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Roughly translated, it means that freedom of speech should only be extended to those on the radical left, while their critics should be silenced. Lindsay describes himself as a liberal, by which he appears to mean someone who stands up for their traditional liberal values of freedom of speech, individualism and Enlightenment rationality. He is, however, vehemently anti-Communist, though possibly not without reason. Helen Pluckrose also describes herself as a liberal and someone who believes in those values, but also has socialist beliefs. And the other day looking through the internet I found a book by a left-wing author on how the Left can fight woke.
It therefore seems to me that countering the intolerant, extremist ideologies that have been called ‘woke’ – Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory and so on and the attempts of their supporters to silence reasoned criticism and debate isn’t either a left-wing or right-wing issue. It’s one that concerns people on both sides of the political spectrum, who are concerned about preserving Enlightenment values of free debate, rationality and the individual.
How stupid and arrogant is Rees-Mogg? I’ve put up several messages I’ve received from Open Britain and other internet campaigning organisations giving their assessment of the Voter ID laws. Not surprisingly, they’ve been wholly negative because of the way severely normal Brits were turned away from polling stations because they either didn’t have ID, or didn’t have the right ID. In Somerset 400 people were so denied their right to vote. Open Britain has argued very strongly that this is part of the Tories’ attack on British democracy. They’ve also given sharp criticism of Keir Starmer’s plans for constitutional reform, expressing their concerns over what he leaves out, such as proportional representation and repealing the highly authoritarian legislation stifling the right to protest. There always was a very strong whiff of gerrymandering about the Voter ID legislation. The amount of electoral fraud is low. I think there have been only seven or so recent cases, and so there’s no need for it. The Tories introduced it following the example of the Republicans in America. Left-wing commenters over there pointed out that many of the people affected by the new legislation – Blacks, the young, the poor and students, the sections of society least likely to have such identification – were also the parts most like to vote Democrat. One Republican politician even admitted it was done to the nobble them.
And now Jacob Rees-Mogg has also admitted it on this side of the Atlantic.
The man one of the great commenters on this blog dubbed ‘Jacob Reet Snob’ let the cat out of the bag at the National Conservative conference. National Conservatism is the trend in transatlantic politics towards nationalism as a reaction to the collapse of globalism. Andrew Marr did a very good analysis of it for the New Statesman YouTube channel a week or so ago. Although it’s becoming influential in the Tory party, its roots are in America with the right-wing Edmund Burke Society, and its leadership seems to be American. Mogg was speaking at the conference about the threat to British sovereignty and Brexit posed by Keir Starmer’s statement that he would give the vote to the 6 million EU citizens in Britain. This has naturally panicked the nationalistic, Brexiteer right. Mogg sought to calm them by telling them that such gerrymandering never works, and rebounds on the party that did it.
Which he illustrated using the example of the Tories’ Voter ID laws.
They had, he said, been put in to stop people voting Labour. But they harmed the Tories instead, because most of the people turned away were Tory-voting senior citizens.
I found this short video commenting on Snob’s speech on the News Agents’ YouTube channel. The man in the video is absolutely amazed at Snob’s admission. He states that when he spoke to people in America about the Voter ID laws over there, they all defended it by telling him it was about protecting democracy. Presumably he didn’t meet the Republican politico who was open about it being a ruse to stop Democrat supporters voting. But there Mogg was, telling his audience that it was a piece of deliberate gerrymandering.
So why was Mogg being so open about it?
Maximilien Robespierre did an interesting video the other day talking about how bonkers Snob and the other headbangers demanding the return of Boris Johnson were. He’s part of a group which includes Nadine ‘Mad Nad’ Dorries and Priti Patel, the woman who makes up her own foreign policy. They had declared that the Tory party had been stupid to get rid of such an electorally successful Prime Minister as the huffing classicist. Well, the Tory party had done the same to Thatcher. She was massively successful, but when it seemed she was becoming an electoral liability, they got rid of her. She was replaced by her chancellor, John Major, just as Johnson had been replaced by Sunak. But Robespierre also wondered if the three weren’t also trying to scupper the Tory party’s chances at the next election by reminding everyone just how terrible Johnson was. Bozo had promised to build 44 new hospitals, of which only one has been built, if that. And that’s only one of his failures and broken promises.
Now comes this admission by Mogg, which tells anyone seriously worried about the state of British democracy that they shouldn’t vote Conservative. Is this part of the same plan to destroy the Tories’ chances from within? Cosplay priest Calvin Robinson has appeared on one video at some kind of right-wing political gathering saying that the Conservatives are no longer conservative, and the party needs to die to save Conservatism. Does Mogg share that view?
I doubt it. I think it’s just arrogance.
I think he came out with it because he either doesn’t believe it will do the Tories any harm and/or he thinks that the media won’t pick up on it and it won’t become a major issue. He probably has a point about that, as I have seen many people in the lamestream media commenting on it. The big news about the National Conservatives yesterday was about the Extinction Rebellion protester being thrown out for comparing them to fascism. I’m sure he was right and the parallels are there. But so far I haven’t seen anyone, outside of left-wing YouTubers, comment on this.
But worryingly, the Tory gerrymandering isn’t going to stop with the Voter ID laws.
Snob says in this snippet that the real problem was the postal votes.
So how long do you think it will be before they devise a plan to gerrymander those as well?
They told us that there was absolutely no need for it, and that the Voter ID laws were brought in to prevent the demographics most sympathetic to Labour and the left from voting. It was introduced in America by the Republicans, one of whom actually said it was to prevent people voting Democrat. And now it’s happening over here. I got this report from the pro-democracy group Open Britain on how it has resulted in ordinary, decent British voters being turned away because they don’t have ID, or the ID they do have isn’t the correct one. This is yet another perversion of democracy by the Tories on their way to turning Britain into a third world Fascist dictatorship. No doubt with either Mogg or Farage as ‘Minister for Public Enlightenment’.
Dear David,
The picture emerging from the local elections is not a happy one. The polls are still open, votes are still being counted, and we don’t have the full story yet. However, so far it looks like all our worst predictions are coming true.
Worrying stories have been popping up on the news and on social media all day today. People are being turned away because they lack photo ID, and polling stations are having trouble handling the increased workload.
East Anglia Bylines has a running blog of the problems arising, cataloguing stories of people turned away and others headed off by greeters prior to entering the polls, meaning the rejection of their vote will go unrecorded. This is a critical concern, because it means we will never know the full extent of the damage that voter id is causing.
A comprehensive twitter thread from Edwin Hayward is collecting people’s stories from the polls, and the picture is equally bleak. Here are a few people’s testimonies:
@Jlilburnsniece:“One of our tellers at a polling station has just let us know that 15 women have been turned away so far because they didn’t have photo ID. This is going to be horrendous.”
@TorUdall:“Cried at the polling station this morning as the old lady in front of me, who had struggled to walk there, was turned away. She had photo ID but not the right version. When I handed them my passport, they questioned if the photo was me. Horrible atmosphere.”
@geography_paul:“Witnessed 3 people turned away for not having photo ID in the short time I was at the polling station.”
Byline Times, reporting from six English counties about the voter ID rollout, interviewed dozens of voters and poll clerks today finding similar results. Byline’s interviews paint a picture of a democracy mired in both chaos and apathy, with people who already found voting challenging struggling to get over this extra hurdle, and polling staff fighting to keep up.
The official numbers will be published by the Electoral Commission soon, but those figures won’t reflect all of the people turned away outside of the polls by greeters and front desks. Even with just the anecdotal cases we’ve seen so far, a higher number of people have already been turned away from the polls than have been convicted of voter fraud in the last decade.
If today’s experience were extrapolated to a General Election – when the entire country votes at the same time – there would be unmitigated chaos. Open Britain has been against this policy from the moment we heard the first mention of it in Parliament, and all of our concerns (which the government dismissed) are looking more valid by the minute.
As the dust settles on these elections, we’ll be doubling-down on our work with allied organisations like the Electoral Reform Society, Unlock Democracy, Fair Vote UK, and others to make the same case we’ve been making since the beginning, but now with hard evidence to back-up our position: Voter ID is an unnecessary and expensive gimmick that has undermined trust and confidence in our democratic system. We must revoke it now or jeopardise the integrity of the next general election.
If you had a bad experience today, related to voter ID or chaotic polling stations, please tell us about it by replying to this email. And if you’d like to support us as we continue the fight against this government’s agenda of voter suppression, please consider making a small donation.
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