Guest post by pagar

The policy of multiculturalism is built on two theories.

Firstly, there is the idea that human beings need, at a very primal level, some sort of attachment to cultural heritage. Without such attachment, the argument goes, people are likely to be less fulfilled and lack personal foundation. Without our cultural reference points, we are but leaves blowing in the wind.

Secondly, multiculturalism demands that all cultures have equal value. Indeed, it says that the value of a culture cannot be empirically measured because there is no fair starting point. The person making the comparison and value judgment will necessarily do so from a position that is informed by their own culture.

When these two theories are put together, we are logically driven towards embracing diversity- where everyone is encouraged to celebrate and codify the differences between cultures. Divergence is seen as positive and homogeneity is outlawed. In this climate immigrants are not required to integrate into the host culture and it is considered wrong and regressive for anyone to ask or expect them to do so.

But for liberals, the multiculturalism agenda brings with it some difficulties. continue reading… »

This originally appeared on ‘Though Cowards Flinch’, here and here

It has come to our attention that the magazine ‘Total Politics’ is planning to publish an interview with Nick Griffin, the racist leader of the British National Party.

Yesterday, we made an initial call to bloggers to consider a boycott of this year’s ‘Total Politics Blog Awards’, in the event that this magazine chooses to publish as planned an extended interview with Nick Griffin, the racist leader of the BNP.

The initial call was greeted favourably by some bloggers who saw it, and we are therefore seeking to extend the call. continue reading… »

Guest post by Jennifer O’Mahony

On March 1st in France, immigrants were encouraged to stay at home, protest, and spend nothing as a nationwide protest against the country’s latent problems with immigration and national identity.

Peggy Derder, Nadir Dendoune and Nadia Lamarkbi, three French professionals in their thirties, hit upon the idea of la journée sans immigrés, or the day without immigrants, after years of endless police checks and discrimination. The trio were encouraging anyone who is an immigrant, of immigrant origin, or who feels solidarity with immigrants and wanted to contest their treatment to take these three simple measures for just one day. In a political system where there are no black or Arab representatives, despite the fact that these minorities make up 10% of the population, people of immigrant origin wanted to make their invisibility and silence symbolically evident in workplaces around France.

Their aim was to make their compatriots see how different their country would look and sound if France’s minorities did not exist. The demonstration also sought to highlight the economic contribution that minorities make, and the range of industries they operate within France. Demonstrators were hoping to empty offices, stop public transport and close stores. The idea quickly spread and similar demonstrations were seen in Spain, Italy, and Greece. continue reading… »

The editor of Conservative Home, Tim Montgomerie, is, I understand from the Financial Times, a “committed Christian”.

He is presumably familiar with the way in which the parable of the Good Samaritan warns us away from racist stereotyping, and perhaps also of the anti-racist message in the episode of the moneychangers in the temple.

He is also, according to the FT, a key influence on the thinking of the Conservative party hierarchy, his blog supposedly reflective of Conservative grassroots opinion.

In this guise, Montgomerie is now proposing that each Tory leaflet before the election should strip the content down to three key messages. Here they are:

(1) something on the economy, emphasising how Brown has failed on controlling debt, cutting waste and regulating the banks;

(2) something on crime and immigration; and

(3) something on protecting the NHS and the most vulnerable.

(My emphasis)

So Montgomerie is suggesting that around a third of the Tories’ overall ‘message-time’ should be spent conflating the issues of crime and immigration.

For him, and presumably for his readership, it is perfectly reasonable to insinuate/imply/spell out that crime is a problem because there are immigrants, and immigrants are a problem because there is crime.

In its way, this is actually much more shocking than Rod Liddle’s outrageous claims, because however revolting they are there is always the sense that it’s the desire to outrage that drives the racist message, rather than the other way round.

But Mongomerie’s casual, perhaps even unthinking racism, with its apparent willingness to victimise a whole section of an already victimised population (let’s not get into who’s an immigrant) is simply disgusting.

And this man calls himself a Christian.

Both the ‘Hope not Hate’ campaign and the ‘Nothing British’ campaign aim to defeat the British National Party. Hope not Hate draws on the leftie tradition of mobilising opponents to fascism, and protesting wherever fascists try to march, inspired by the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ in the 1930s. Nothing British aims to defeat the arguments of the BNP, and win back ‘patriotic’ voters to mainstream politics, just as Maggie Thatcher did in the 1980s.

In the history of successful anti-fascist tactics which campaigners draw on for inspiration, there is one very important one which doesn’t always get the profile it deserves. If you want to beat the BNP, it’s not enough to expose their arguments, or to mobilise anti-fascists for demos or elections, important though all those things are. We also need to help their supporters. continue reading… »

Last night the Muslim Council of Britain held a special closed-meeting of parliamentarians, journalists, police, public servants, community representatives, academics and, erm, me. The topic of discussion was Tackling Islamophobia: Reducing Street Violence Against British Muslims.

The event was timely. “Since 9/11 anti-Muslim hate crimes appear to have become more prevalent than racist hate crimes where black and Asian Londoners are the victims.” (PDF) Testimony from a range of academic experts and politicians substantiated the claim that street violence against Muslims is rising.

Speakers stressed that there are “tangible links between Islamophobia or anti-Muslim bigotry in both mainstream political and media discourse…extremist nationalist discourse, and anti-Muslim hate crimes”. Peter Oborne – a journalist on the Conservative right by his own admission – described how after 7/7 he became aware that journalists in mainstream newspapers got away with telling lies and distorting facts about Islam and Muslims on a regular basis. Indeed he collected his findings and took them to Channel 4, who turned them into a special episode of Dispatches. This sort of dishonesty – he said – would not be tolerated if it were directed at any other minority group. Yet the smearing of British Muslims, usually playing on fears of terrorism, is standard fare in the British media.
continue reading… »

Yesterday the Daily Mail regurgitated an old story about how New Labour had apparently engineered a “secret plot” to encourage immigration into the UK.

It originated last year from an article by the Evening Standard’s Andrew Neather, whose words were twisted out of all context to create “a secret plot”. He later explained the context of the policy paper:

Multiculturalism was not the primary point of the report or the speech. The main goal was to allow in more migrant workers at a point when – hard as it is to imagine now – the booming economy was running up against skills shortages.

On the basis of that regurgitated story yesterday, the Daily Mail today published this cartoon.

The cartoon is here. Yes, it’s really a man marrying a sheep in the name of “multiculturalism”. Because, you know, immigrants are clearly no different to animals.

Fucking disgusting, even by usual Daily Mail standards.

Update: Additional comment from: New Statesman / Left Foot Forward / whatistigerbalm / Enemies of Reason / Operation Black Vote

contribution by Simon Fanshawe & Danny Sriskandarajah

Last week we published a report through ippr suggesting that we really did need to catch up in our approach to identity and how we foster diversity and tackle inequality.

Our central point was to question the belief that our identities any longer fit neatly into ‘tick boxes’ or that equality issues fit neatly into ‘strands’. Doing this produces a simplistic and sometimes false picture of disadvantage.

It runs the risk of patronising those in the previously disadvantaged groups who do not feel that their aspirations and achievements are any longer foreshortened by the mere fact of being black or disabled or gay or whatever.

And, worse than that, an approach to equalities that is based solely on ‘minorities’ risks excluding further those in the broader population who already feel that they are not being listened to. It is not so difficult to join the dots from this kind of political approach to one of the reasons why people vote BNP.
continue reading… »

Meet Tess Culnane, former National Front candidate, long-time Neo Nazi, anti head lice campaigner and the new employee of BNP London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook.

Culnane is the latest and most extreme member of the BNP to be employed at the Greater London Authority, since Barnbrook was elected in 2008.

His other appointments have included Simon Darby (now suspended) Emma Colgate, Rod Gordon, Chris Roberts and Tony Avery. All have been, or remain members of the BNP.

continue reading… »

The massive interest in the campaign by Indy readers against Rod Liddle as editor of the Independent has raised serious doubts even with Alexander Lebedev.

I’ve been told by several top sources at the Independent that the once-certain appointment is now being considered with greater reservation than before. Hell, the Indy’s own staff are sending out coded messages – they don’t want him there. Lebedev is still considering Liddle, but with greater reservations than before.

We need your help to make Alexander Lebedev’s doubts bigger. We want to place an advert (below) in the Independent, making the case that it would suffer greatly under the editorship of Rod Liddle.

If the Indy refuses the ad, the money raised will go to three charities dealing with Somalian refugees, a women’s rape and sexual abuse support group and a charity campaiging on climate change.

continue reading… »

I picked this up on the local TV news tonight, but it bears repeating for anyone who hasn’t seen it:

A mosque in Stoke-on-Trent was sprayed with graffiti referring to an upcoming English Defence League rally.

Mosque administrators discovered the daubed message at 0630 GMT on Saturday and had removed it within two hours.

Staffordshire Police said a criminal damage investigation was under way into the incident in the Normacot area.

A police spokesman said: “The community haven’t reacted to it, so it hasn’t achieved what the person who did it wanted to achieve.”

Whether the perpetrator is, in fact, associated with the EDL or linked to another far right group with a vested interest in stirring up trouble is anything but clear at this point.

What is clear, however, is that a deliberate attempt was made to draw the local Muslim community into a confrontation with EDL supporters; one that, fortunately, fell flat on its face.

In responding to John Denham’s speech last week on class, Chris Dillow said this on his blog:

…how could anyone have ever thought that class wasn’t important, or that race and disadvantage were the same?
To cut a long and tragi-comic story short, I fear the answer originates in the Left’s reaction against orthodox Marxism in the 1980s. Inspired in part by Hobsbawm’s essay, the Forward March of Labour Halted? (pdf), many on the Left gave up on the idea of the working class as a revolutionary force, and looked instead to what they called “new social movements”: women, blacks and gays (yes – to many the three were somehow homogenous!)

He then goes on to list three disastrous effects it’s had: a privileging of identity politics over class; the belief that government should get involved in everything; giving us a target-driven bureaucratized public sector which is plundered by “consultants”.

While I share concerns about the second and third issues, I want to discuss the first one. What frustrates me about Chris Dillow’s post is that while many on the Left instinctively support identity politics: they don’t seem to know why, or the thinking behind it.
continue reading… »

I’ll try and keep this succinct because the trail is long and interesting. Firstly, it looks like Liddle is being contradicted by the website’s admin (who denies they were hacked) and secondly, he has admitted to some of the comments I highlighted earlier.

Today there will be an Early Day Motion in Parliament against Liddle’s possible appointment as editor of the Indy. It will be tabled by Paul Flynn and Diane Abbott MPs, confirmed here last night, and has been prompted by the comments I published Sunday evening.

Monkeymfc
Let’s start with Liddle’s claim that others were making comments on his behalf. The Mail on Sunday reported:

When first contacted by The Mail on Sunday, Mr Liddle denied writing the BNP message, adding: ‘I often get opposition fans logging in under my name to try to embarrass me. I wouldn’t go near the racist ones.’
…
And he denied writing the comment about racial intelligence, saying the site’s administrator had told him it had been left by someone using a different computer to his.

Yesterday Roy Greenslade reported that Vikram Dodd was told by Rod Liddle that, “he was the victim of hacking due to other users of the site guessing his password.”

I asked in an earlier post when he found out his login was hacked and whether he told others this had happened.

Yesterday evening, a website admin posted this message.
continue reading… »

When the Mail on Sunday first approached Rod Liddle yesterday about comments posted on the MillwallFC site under the pseudonym ‘monkeymfc’, he denied posting some of the inflammatory comments.

He said the comments had been made by a hacker. Later he admitted making some comments, though not all.

I often get opposition fans logging in under my name to try to embarrass me. I wouldn’t go near the racist ones.

It’s worth pointing out that registered members of that messageboard can only post under specific usernames with a login. No one else can pretend to be a specific user unless they know the password.

We’ve done some digging and found very vile comments posted there ‘monkeymfc’, and have some questions for Rod Liddle.

1. He claims these extreme racist comments were put there by “hackers”. How did these hackers get his password to break into his account?

2. I’ve tried to find instances where he complained to moderators about his account being hacked, or distanced himself from messages supposedly posted under his name but couldn’t find any examples. Could he show any? Since Rod Liddle has met people from the messageboard at games, surely he would be concerned about his reputation being besmirched?
continue reading… »

In a speech today the communities secretary John Denham will say that ethnic minorities are no longer automatically disadvantaged in Britain, but that disadvantage is more linked to poverty, class and identity.

New trends are emerging linked to the way that race and class together shape people’s lives and this makes the situation much more complex. That does not mean that we should reduce our efforts to tackle racism and promote race equality but we must avoid a one dimensional debate that assumes all minority ethnic people are disadvantaged.

This should be welcomed and I’ve been arguing for a multi-dimensional approach for years, one of the reasons why I opposed ethnic minority shortlists. Class is indeed one of the primary factors affecting minorities, especially in education where middle class boys of Indian and African backgrounds do better than working class kids from white, Caribbean and Bangladeshi backgrounds.

To say that a person’s race affects their opportunities in society less than factors such as class and gender is now, I think, to state the obvious. In a way it is also a welcome development because it shows our society has become much more progressive on race issues: though it’s still a problem that how much a child’s parents earn still matters.

I can predict some comments and headlines on the right: ‘see, it shows why multiculturalism and political correctness should be ditched and Richard Littlejohn spoketh the gospel‘ etc.
continue reading… »

Last week the Southern Italian region of Calabria (’the toe of the boot’) became the theatre of a depressing anti-immigrant witchhunt eerily reminiscent of last century’s Ku Klux Klan violence in the US.

First off, the background. Like in most of Europe, fruit-picking is carried out by immigrants, except that in the South of Italy, those are largely underpaid and illegal – under the ruthless watch of the local mafia (n’drangheta), one of the most powerful groups of organised crime in the country.

Reports suggest that up to twenty thousand illegal immigrants in the region are paid £20 for a 12 or 14-hour working day minus a £5 ‘fee’ handed to their gangmasters for transport and “protection”.

They live in appalling conditions, amassed in rat-infested warehouses with no light and poor sanitation and with nothing to do but work and sleep – effectively becoming profit fodder for the n’drangheta. Every morning they are rounded up together, packed into rusty trucks and driven to orange or olive groves.

Last month, a report by Italian daily la Repubblica highlighted a ticking bomb, comparing the migrants’ living conditions to concentration camps. “About seven hundred of them live jam-packed into a derelict paper mill”, wrote reporter Carlo Ciavoni.
continue reading… »

Since the Guardian revealed on Friday afternoon that Rod Liddle was seen as Alexander Lebedev’s main choice as editor, there has been a flurry of emails and tweets in horror.

It’s not absolutely certain Lebedev will take over the Indy, and neither is it certain Liddle will be appointed. But more than one writer/journalist at the newspaper has been in touch with me saying it is a serious prospect and they are very worried.

A Facebook group entitled ‘If Rod Liddle becomes editor of The Independent, I will not buy it again‘ has started – and accumulated over 1,400 followers in a short space of time. I tweeted the same on Friday – I’d never buy it again nor link to it if Liddle becomes editor.

The Indy is Britain’s only other progressive/liberal/left newspaper. Rod Liddle is the anti-thesis of all that (quotes by Liddle at the end).
continue reading… »

contribution by Left Outside

Last month DK’s quote of the day from Charlotte Gore and her post inspired by Hayek’s Road To Serfdom.

It may be that the socialists are the most vocal anti-racists, but it is they who’ve created the economic conditions in which racism thrives. It’s they who’ve created a country with a growing obsession with stopping “foreigners” taking advantage of our welfare state, and it’s they who’ve spent the last 100 years telling everyone that Free Trade (which includes free movement of people) is a bad and terrible thing, it’s they who’ve told everyone that the job of the state is to pick sides and pick winners…. and they’re acting surprised, shocked and outraged when people who see themselves as losers in the current system want to use the state for their own purposes?

What exactly did they think would happen? I mean, really? The only way to stop National Socialism in the UK is to stop socialism.

For DK and Charlotte this is one of key critiques of even fairly mild state intervention. In my view it is a totally fallacious one. What Charlotte Gore, and DK, suggest is that once states (read: Socialists) have created even a modest welfare state they have set the scene for conflicts because they have been seen to pick sides and the creation of an “other” becomes central to politics.

We will look at 4 countries – US, UK, Australia and Germany - because they are the ones I have information for and because I think they provide a reasonably adequate sample. Of course, I would prefer to do more but I don’t have the resources or the time at the moment.
continue reading… »

There’s a paradox raised by the reaction to “Rod” Liddle’s mostly incorrect claim that “the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community.”

The paradox is this. When it comes to tax, the right are keen to stress that people respond to incentives. And yet when it comes to crime they seem coy about incentives, and prefer to talk about “multiculturalism“ or genes.

The paradox is especially strong because economic theory is much clearer on the link between poverty and crime than between tax rates and tax revenue.

This is because in the case of taxes, the income and substitution effects work in opposite ways. The substitution effect causes people to prefer leisure over work when taxes rise, whilst the income effect causes them to want to work more to recoup lost income. However, with crime the two work in the same direction. The income effect causes a poor person to turn to crime to raise money, whilst the substitution effect means the unemployed have more time with which to commit crime, and lower penalties – no danger of losing one‘s job – for doing so.
continue reading… »

A late contender for post of the year, this superb treatise on local racism, the decay and depression of outer-city housing estates and with it the potential for extremism, also contains a paragraph that gives me heart that permanently pulling up the tabloids on their bullshit, however many times you repeat yourself, is worth it:

The impulse to segregate was compounded by the messages that seemed to reinforce the idea that the treatment in Southmead reflected the mood and views of the rest of Britain. “Hundreds of thousands of migrants here for handouts, says senior judge“. “Britain paying migrants £1,700 to return home BEFORE they’ve even got here” “The violent new breed of migrants who will let nothing stop them coming to Britain“.

These headlines were just three of many that were printed in the Mail, a right-wing daily during my time in Southmead. I don’t usually take much notice of the headlines in the Sun and the Mail unless they are truly shocking, but in Southmead the headlines seemed to have an impact on the treatment we received. The level of low-level hostility from adults seemed to be directly linked to the content of the headlines. More outright hostility from younger adults and children followed a day or so later.

Do go and read the whole thing.