RACE RIOTS - Poor little England

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Current News : One Thread

NYPress

The Conformist Scott McConnell

Poor England

"Poor little England," my wife said when I told her I was planning to write about the outbreak of race-rioting in Britain. She has memories of long vacations with her mother’s family in the working-class suburbs of Manchester, where tinned peaches with evaporated milk was a special treat and kids roamed about in big carefree groups in the late summer evenings.

That world is now gone, essentially killed by an onslaught of immigration. Last month the northern town of Burnley erupted in white-Asian rioting—with firebombs launched at pubs and schools and homes. By May, Asian-white battles had broken out in nearby Oldham, which had been wracked by racial tension after the severe beating of a World War II veteran; he had mistakenly walked home via one of the streets declared "no-go" by an Asian gang. Now Bradford is in flames, with more than 100 police injured trying to quell the latest outburst.

The Asians are the children of Indian and Pakistani immigrants who arrived in the 60s and 70s, called "boscos" (for "British of sub-continent origin") in current jargon. Raised eating Western food, they are a great deal larger in stature than their parents, and as the British press frequently notes, lack the deference or readiness to put up with white "racism" that first-generation immigrants were supposedly willing to tolerate.

The working-class whites involved in the rioting in these economically depressed towns are hardly angels, and major party politicians point to the nefarious role of the British National Party, a small right-wing group, in ratcheting up tensions. But of course the racial strife would exist without "outside agitators"—it is entirely predictable, a part of human nature. It was, in fact, predicted. Thirty-three years ago the great English parliamentarian Enoch Powell delivered the most quoted speech of any British leader since Churchill, asserting before a small Birmingham audience that watching the concentration of New Commonwealth (from Asia, Africa and the West Indies) immigrants rise in various British cities was like observing "a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre." Powell took note of the violence already occurring and warned of more to come.

At that time, Powell was one of three or four leading figures of the Conservative Party, a member of the shadow cabinet and a potential prime minister. The press immediately denounced him ("An Evil Speech," editorialized The Times) and the Tory leadership quickly moved to isolate him by dropping him from the "shadow cabinet."

Remarkably, in the face of this united front of establishment condemnation, millions of Britons rallied to Powell: he received 45,000 letters of support in the next few days; dockworkers mounted a march outside Parliament in his favor and national public opinion polls showed between 70 and 80 percent backing his stand. But in the contest between the people and the ruling establishment, the latter prevailed. Powell held on to prominence as an essayist and political intellectual, but, unwilling to try to lead a new party, he was finished as a major electoral force. Modest immigration reforms, spurred in part by the outpouring of support for Powell, reduced the immigration flow slightly from what it might have been, but the die was cast. "As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to ‘see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’"

This coda of Powell’s speech, so stridently denounced at the time as recklessly inflammatory, has now come to pass. One can debate the severity of the future bloodshed (in the recent Asian-white battles, no one has been killed), but the fact that the ethnic transformation of entire cities has led to displacement, violence and a great deal of sadness is beyond dispute.

Britain’s political class now recites as mantra the absurd claim that Britain has always been a multicultural "nation of immigrants," pointing as evidence to the tiny numbers of French Protestants and East European Jews who settled there. But nothing in Britain’s history has prepared it for its sudden lurch toward becoming a multiethnic nation.

As things now stand, 7 percent of Britain’s population is made up of New Commonwealth immigrants, and 14 percent of mothers giving birth were not born in Britain. As new immigration continues, demographers and political activists alike point to the blessed day when Britain will no longer have a white majority. As in the United States, both major parties engage in competitive happy talk about the joys of multicultural society; neither is ready to admit that there may be irreducible conflicts between the values, behavior and loyalty of new populations and those of the natives. As in the United States, those most antagonistic to the old society—viewed as irremediably conservative and racist—are most enthusiastic about displacing it with immigration. And as in the United States, the Big Business Right stands resolutely on their side.

But the U.S., a slaveholding society at its founding and destined to displace the American Indian in its growth, could probably not have avoided having race at the core of its politics. Poor little England, by contrast, has entered on this dolorous path entirely through its own folly.

-- Anonymous, July 10, 2001


Moderation questions? read the FAQ