A Comprehensive Attack on Multiculturalism and Mass Immigration

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.

Alex Sayle Recites His Slam Poem, ‘I hate Kier Starmer’

Except it’s not really a poem, just an angry rant. But he does tell it like a lot people feel. Sayle was one of the great alternative comedians who exploded onto British television in the 1980s, people like Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, The Young Ones, and French and Saunders. They were immediately controversial for being iconoclastic, left-wing and politically correct. And in the case of Sayle, shouty and sweary. Sayle’s parents were Jewish Romanian Communists, who came to settle in Liverpool, and much of his humour was about Communist politics. I think he did a radio series in which the Russian revolutionaries, Lenin, Trotsky and the others, were members of a football team. He also made the odd joke about the Russian football team Moscow Dynamos. I think he’s left-wing Labour rather than anything further left, and is definitely, definitely not a fan of its current leader. Sayle is genuinely anti-racist, and so was one of the hosts or supporting acts for a series of performances in which the Black anti-racist activist smeared as an anti-Semite appeared to present his case. This was the same Black activist who had managed to get the parents of Stephen Lawrence to meet Nelson Mandela, and in the 1980s worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews to have legislation pass against real anti-Semitism. This was against the BNP beating up Jews in Thanet. So, Sayle is obviously not going to be popular with Starmer and his cronies. He’s genuinely anti-racist, as well as being a socialist supporter of Corbyn. And therefore the Wrong Kind of Jew.

This piece comes from Sayle’s podcast, in which he gives a list of reasons why he hates Starmer. This begins with how he looks like he’s trying to play down a sex scandal in a dog’s home, his pedantry other personal comments, before stating that he hates him because he broke every promise he made when he was campaigning for the Labour leadership. It ends with him saying he’d rather not hate Starmer. He’d rather nobody hated Starmer, because Starmer wouldn’t be in a position of power to be hated.

Have fun!

Diane Abbott’s ‘Whites Like to Divide and Rule’ Comment

Discussing the ongoing riots between Muslims and Hindus in Leicester, I have said that I believe that part of the problem comes from politicians’ and anti-racist groups’ exclusive focus on White racism. This, I believe, was shown a few years ago during a Labour party gathering when an Asian man asked Diane Abbott if Labour would do more to tackle racism amongst ethnic communities. Abbott refused, stating that Whites would use it to divide and rule. Searching through YouTube for this exchange, I regret that I’ve been unable to find it. But I did discover other occasions where she stated that Whites liked to divide and rule.

She seems to have first uttered it in 2012 during a twitter exchange with another Black woman about the sentencing of the accused in the Stephen Lawrence murder. The other lady objected to statements about the Black community, as if they were all a monolithic group. Abbott replied that she understood that, but that ‘Whites like to divide and rule’. She was challenged on that statement by various Tories in parliament, who called her racist and demanded that she should resign. Andrew Neil also tackled her about it, in the company of Michael Portillo and an Asian guest, on his programme. Abbott tried to excuse it by saying that she was really talking about 19th century colonialism, but she was unable to state this precisely because of the 140-word limit on Twitter. But as Neil pointed out, did she didn’t put it in the past tense. She used the present. And she continued to repeat it. She stated that Black people need to unite, because the races with the greatest cohesion succeed while Whites like to divide and rule. And two years ago, she repeated the same statement when calling for all of Britain’s ethnic minorities to unite against White racism.

Here’s a video from ‘Bin the Labour Party’ of Abbott making her racist statement. I definitely do not endorse the channel or its sentiments, but this video is very useful for what it shows about Abbott’s racial attitudes in this regard.

While I can see the logic behind her statement, I still believe very strongly that Abbott’s exclusive focus on White racism against Blacks, Asians and other ethnic minorities, and those of anti-racist activists like her, have brought Britain to the current climate of racial tension today. Nothing was done about the ideologies entering Britain’s ethnic communities, such as Islamism and the Hindutva fascism of Modi’s Indian BJP and others. It didn’t suit their purpose. And the result is that gangs of Muslims and Hindu youths – not the entire communities, as the mayor of Leicester also said on GB News – are tearing each other apart on Leicester’s streets.

As an aside, one of the interviewers on GB News – I think it may have been Mike Graham – in the interview with the Mayor of Leicester claimed that half the people arrested during the riots were foreigners. No, said the good mayor, ‘they came from Birmingham’. Graham thought that some of the trouble came from Gujeratis who had entered the country through Portugal and had Portuguese passports. One of the commenters on that exchange on YouTube knew some of the Asians Graham was talking about. They were Christian Goans, who spoke Portuguese. And as Christians, they weren’t going to join either side in the fighting.

My Emails to the Local Labour Party and Bristol’s Head of Equalities and Children for a Multicultural Protest Against the Grooming Gangs

One of the other issues that really concerns me at the moment is continuing revelations about the Pakistani grooming gangs. Last week it was revealed that gangs in Telford had preyed on a further thousand victims, and that this had been ignored by the police and the local authorities. I’m absolutely disgusted by this, and infuriated by the response of these organisations and the left to it. There were angry scenes at a council meeting in Oldham last week when the council blithely claimed that there had been no cover-up. a Tory councillor shouted that there was, and he had one of the victims of these gangs there to prove it. I’ve also heard it alleged that it’s still going on. This is being used by the right to discredit the left, meaning particularly the Labour party, as the local authorities that allowed it to go on for decades were Labour. Various right-wing channels and YouTubers are stating that the left prefers rapists to accusations of racism, which is absolutely correct. But it also shows an underlying, profound inability in the left to deal with anti-White racism.

The anti-racist movement and its various organs, like the former Commission for Racial Equality, were set up to deal with anti-Black and anti-Asian racism, particularly after the race riots and the stabbing of a Black man just for having a White girlfriend at the Notting Hill Carnival. And there was a lot of very blatant racism, right down to the bullying of peeps from ethnic minorities by their workmates. There really were signs saying ‘No dogs, no blacks, no Irish’. And the continuing poverty, poor educational performance and marginalisation of the Black community has continued this focus on Black racial welfare. At the same time, the biased reporting in the right-wing press of Black crime and the victimisation of Whites in Black and ethnic majority areas was a part of a wider campaign against non-White immigration. This was rightly attacked as racism, especially as the real Fascists of the BNP and National Front used it as part of their political campaigns, while making up a few facts of their own. One of the grotesque examples of this was Nick Griffin or one of his wretched storm troopers telling his minuscule legions that Stephen Lawrence was a crook at school who forced the other kids to give him their dinner money. Completely made up! But when did that bother the political heirs of Hitler and Goebbels? What this has done is made the left in particularly absolutely terrified of acknowledging, let alone combating, anti-White racism.

This hasn’t been the case all the time. The Independent journo Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote a report for the CRE about anti-White racism, and the issue was discussed in the Guardian. But this was two decades and more ago. And the left is continuing to mishandle the issue of the grooming gangs by signally failing to protest against them. It means that the issue is being exploited by racists and islamophobes like Tommy Robinson. The left, meanwhile, protests against him while saying nothing about the racism against the White girls who were raped and exploited by the gangs.

I believe there is a way to tackle this, and that the left has the resources within it. I think what is needed is for the left to hold multicultural rallies against the gangs, just as Whites have marched with Blacks and Asians against racism and prejudice against them. I have therefore sent emails suggesting this to my local branch of the Labour party and to Asher Craig, the deputy mayor for Bristol and head of children and equalities for the city. My email to the local Labour party runs

‘Dear Sir,

I am writing to you as a member of the local Labour party to express my growing concern about the recent revelations of the rape and racist abuse of White girls by grooming gangs of men of Pakistani origin. I am particularly dismayed by what I feel is the complete lack of an appropriate response by the Labour party and the local authorities. In towns and cities like Bradford, Oldham and Rotherham, these gangs were allowed to get away with their predations for decades because the police and local authorities were afraid of being accused of racism. This past week it has emerged that a further 1,000 girls were raped and abused of the decades in Telford. This abuse has been confounded by police officers turning up to talk to one of the victims because she appeared on GB News to talk about her experiences. This grotesque inaction and the attempts by the police and authorities to contain this story, complete with denials that there has been any cover-up, reflects extremely badly not just on the police and local authorities in those areas, but on the left and the mainstream anti-racist movement generally. There have been videos about this scandal on YouTube that make it very clear that the posters believe that the authorities cannot be trusted and that the Left as a whole finds the racist abuse of White girls perfectly acceptable. The anti-trans activist Kelly-Jay Keen has put up a video, for example, with the title ‘the Left – Better a Rapist than a Racist’. The right-wing YouTube group The Lotus Eaters have been covering this issue for years, expressing similar views about the left. And the anti-immigrant YouTuber, ‘We Got A Problem’ included on his video about the issue the advice that people should start organising themselves to protect their children against such predatory gangs because the police and authorities won’t protect them. This is a call for vigilante gangs and racist lynch mobs, and the first step to Fascism. 

I believe that this issue has and is being disastrously mishandled by the left and the conventional anti-racist movement because of a long-standing failure to treat anti-White racism equally with anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. This seems based on the fear that any mention of racism by Blacks and Asians towards Whites will spark race riots and bring back the spectre of Enoch Powell and his notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. But the opposite seems to be the case, as people are going back to Enoch Powell because of the left’s refusal to tackle these gangs. See recent posts by the History Debunked channel. While the left appears to give the impression that racism towards Whites is acceptable, it is islamophobes such as Tommy Robinson who are successfully manipulating the issue so that they appear inclusive. A few months ago Robinson, formerly of the anti-Islam organisations the EDL and Pegida UK, as well as the BNP, held a rally in Birmingham to promote the launch of his film, ‘The Rape of Birmingham’, complete with interviews with the abused girls. There was a counterprotest by Unite and Stand Up To Racism. However, instead of demonstrating that they were also against the grooming gangs, they simply shouted the usual slogans of ‘Refugees welcome’ and ‘Off our streets, Fascist Scum’. But it was Robinson’s group that really appeared to be inclusive and genuinely anti-racist. Their video of the rally prominently shows a young Black man wearing a ‘Black and White Unite and Fight’ anti-racist T-shirt.

This is what the Left needs to be doing. A few decades ago it was prepared to discuss and condemn anti-White racism as well as racism against Blacks and Asians. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote a report on it for the Committee for Racial Equality back in 1997. In the early part of this century, a Muslim Guardian journalist wrote a piece in that paper stating that working class Whites and ordinary Muslims should united against Islamist organisations like Hizb-ut Tahrir. And I have heard complaints from other moderate Muslims that they have received zero coverage and support from mainstream British society in their protests against the preachers of hate in their religion.

I feel very strongly that what is needed is a multicultural rally bringing Whites, Blacks and Asians together to condemn the grooming gangs and their predations as part of the wider anti-racist movement, to show that every form of racism, against all ethnic groups, is equally unacceptable. After all, Whites have shown their support for their Black friends in marching with them against their discrimination in the Black Lives Matter rallies, for example.

While Bristol is not one of those cities what has been preyed upon by these gangs, I believe it can play a major part in combating them through launching such a rally. Bristol has a diverse, multicultural population with Bristolians of all colours enjoying events such as the St. Paul’s carnival and the Asian melas, as well as the Pride events last weekend. I feel it is absolutely imperative that a multicultural rally should be staged to combat this racism, not just for itself, but to nip in the bud any further exploitation of it by the racist right.

It would be excellent if the Labour party in Bristol, or just the local Labour party in south Bristol, could organise such a rally or march, even if only on a small scale. I understand that there is no monthly meeting in August, but if this affair continues to develop then I will try and put forward this suggestion as a motion at the September meeting. In the meantime, if you can suggest other people or organisations I should contact to get this going, I would be very grateful.

I eagerly await your response.

Yours sincerely,

David Sivier’

And here’s my email to Craig

‘Dear Asher,

I am writing to you in your specific capacity as the official in charge of child services and equalities in our great city. I am very much concerned by the recent revelations about the grooming gangs of men of Pakistani heritage and the way their predations on vulnerable White girls were ignored by the police and authorities because of fears that they would be accused of racism. This past week, as I’m sure you know, it has been revealed that there were a further 1,000 girls abused by these gangs in Telford. I am deeply worried at what I believe is the disastrous way Labour and the anti-racist organisations are handling this crisis, and the way it is now being perceived and exploited by the right. Thanks to this mishandling, many people now believe that the Labour party regards such abuse as perfectly acceptable. The anti-trans activist, Kelly-Jay Kean, has put up a video entitled ‘The Left – Better a Rapist than a Racist’. The Lotuis Eaters, a right-wing, Libertarian YouTube channel, have devoted a stream of videos to this issue, which they regard as a form of anti-White racism. And not only is the Labour party tarnished by this inaction, but so is are the police, the BBC and the authorities generally. The anti-immigrant YouTuber ‘We Got A Problem’ posted a video last night stating that people should organise themselves to protect their children because the authorities would not protect them. This is a call to set up vigilante groups, with the attendant danger of racist lynch mobs. As I’m sure I needn’t tell you, the first step on the road to real Fascism is when there is a profound breakdown of trust between the authorities and their citizens on issues of race and nation.

I also believe that the racist right are far better at exploiting this issue,, and are doing so because they are doing what the left should be doing, but isn’t. The islamophobe Tommy Robinson, formerly of the EDL, Pegida UK and, I gather, the BNP, held a rally and a public showing of his film ‘The Rape of Birmingham’ a few months ago. He was met by a group of counterprotesters from Stand Up To Racism and Unite the Union. But they did not tackle Robinson on the subject of the grooming gangs. They merely recited the usual anti-racist slogans of ‘Fascist scum off our streets!’ and ‘Refugees welcome’. But they did not recognise that here there was a genuine, serious issue of the racist abuse and victimisation of White girls or demonstrate any support for the victims. When someone from the Lotus Eaters asked them if they did agree with the girls’ abuse, they said that of course they didn’t. But this isn’t good enough. They have to publicly show that they don’t. And they haven’t. Their failure to do so very much contrasts with Robinson’s own presentation of himself and his supporters. He claims not to be racist, and in the video he made of his rally there is a young Black man amongst his supporters, wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Black and White Unite and Fight’. This is what the left should also be doing about these gangs.

For decades now, White people have marched in support of Blacks and other people of colour against racism and discrimination. I’m sure you remember the marches against the BNP and institutional racism in the 1980s and musical events in that decade and the ’70s by Rock Against Racism. I strongly believe that we need similar multicultural rallies against the grooming gangs. I realise that as head of equalities for Bristol your specific focus is tackling racism and improving conditions for the Black community. But the Black community, in my experience, is also able and willing to discuss racism and racist abuse directed against Whites. The I journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown authored an official report into anti-White racism by Blacks and Asians in 1997, and a Muslim Guardian journalist called for moderate Muslims and the White working class to unite against Islamist organisations such as Hizb ut-Tahrir. One of the complaints of moderate Muslims is that they are given no media coverage or support when they demonstrate against their religion’s preachers of hate.

I believe very strongly that the only way to tackle this is to organise a multicultural rally bringing Whites, Blacks and Asians together to condemn the gangs. We have to show unity, and that all forms of racism are equally unacceptable, just as White support for Black Lives Matter two years ago showed that the wider community despised anti-Black racism. I realise the gangs are a northern phenomenon, but there have been suggestions that it started in the south. And while Bristol hasn’t been touched by them, I believe the city could play a leading role in this because of its diverse population and the popularity of multicultural events such as the St. Paul’s Carnival and the Asian mela.

It is absolutely imperative that this should be done to show that Labour and the authorities are not complacent about any kind of racism, and that paedophile gangs of whatever colour are not welcome in our city.

As the head of equalities, I hope you may be able to organise such a rally for the city. If you cannot, I would be grateful if you could direct me to someone who could.

I eagerly await your reply.

Yours sincerely,

David Sivier.’

I’ll let you all know if there’s a reply.

Labour Witch-Hunters Put Me on the Naughty Step

I’ve been meaning to put up something about this ever since I got the wretched message from the Labour’s party’s wretched Disputes Team in the Governance and Legal Unit, but didn’t get round to doing so. As some of you may remember, I got a series of emails from the Disputes Team or whoever a little while ago telling me that I was being investigated for anti-Semitism because of a particular blog post. Naturally I argued very strongly against the accusation, and demanded to know the identity of my accusers as per natural justice in a British court of law. I was told they wouldn’t divulge that information, and Labour party investigations aren’t part of the British justice system. This is very true, as the principles of justice that are supposed to animate our legal system are completely foreign to it, as numerous people falsely accused of anti-Semitism can attest.

Several months later, on the 22nd March of this year, 2022, I got the following email from the Labour party. They decided that I had contravened the provisions on anti-Semitism and racism in the party, and that this was hampering the party’s fight against racism! But they haven’t expelled me. No, I’ve been issued with a formal warning, which will stay on my record for 18 months. Here’s the text of their message

‘

Notice of Outcome of Investigation: Formal Warning

We are writing to inform you that the Labour Party (the Party) has concluded its investigation into the allegation that you had breached Chapter 2, Clause I.11 of the Party’s Rule Book (the Rules).

A panel of the National Executive Committee (the NEC Panel) met on 18 March 2022 and considered all of the evidence that the Party put to you and any evidence submitted by you in response.

Summary of the Findings of the NEC Panel

The NEC Panel found on the balance of probabilities, that you posted an article on your blog on 05 December 2020.

The NEC Panel concluded that your conduct was in breach of Chapter 2 Clause I.11 of the Rules. In particular, your conduct undermined the Labour Party’s ability to campaign against racism. In coming to this conclusion, the NEC Panel considered that your conduct contravened the provisions of the Code of Conduct: Antisemitism and other forms of racism.

Taking into account all relevant evidence the NEC Panel concluded that the appropriate outcome is to issue you with this Formal Warning pursuant to Chapter 2, Clause I.1.D.iii of the Rules.

The NEC Panel wishes to make clear that your conduct has fallen short of the high standards expected of Party members and to remind you of the importance of behaving consistently with the Rules and Codes of Conduct at all times.

This Formal Warning will remain on your Labour Party membership record for a period of 18 months. If you commit any further breach of the Rules during that period, an NEC Panel may take this Reminder of Conduct and the behaviour that led to it into account in dealing with that breach.

Consequently, any restrictions that the Party may have imposed on your membership rights pending the outcome of this investigation have now ended. This includes any administrative suspension of your membership that may have been in place.

Conduct Expected of Labour Party Members

The Party expects you, in common with all members, to engage in civil, measured discourse, online and offline.

It also expect members to conduct themselves in a manner that avoids any discrimination or harassment on grounds of race, religion or any other protected characteristic inside the party and in wider society and support, and not to undermine, the Labour Party’s ability to campaign against all forms of racism and prejudice.

Members of the Party agree not to engage in any conduct that is prejudicial or grossly detrimental to the Labour Party. This includes any conduct that demonstrates hostility or prejudice based on a protected characteristic; sexual harassment; bullying or intimidation; and unauthorised disclosure of confidential information.

Members must also comply with the provisions of the NEC’s Codes of Conduct, which are publicly available online here:

The Party urges you to read the NEC’s Codes of Conduct carefully and bear them in mind whenever you are involved in Labour Party activities and in discussion and debate, online and offline, about political issues and ideas.

Yours sincerely,

Disputes Team

Governance and Legal Unit

The Labour Party

c.c.

Labour South West’

I’ve been late posting anything up about this because my reaction to it is that of Catherine Tate’s schoolgirl Lauren: ‘Am I bovvered? Do I look bovvered? I ain’t bovvered’. I was expecting to be thrown out, as so many excellent people have been before me. Indeed, considering the calibre of people purged or accused of alleged anti-Semitism, like Mike, Martin Odoni, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Mark Chilson, Marc Wadsworth, Asa Winstanley, Moshe Machover and far too many others, it’s almost a badge of honour to be included with them.

None of them are or have been in any way racist or anti-Semitic. And neither was the blog post that so offended someone that they felt they just had to complain about me. The post criticised Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. This is the state of Israel, not Jews and not Israelis either. Through reading material by Jews critical of Israel, like Tony Greenstein’s and David Rosenberg’s blogs, as well as Ilan Pappe’s 12 Myths About Israel, as well as online presentations by the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, it’s massively apparent that there are very many Jews and Israelis who despise the Israeli state’s decades long ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arabs. The Jewish people have never been a homogenous, monolithic group. The Talmud, Judaism’s second holy book, contains the records of disputes over the Law by the sages and great rabbis of antiquity. Quite often these disputes ended with ‘and so they differed’. It’s no different today. There is a wide diversity in Jewish belief, observance and political and social attitudes, just as there is in every community. However, former president Netanyahu and the Israel lobby would like us all to believe that all Jews everywhere are citizens of Israel and passionately support it, to the extent that any criticism of the country is a terrible assault on their identity. Which isn’t necessarily the case. American Jewish young people are becoming increasingly less interested, even opposed, to Israel. One American Jewish vlogger put up a video stating that he found it ridiculous that he somehow had a right to settle in a country he’d never visited – he came from Anchorage, Alaska, while his Palestinian friend, who was born there, was forbidden to return. In fact, far from speaking for the majority of British Jews, organisations like the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Chief Rabbinate don’t speak for anyone except the United Synagogue, which is only one of a variety of Jewish denominations. But the Board and the Chief Rabbis were very vocal in the anti-Semitism smear campaign against the Labour party and specifically against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. Despite the sectarian nature of their support, they did their level best to present themselves falsely as the true voice of British Jews, speaking for the majority.

As for the specific charges against me, I was accused of anti-Semitism because I said that before the Second World War Zionism was a minority position among European Jews. It was. Pappe’s book, and Tony Greenstein’s and David Rosenberg’s blogs have made it very clear that it was, quoting chapter and verse from scholarly studies of Jewish history. The majority of European Jews wished to remain proud citizens of the countries in which they were born, with equal rights and respect as their gentile fellow countrymen. Ditto for Jewish Americans. As late as 1969 one of the Jewish Zionist magazines lamented that there was little interested in Israel among Jewish Americans.

My anonymous accusers also disliked me stating that all ideologies should be open to examination and criticism. Well, they should. There is nothing anti-Semitic in that. It’s one of the cornerstones of real political freedom. Presumably this alarmed them because it means that Zionism should also be examined and criticised. Which is true. Zionism, as I’ve also pointed out, is a political ideology. It is not synonymous with Jews or Judaism. In fact for many years it was just the opposite. The return of the Jews to Israel was first proposed by Christians wishing to hasten Christ’s return, long before Theodor Herzl and Jewish Zionism. Even now the largest Zionist group in America is Pastor Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. It was also supported by real anti-Semites, like Richard Wagner and the various European Fascist parties before the Second World War as a way of removing them from their countries.

I also blotted my copybook defending awkward historical facts, which had resulted in the witch-hunters accusing other Labour party members of anti-Semitism. Ken Livingstone was smeared and then thrown out as an anti-Semite, because the Commie newt-fancier dared to state that Hitler supported Zionism. This is factually correct. It was the short-lived Ha’avara Agreement, in which the Nazis covertly supported the smuggling of Jewish Germans to Palestine. It’s in mainstream histories of Nazism and the Jews, and is mentioned on the website of the Holocaust Museum at Yad Vashem. But it does not support the myth the Zionists have constructed to present themselves as devoid of any collaboration with the Nazis.

Now let’s dismantle the Labour party’s statement that, because of my blog post criticising Zionism, I am harming the party’s efforts to fight racism. The simple answer is ‘No’, to the point where recent events in the Labour party make this sound like a sick, unfunny joke. The majority of the witch-hunt’s victims have been self-respecting Jews like Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, to the point that they comprise 4/5 of those purged. From this angle, it very much looks like it’s the witch hunters who are motivated by a sectarian anti-Jewish prejudice. Because peeps like Jackie and Tony ain’t the right kind of Jews. Marc Wadsworth, another victim, is Black and has campaigned tirelessly against racism. He got Stephen Lawrence’s family to meet Nelson Mandela, and in the ’80s worked with the Board to put in place legislation against real anti-Semitic attacks by the BNP in the East End. But they accused him of anti-Semitism and so had him purged.

At the moment, the Labour party is losing many of its Black and Asian members. Some of this is undoubtedly for the same reasons the party’s losing members generally: the party no longer represents the genuinely popular polices put forward by Jeremy Corbyn, policies that inspired so many to join the party that under Corbyn’s leadership it became the largest socialist party in Europe. But there’s also been a rise in anti-Black and anti-Asian racism in the Labour party as well as islamophobia under Starmer. Black and Asian MPs and activists like Diane Abbott were bullied and racially abused. One third of Muslim members say they have encountered islamophobia. But Starmer has done absolutely nothing about this. And the reason is simple:

He doesn’t care.

Starmer describes himself as ‘100 per cent Zionist’. The people he wishes to appease is the Israel lobby, and so avoid the same charges of anti-Semitism that brought down Corbyn. He does not seem to care about racism against Blacks or Asians or hostility and prejudice against Muslims. And the party’s attitude to what it considers to be anti-Semitic is highly partisan.

Starmer has been using fake charges of anti-Semitism to purge the Labour left, and so make the Blairite grip on it permanent and unchallengeable. Blair did something similar when he was in power. He ignored the left and traditional Labour voters in favour of middle class, Thatcherite swing voters. He assumed that traditional Labour voters and supporters would continue supporting the party because they had nowhere else to go. As a result, many Labour supporters stopped voting, so that even when he won elections, the percentage of people voting Labour actually declined. Some of the party’s working class supporters may have gone over to UKIP, whose supporters were largely older working class Whites who felt left behind and ignored by the existing parties.

And today there are a number of competing parties. A poll a few months ago found that there would be massive support for a new party led by Jeremy Corbyn. A number of left-wing organisations are considering allying to form a competing party, not to mention the Trades Union and Socialist Alliance, which has been around for years. And the Green Party is also growing in popularity. At the moment it’s only just behind Labour in the number of seats it holds on Bristol city council. I’m sure it’s similar in other cities up and down the country.

Starmer’s playing a very dangerous game with his purges, because rather than people keeping on voting and joining Labour because there’s nowhere else, they may very well join or set up rival parties.

This could destroy the Labour party, but I really doubt Starmer and his allies care, just as long as they retain control of the party. And it doesn’t matter how many decent people they purge and smear as anti-Semites, Communists, Trotskyites or whatever.

Ruined Leon on the Media and Activist Silence over Black on Black Murders

Ruined Leon is a Black American YouTuber, who criticises and rips into the crazy and bigoted elements in gay rights, feminist and purportedly anti-racist activism, ‘woke’ individuals whose comments and opinions are as hypocritical and offensive in their way as the oppression they oppose. This is a video he posted on the last day of February, commenting on the collapse of the trial against the four men accused of shooting BLM firebrand Sasha Johnson in the head. He notes that this was major news when there was speculation that the perp was a White supremacist. In fact, the four suspects arrested by the police were Black. There’s circumstantial evidence to link them to the crime – they were caught on CCTV casing Johnson’s house, and she and her family were already sufficiently worried to put in extra security. The men were arrested following a random ‘stop and search’ by the cops. But the prosecution dropped the case because no-one has come forward to testify against them. In fact, the witnesses’ statement at the time were confused, with some saying they were Black, others White and others that they couldn’t tell, because they were wearing balaclavas. In fact this looks like an example of the twisted code operating in some Black ghettos. It doesn’t matter what Black criminals do, even to other Blacks, no matter how violent or sadistic. Blacks don’t inform on other Blacks. Or it could be simple fear of reprisal from vicious criminals.

What angers Ruined Leon is that while the initial shooting was well publicised, he had to Google to find out about the collapse of the trial. Like many ordinary Black peeps, he’s angry about the amount of violence within the Black community and that it’s ignored by Black activist organisations like Black Lives Matter. At one point in this video he asks if Black lives only matter when they’re killed by Whites. It’s a good question. Jason Riley raises the same issue in the book, False Black Power, I reviewed earlier. Among other things, he cited the Barbershop series of comedies, set in a Black barbershop. In these movies, the hero and his friends and clients are less worried about systemic racism than with the gang violence plaguing their community. The film caused an outcry from the anti-racist activists Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, but Riley defended it on the grounds that it showed what Blacks really talked about when Whites weren’t around.

Leon has a point. The Lotus Eaters and others have gone through the stats, and at least over here, Black people are far more likely to be assaulted and killed by other Blacks than by White racists. But no-one wants to talk about it. They did nearly thirty years ago, when Black on Black violence was such an intense cause of concern that Sasha Baron Cohen, in his alter ego of Ali G., invited a senior cop on to one of his spoof interviews to discuss Black on Black violence and the weapons brothers were using against brothers.

But even twenty years ago, there were Black activists trying to silence the issue and demanding that attention be directed elsewhere. Readers may remember the Demilola Taylor case. This was a Black lad in London, who was attacked and stabbed to death by a gang on his way home from school. He bled to death in their stairwell of the block of flats where he lived.

I have a particular horror at this case. I was bullied at school, though it was not like today when kids are carrying knives. But the fear I remember from just normal thumps and abuse has stayed with me. I can’t image the fear that child must have experienced as he was set upon and died. The incident is one of the reasons I broke with a Black activist group I was corresponding with when I was working at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol. This was the Black and Asian Studies Association, and I got on so well with them that they sent me a copy of their magazine. And it offended me so much that I wrote them a letter back, criticising some of their points. The articles in it varied in quality, but the overall tone was that all White people are racist and all Blacks the victims of racism. Which ignores other forms of racism, such as that of the Sudanese Arabs to the Black Beja people of the Sudan. But one of the comments in their magazine which really infuriated me was about Demilola’s murder. They, or at least, the magazine’s editor, felt that its coverage was ‘racist’. Why couldn’t the Beeb and the other news companies cover all the Blacks murdered by White racists? Reading between the lines, it seems to me that they thought the lad’s murder was only covered because it had been done by a Black gang. In fact it was a case of them jumping to conclusions. The race of Taylor’s murderers was not mentioned. When it was, it was stated that the gang was made up of people of different races. It wasn’t all Black.

A child died in pain and terror, murdered by thugs. But this should be ignored because Black activists thought he was murdered by other Blacks. I find that attitude absolutely contemptible.

I’ve reblogged some of the videos made by Simon Webb of History Debunked on racial issues and some of the myths and falsehoods being retailed as solid fact in Black history. Webb needs to be read carefully, as he is a Telegraph-reading Tory who believes that Bell Curve nonsense about Blacks being less intelligent than Whites. I’ve had one commenter criticise one of his videos I’ve posted here for what he considered to be its historical inaccuracies, and I do advise people to check what he says for themselves. Some of his material, where he sites his sources, seem sound, others much less so. But one of his videos explicitly commented on the problem of this media silence. It asked ‘What’s So Special about Stephen Lawrence?’ Lawrence, you may remember, was a young Black lad killed in a racially motivated incident. The Met police failed to properly arrest and charge his killers, who seem to have been the sons of notorious criminals. This rightly caused a national scandal and resulted in further examination and actions against the Metropolitan Police to purge it of racism. But Webb’s video pointed out that Lawrence was far from the only Black male murdered. The thumbnail to his video showed the faces of many other Black men and lads, who were also killed, but whose murders generated much less interest simply because they were killed by other Blacks.

Not that it’s just Blacks like Stephen Lawrence who are murdered by racists. Years ago Private Eye stated that just before Lawrence was killed, an Asian and a White man had been killed in two separate racist attacks. The Met police treated their deaths with the same cavalier indifference and incompetence they treated Lawrence’s. But there was no public outcry, no denunciations by anti-racists, questions in the House, or marches. Absolutely nothing.

Ruined Leone is right. Black lives only matter when to anti-racist activists like BLM when they’re taken by Whites. Otherwise the same people want you to ignore them.

Some of this no doubt comes from the way the right-wing press has reported Black crime figures to generate anti-Black racism and opposition to non-White immigration. It’s why Ashley Banjo of the dance group Diversity told Jim Davidson that the reporting of Black and White crime had been used to oppress Blacks. Davidson had asked him why it was all right to report a White police man killing a Black man, but not a Black man robbing a White man. But when the amount of Black on Black violence has reached such a pitch that it is a major issue that ordinary Black people are living in fear of their and their children’s lives, I don’t think it is fair to remain silent. People should be organising and marching against it, just as they should be organising and marching against the Asian grooming gangs. It should be done as part of proper anti-racist movement, and not left to be exploited by real racists and xenophobes like Tommy Robinson in the case of the grooming gangs.

But it’s acutely embarrassing to the Black and other other anti-racist organisations, who currently control the narrative on racism and racial issues. I think they seem to believe that somehow Black on Black violence will stop or decline once White anti-Black racism is tackled and conditions and opportunities for Blacks improve. This is undoubtedly the case, but in the meantime innocent people are being killed, but the professional anti-racists would rather you looked away and only saw those who were butchered by Whites.

Black lives matter regardless of the race of the people that take them. And Ruined Leon is right to be angry, because silence is violence whatever the colour of the killer.

Smeeth and Hodge Gaslit Conference to Support Undemocratic Labour Rule Change

Further evidence to condemn Starmer, Smeeth and Hodge as fanatically intolerant Blairites with absolutely no qualms about lying to the wider party to support their witch hunt against decent people, especially Jews, because their socialists and/or they criticise Israel. Mike has on his piece about this shameful incident a tweet from Labour Grassroots, in which a tearful delegate to conference describes how they were gaslighted by the odious Ruth Smeeth into support the grotty rule changes that have concentrated powers in the hands of the leadership and General Secretary. Smeefy got up on her hind legs to tell conference that they couldn’t consider themselves anti-racists or opponents of anti-Semitism without backing the changes. She was then followed by the equally repulsive Margaret Hodge, who said the same thing. The delegates states that this was all about concentrating power in the hands of an undemocratically elected official and continuing the witch hunt, but she was too frightened to speak up. She and her colleagues were hoping that someone else would, but nobody did. She describes it as the lowest point in her experience of the Labour party.

Mike states that, with these changes having been passed, her experience is going to get a lot lower.

Smeeth is the noxious MP, who got genuine anti-racist and opponent of real Nazism thrown out of the party as an anti-Semite. Why? Wadsworth caught her passing on a Labour brochure to a hack from the Torygraph at a party rally. Smeefy then accused him of using the old trope of the disloyal Jews. Except that Wadsworth didn’t know she was Jewish, and didn’t mention Jews at all. Wadsworth has a long and proud career as a real campaigner against racism, arranging for the parents of Stephen Lawrence to meet Nelson Mandela, and working with the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 80s to pass legislation against NF attacks on Jews in the Isle of Dogs. This didn’t prevent an angry squad of right-wing, White female Labour MPs descending on his trial to demand his expulsion. Commenters have said this squad was like a racist mob about to lynch a Black. As for Hodge, who looks to me like a cross between a Dr. Who monster and a ferocious female character, Mrs Slocombe, from Are You Being Served, she infamously screamed at Corbyn in parliament, calling him a ‘f***ing anti-Semite!’ This was against the rules, and she was suspended. She then whined that this was anti-Semitic, and made her feel like the Jews in Nazis Germany waiting for a knock on the door from the SS. This, not unreasonably, angered Jews and gentiles, whose relatives had been carted off to the concentration camps by the Nazis. And as an MP, she was so complacent about the threat from the BNP that seven of them got elected to Tower Hamlet’s local council and their leader sent her a bouquet as thanks. It’s partly thanks to these two lying clowns that Stalin has now managed to tighten his grip on the party.

I don’t blame the speaker for being too scared to stand up. I think that anyone who did, would have been smeared as an anti-Semite. But this shows that you can stand back and expect someone else to speak out against lies and authoritarianism, ever. Because if you stand by and allow it, it will be passed unopposed. And sooner or later, they will come for you.

Labour delegate explains how Ruth Smeeth gaslighted conference to support shocking rule change

Yay! Marc Wadsworth Wins Libel Fight Against Far Right Ultra-Zionist Smear Sheet

First the good news. Black anti-racism campaigner Marc Wadsworth has won his libel battle against the Jewish Chronicle, one of the Jewish newspapers involved in the press and media smear campaign of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as raging anti-Semites and Nazis. Wadsworth was unjustly accused of anti-Semitism and expelled from the Labour following accusations from the noxious Ruth Smeeth. Wadsworth had seen her pass on a Labour party brochure to a Torygraph hack sitting next to her at a Labour party, and so commented about her helping the Tory press. Smeeth and her supporters in the party and beyond chose to interpret the comment as more anti-Semitic tropes. He was accused of saying she was part of a conspiracy, just as Jews are accused of conspiring against gentiles, subjected to a kangaroo court like like the others the Labour right and right-wing British media and political establishment smeared as anti-Semites, and thrown out of the party. This was despite the fact that Wadsworth isn’t any kind of anti-Semite or Fascist. Far from it. In the 1980s he worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews to bring in legislation to protect Jews in Thanet from real anti-Semitic assault by members of the NF/BNP. He was also responsible for arranging the parents of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence to meet Nelson Mandela. During his farcical trial by the Labour party, a squad of angry White female Labour MPs turned up to demand his expulsion. Some observers found this extremely chilling as it was very reminiscent of the lynch mobs attacking Blacks.

Wadsworth sued the Chronicle for libel because it also claimed that he was part of the Labour In Exile Network, which was targeting Jewish Labour party activists at their homes in order to ‘take care of them’. Wadsworth wasn’t a member of the group and didn’t have anything to do with what the Chronicle claimed they were doing. As a result, he has won his libel case, the Chronicle was forced to apologise to him and pay him substantial damages. Mike over at Vox Political is particularly glad Wadsworth won as he too was on the receiving end of the Chronicle’s mendacity when it smeared him years ago as an anti-Semite and Holocaust-denier. Zelo Street has also suggested that he might also care to launch a libel suit against Tom Bower for the smears and lies in his biography of Jeremy Corbyn. This repeats the Tory establishment lie that Corbyn is some kind of Trotskyite traitor and anti-Zionist Nazi. It repeats the smear that Wadsworth anti-Semitically abused Smeeth, despite the fact that not only is he definitely not a Jew-hater, he didn’t even know she was Jewish. But this hasn’t stopped Bower repeating the libel with a few additions of his own. He has invented a statement that was never made by Wadsworth, writing that after he made the conspiracy theory comments, Wadsworth said ‘And she’s Jewish’.

It’s great that Wadsworth has won his libel battle against the Chronicle, but the injustice remains. There are many others, like Mike, who were thrown out of the party and similarly falsely smeared, who have spent years trying to clear their names.

And the Labour party’s witch-hunt and smear campaign is continuing under its useless and partisan leader, Keir Starmer.

See: Falsely-accused Wadsworth wins libel victory and substantial damages from Jewish Chronicle | Vox Political (voxpoliticalonline.com)

Zelo Street: Marc Wadsworth – A Little Vindication (zelo-street.blogspot.com)

History Debunked Refutes Critical Race Theory’s Rejection of Objective Fact

In this video from History Debunked, YouTuber and author Simon Webb attacks Critical Race Theory’s epistemology. Critical Race Theory is the theory of racial politics, devised by American Marxists, that Blacks are the victims of institutional racism. As the video states, Critical Race Theory has largely been confined to the US for the past 40 years, but is now being adopted in Britain. It was the McPherson report following the murder of Stephen Lawrence, which introduced the idea of institutional racism in Britain with its conclusion that the Met was institutional racist. Since then a number of other organisations have also been accused of institutional racism, including the NHS.

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy dealing with knowledge. There is a difference between subjective and objective knowledge. The statement that light moves at 186,000 miles per second is objectively true. It can be tested. But the statement that X hates someone is subjective, as it is difficult to prove objectively. In the West, knowledge is generally regarded as objective fact. But Critical Race Theory rejects objective fact in favour of ‘Standpoint Epistemology’. This is the view that the opinions and perceptions of minorities are what matter, and these should be accepted uncritically, as demanding objective proof or questioning them is a form of oppression. The video also states that the theory also promotes instead of facts the stories Black people tell amongst themselves. These stories, which may include myths, are to be regarded as incontrovertible truth, and should similarly not be subjected to criticism or testing.

The video illustrates this by citing the views of a young Black woman, Yomimi, in an article published by the Beeb, and the Oprah Winfrey interview with Meghan Markle. The Beeb article is about the higher percentage of graduate unemployment among Blacks. Yomimi is quoted as saying that she feels it is due to institutional racism, and that employers automatically reject applicants from Black and Asian candidates, whose names are difficult to pronounce. This was the subject of a previous video by History Debunked yesterday, in which he argued against this assertion. Official statistics show that Chinese and Indians are slightly better at obtaining jobs than Whites, but Chinese names are notoriously difficult for westerners to pronounce. However, the Chinese generally do better in education than Whites, while fewer Blacks than Whites obtain two or more ‘A’ levels. Black unemployment may therefore have more to do with poor Black academic performance than institutional racism amongst employers. But what is important about the article is that Yomimi is not asked to provide supporting facts for her arguments. It is just how she feels or sees the situation.

Similarly, Markle said little in her interview with Winfrey that could be objectively verified. Significantly, Winfrey thanked Markle for speaking her ‘truth’. This sounds strange to British ears, but it’s part of the same viewpoint that rejects objective truth in favour of feelings and perceptions.

I’ve no doubt that racism exists in this country, and the police force, especially the Met, has been notorious for the racism of some of its officers. Racism appears to be one explanation for the Met’s failure to prosecute Lawrence’s murderers, but they were also the sons of notorious London gangsters. An alternative explanation was that the cops were afraid of prosecuting them because of their fathers, or else were corrupt and on their payroll. Private Eye also stated a few years ago that an Asian and White lad were also separately the victims of racist murders, and the Met was similarly negligent about finding and prosecuting their killers but that there was no mention of this.

The rejection of objective fact, however, is a fundamental element of Postmodernism and its moral and cultural relativism. Instead, it sees every culture and viewpoint as equal. Way back in the 1990s I tried to do an MA on British Islam at my old College. As part of it, my supervisor sent me to several Cultural Studies seminars, which were thoroughly postmodern. These were on colonial or western views of extra-European cultures. The attitude really did seem to be that westerners really couldn’t understand or appreciate other cultures, who should thus be exempt from western criticism. Any attempt to do so was dangerously prejudiced and ‘othering’.

Unfortunately, parts of the women’s movement have also been contaminated by this irratrionalism. In their book Intellectual Impostures, Sokal and Bricmont, one an American left-wing mathematician and physicist, the other a Belgian philosopher, attack postmodern philosophy and particularly its appropriation of scientific concepts. These are used nonsensically to give an appearance of depth and profundity to arguments that are actually absurd and incoherent nonsense. In one chapter they attack a number of postmodern feminist writers, who refuse to use conventional logical argument because logic and objective are patriarchal concepts that mentally imprison women. I am not joking, and this is most definitely not a wind-up.

A friend of mine came across this attitude, also back in the 1990s, in the women’s committee of the local branch of the National Union of Students. He was told by someone who worked with it, that it was one of three autonomous committees, whose conclusions were automatically passed as NUS policy. The other committees were for Black and LGBTQ students. The women’s committee similarly rejected logic and objective fact. Instead their debates supposedly consisted of them largely talking about their experiences of sexual abuse before concluding with their recommendation on a particularly issue. Which was passed with no debate. This situation should have been unacceptable. I have every sympathy for anyone who has been sexually abused, but official decisions need to be based on logical argument and proper debate, not entirely subjective feelings and personal history unless these are directly relevant to the matter.

Sokal and Bricmont were highly critical of this feminist rejection of logic, not least because it was based on a very traditional view, that has been used to exclude women from authority. For centuries women were largely excluded from a number of professions and political power on the basis that they, unlike men, were emotional rather than reasonable and logical. The Nazis used the same argument to justify their removal of women from the workplace and politics. They also believed in Cultural Relativism, and what was appropriate for one race was unsuitable for others. This is shown in their denunciation of democracy as ‘Jewish’. Now cultural relativism and the rejection of objective fact in favour of feelings and perceptions is being promoted as empowering for Blacks and women.

Proper discussion of racism is entirely appropriate, especially given the continuing poverty and marginalisation of the Black community. But this has to be done through rational discussion and argument, backed up with facts and statistics. And this means a rejection of Postmodernism and Critical Race Theory’s theory of knowledge.

Channel 4 Documentary Next Wednesday on the Murder of Damilola Taylor

Here’s another documentary that may interest you, particularly if you’re old enough to remember it and the horror it rightly provoked. Damilola Taylor was a ten year old boy, who was stabbed to death by a gang on an estate in Peckham twenty years ago in 2000. It was a murder that shocked the nation, comparable to that of Stephen Lawrence who was killed in a racist attack by a White gang. Channel 4 have made a documentary in which Yinka Bokinni, a radio presenter and former friend and neighbour of the murdered lad, talks about the murder and speaks to other members of the community about it. It’s entitled ‘Damilola: the Boy Next Door’, and is on Channel 4 at 9.00 pm on Wednesday, 28th October 2020. There are two blurbs for it in the Radio Times. The first, by Jack Sealse on page 95, runs

The murder in 2000 of ten-year-old Damilola Taylor shocked Britain but, for most of us, it was an abstract, distant tragedy. Not so for Yinka Bokkini, now a radio presenter and then a kid for whom “Dami” was a friend and neighbour.

Bokinni’s documentary about the killing and its repercussions is unusually personal. She explores her own imperfect memories of Damilola and the south London community they lived in, visiting fellow residents to talk about the horror and how growing up on their Peckham estate, which was demolished soon after Damilola’s death, shaped them.

Gradually – it feels harsh to say it, but a bit too gradually – a complex picture emerges about our attitude towards run-down urban areas and the people who live there.

The second blurb, on page 97, goes

To mark the 20th anniversary of her friend Damilola Taylor’s death, Yinka Bokinni confronts the impact it had on her community, as she discovers that she is not alone in having grown up never mentioning Damilola, or even wanting to admit that she is from Peckham. Yinka attempts to reconcile the happy community she remembers so fondly with that presented in the media as a crime-ridden “sink estate”.

I have to say that I felt particularly shocked by the murder, because I was bullied at school. The whole idea of a young boy living in fear of his life, and finally being killed by a gang really did fill me with horror.

I was also massively unimpressed by the attitude towards the media coverage of his murder by the Black and Asian Studies Association, one of the groups I’d been in contact with in my volunteer work in the slavery archives at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol. Their editor commented on the murder and the news coverage in an issue of their wretched magazine they sent me, I think it may have been number 31 or 32. They complained about the murder being covered, and asked instead why the media didn’t cover all the children murdered by Whites. Or something like that. They clearly believed that the media was only covering it because Taylor’s killers were black. In fact, the gang’s race was not mentioned on the news as I recall, and I think when it was mentioned the gang was composed of individuals of different races.

But I was heartily disgusted by the Association’s attitude. A ten year old boy had been murdered, for heaven’s sake! It shouldn’t matter what the colour of the victim or the perps is, it’s a chilling, horrific, contemptible destruction of a young life. It deserved to be on the news, just like the reports of other gang violence at the time. Anyone remember the story about the school teacher or headmaster murdered by another teenage gang at the gates of his school trying to protect the kids within?

And young people are still killing, or trying to kill each other in the epidemic of knife crime that’s hit this country. And I don’t doubt that the majority of the victims there are Black people from deprived, inner city estates.

I have to say, I’m not a fan of Black Lives Matter and its automatic opposition to the police. I’m well aware that some coppers have been and probably still are racist, and that perfectly decent, innocent men and women like Dawn Butler have been aggressively stopped and harassed simply because they’re Black. But I also know some excellent cops, who did their job conscientiously and with dedication. I heard from the husband of one, who had herself several times successfully arrested armed criminals, that when she went out each day, she did so with the intent of making sure no-one was going to die that day.

And no-one should.

Black lives matter, and I wish the organisation, apart from attacking the police, would also stand up to Black on Black violence. And all children’s lives of whatever colour, ethnicity or religion do matter. That’s why we should be doing our best to make sure there aren’t any more murders like this.