A black British citizen says below that the tensions predicted by Enoch Powell have come to pass but that grumbling is about all that the British will do about it. He is probably right about that. He very much understates the Muslim problem, however and completely ignores the huge problem of black crime
On the afternoon of April 20, 1968, when Conservative MP Enoch Powell was making the most provocative and notorious speech in the history of race relations in Britain, I was a nine-month-old baby living in Mogadishu, Somalia. Speaking at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham, Powell predicted that the cost of the burgeoning immigration to Britain would be rivers of blood - communities torn apart by the tensions of conflicting cultures learning to live together. His words have reverberated ever since. Now, more than ever, Britain is experiencing unfettered immigration, the like of which Powell could never have imagined. Each year, around 190,000 immigrants are arriving in this country.
Last week, a report by the House of Lords economic affairs committee concluded that high net immigration has had little effect on income per head in the resident population - in fact, benefitting the population by just 58p a week. The report also said that ministers should limit the number of workers entering from outside the EU.
My family moved to Britain in 1973, four years after President Shermarke was assassinated in a military coup. In my family's case, the streets of Britain were paved with gold. We came from a former British colony and my parents wanted us to have a British education and upbringing. We were not political refugees: this was 18 years before the country's civil war. Britain became my home. I was educated at Cheltenham College and New College, Oxford - both privileged institutions - which gave me a sense of confidence that I could integrate and feel British. I was very fortunate.
But my parents also stressed my Somali heritage and identity. We spoke Somali at home, ate Somali food and went there in the holidays. This gave me a pride in my roots and a confidence to get on with people from all backgrounds.
It was people like me whom the London dockers were objecting to in the Seventies when they marched from the East End to the Palace of Westminster carrying placards saying 'Back Britain, not Black Britain'. It was my family that the factory workers and Smithfield meat porters were striking against when they supported Powell.
So now, 40 years after his incendiary speech, I have travelled around Britain for a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary - Immigration: The Inconvenient Truth - to find out the real legacy of his words, and the state of race relations today. What I discovered was a complex, sometimes confused, but nonetheless compelling glimpse of a society under the most extraordinary strain it has ever faced outside wartime. And my investigation led me to the most troubling question of all: Was Enoch Powell right?
In his speech, Powell warned that Britain's native population would become 'strangers in their own country', and 'the black man will have the whip hand over the white man'. He said: 'They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated.' Warning that the nation was 'busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre', he added: 'As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.'
A survey by YouGov for Dispatches now suggests that he was right. Eighty-three per cent of Britons polled said they feel that there is an immigration crisis, and 84 per cent believe that the Government should stop or reduce immigration altogether. Sixty-six per cent feel their jobs are being undercut by migrant workers, and 69 per cent feel they are losing out because new immigrants are given special treatment.
Certainly, since I returned to Britain, after working abroad as a foreign correspondent, I have noticed that immigration is at the forefront of people's minds and is being discussed across the country. Many people fear that the uncontrolled number of immigrants has put an intolerable strain on housing, health and education.
My children Loula, seven, Sami, five, and Zachary, two, are at school here, and my wife Nina and I are part of the local community. People talk about immigration at home, at the school gates, in the workplace. They worry about the bread-and-butter issues: whether there will be enough places for their kids in our schools, how they will get on in a school where English is the second language, whether they can get a job.
Yet things have moved on enormously over the 40 years since Powell's speech. Back then, immigration was about cultural issues; about prejudice against skin colour and creed. Now, the grievances are focused on economics and the change in the labour market, on the effect on the NHS and on education.
What I found most shocking was that even second and third generation immigrants are resentful of new immigrants. You would think that because immigration and race have become entwined as an issue, this would not be the case. If anything, though, these people's feelings of grievance towards the wave of Poles now arriving in Britain is intensified. I interviewed Harbhajan Dardi, a Punjabi Sikh who arrived in Britain in 1968 and now lives in Smethwick, Birmingham. Although he remembered the days when Asians and dogs were banned from his local pub, he still felt animosity towards the new wave of Eastern European immigrants coming into Britain. 'They don't actually contribute to the country, to the economy,' he told me. 'They are not here to settle. They are here to have the benefits.'
Even Jamaican immigrants, who were the prime target of Powell's speech - he provocatively described their children as ' piccaninnies' - felt aggrieved towards Polish immigrants. Going back to Brixton, where I first started work as a trainee journalist on the black newspaper The Voice, I met Ricky, a carpet cleaner, whose grandparents came over from Jamaica during the Fifties. He told me he felt his job was under threat because the Poles are undercutting his rates.....
However, I don't think we will see the same levels of violence in Britain now as in the riot-torn Eighties because there are a completely different set of social dynamics. English people are generally more tolerant, and institutions like the police are more enlightened. The idea of the BNP marching through New Cross in South-East London and policemen giving them the thumbsup is unthinkable today. Our willingness to confront the problems and talk about them openly will prevent them becoming a real battleground in the way that Enoch Powell predicted.
Powell argued that one of the problems with immigration was that the majority of immigrants did not want to integrate and had a vested interest in fostering racial and religious differences. You may not have communities which are as starkly segregated as in Powell's day, but what you do have - and which modern technology has made available - is segregation of the mind. People can belong to utterly separate communities, which reject the mainstream and don't want, or need, to integrate. Instead of multi-culturalism, we are getting tribalisation.
The Muslims are particularly susceptible to this tribalisation because of a minority of extremists in their midst. Their young could be sitting in a bedroom in Bradford, connected via the internet to a radical Islamic preacher. In Southall, there are third generation British Asians who have their own community, their own music, their own language. They don't see themselves as British Asian: they see themselves as Punjabi. We thought that the generation after my parents' one would be totally integrated - but things have gone full circle. That has got to be the result of a multi- culturalism which encourages loyalty to one's own culture over-and-above all loyalty to the host Britain's....
There is no point sitting around saying Enoch Powell was a small-minded racist bigot. If there are people who still evoke his name and ideas, we have to tackle the problem and ask why.
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BBC PRESSURED TO COME CLEAN: WHAT DID THE WMO SAY, WHEN DID THEY SAY IT?
The BBC is sending this fatuous response to queries about the infamous capitulation to climate activist Jo Abbess's extortion:
Dear Reader
There has been considerable interest in the story about global temperatures authored by our correspondent Roger Harrabin, and the alteration made to the text after publication. A minor change was made to the piece on our website to better reflect the science. A number of people, including the report's authors the World Meteorological Organization, pointed out to us that the earlier version had been ambiguous.
With thanks for your mail, time and interest, BBC News website
Well, for a start the Beeb is supposed to report what is known and in most cases the available data is open to interpretation - it is in fact ambiguous by nature. No points there. So, if the WMO (source of the press release reported on by Harrabin) actually complained (and they might have since they are a UN shopfront):
* what exactly did they say
* what changes did they request
* why was this not noted when edits were made
* why wasn't the editing timestamp updated to reflect changes
* importantly, why was Abbess invited to "Have a look in 10 minutes and tell me you are happier. We have changed headline and more"
* does the BBC believe Abbess to be a representative of the WMO
* if not, what position does Abbess occupy that gives her editorial control over BBC content
* How does this comply with the BBC Trust's stated values?
Our values
Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest.
Audiences are at the heart of everything we do.
We take pride in delivering quality and value for money.
Creativity is the lifeblood of our organisation.
We respect each other and celebrate our diversity so that everyone can give their best.
We are one BBC: great things happen when we work together.
If you'd like to help find out whether the WMO really requested changes and what they said, if they did, then the place to start asking is NewsOnline Complaints and pose your questions. Perhaps ask who contacted them from WMO and what did they say?
If the BBC wants to be a clearing house for activist propaganda that's fine - so long as the activists are the one's footing the bill rather than the fees levied on the British public.
Source
Faces give away giveaways - psych profs' amazing claim
I think that the mocking tone of the report below is probably justified
In today's pseudoscience news, the quality press is alive with the findings by UK psych researchers that people can fairly reliably tell how slutty someone is merely by looking at a picture of their face. Psychologists at several UK universities teamed up on the research, which will plainly lead in short order to the betterment of humanity. The link between looking dirty and being a tramp was firmly established for both sexes.
This was done by asking students to fill out questionnaires regarding how likely they were to put out, how often they had done so lately etc. Data from such questionnaires is well known to be solidly grounded in fact. This done, the subjects were photographed.
Other students were then asked to look at the photographed faces and say how easy they reckoned the pictured individual might be. In a staggering 72 per cent of cases, they correctly guessed whether the person in the portrait was or was not a slag. Or at least, whether or not they were likely to admit being a slag on an anonymous questionnaire.
"We may be subtly aware of other people's attitudes to sex," says Dr Lynda Boothroyd of Durham Uni, lead author of the groundbreaking slapper-spotting research. "What is far more interesting is that despite the subtlety of the explicit awareness... there is a very strong tendency for women to be attracted to... men who are less interested in casual sex. Men have the opposite preference with female faces; they strongly prefer the [easy] women."
Participants were also asked to rate faces on how masculine/feminine they looked, and the researchers believe this shows a connection between masculine aspect in men and a tendency to be anyone's after a couple of drinks. It seems that the study also supports the idea that "male masculinity" has "negative connotations... for long term partnerships".
In other words, manly men are easy, and women don't like that. Or put another way: "Androgenisation in men is related to less restricted sexual behaviour... women are averse to unrestricted men." Comfort, then, for any chaps out there who don't look very studly and don't get much action - it seems women are much more attracted to your type. Even if they sometimes have an odd way of showing it.
Source
AS THEY TACKLE CLIMATE CHANGE, GOVERNMENTS ARE STARVING THE PEOPLE THEY SET OUT TO HELP
The law of unintended consequences has claimed many millions of victims over the centuries; the first decade of the 21st century is now demonstrating that governments have not lost the knack of destroying the livelihoods of the very people they purport to help.
On a brief visit to Britain, the head of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) yesterday told us of his desperate concern over rising food prices, especially in the developing world. Antonio Guterres singled out for special blame the biofuels business, which he said was having an, "unexpected very negative impact on the availability of food".
Unexpected? How could it not have been anticipated that the turning over of millions of acres of farmland to the production of fuel for cars rather than humans would not have had this effect? To be fair to Mr Guterres, the governments of the developed world showed no outward signs of anticipating this inevitable consequence, so seduced were they by the idea of a "renewable" alternative to fossil fuels; it would, they claimed, simultaneously reduce our political dependency on Middle Eastern oil and save the lives of millions in the Third World who would otherwise perish through climate change.
The first part of that equation was especially attractive to President George W Bush. Following the collapse of his policy to "democratise" the Middle East, he promulgated laws which mandated the turning over of about a third of the US corn belt into the production of ethanol. Since ethanol is dramatically less efficient than dead dinosaurs as a way of powering engines, this has also involved vast subsidies - as much as $25bn a year, according to some estimates.
Don't, by the way, expect this to change after Bush leaves the White House. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain all support this grotesque policy - as they have taken great care to point out when electioneering in Iowa, the Saudi Arabia of ethanol production.
They, rather more than Mr Bush, have tended to justify this monumental bribe as part of a policy to "reduce climate change". In this they are much closer to the governments of the European Union, which is collectively committed to a mad plan to generate a third of our fuel from crops, as part of its attempt to conform to Kyoto treaty obligations. It is especially mad, because recent research has suggested that most biofuel production, especially when it involves the uprooting of vast tracts of forest, is much more environmentally damaging than the burning of fossil fuels.
Gordon Brown has now called for a review of the consequences of this policy for world food production and distribution, to the irritation of the President of the European Commission, who (somewhat bizarrely) sticks to the view that it has no significant consequences for food prices.
Yet one can also understand Jose Manuel Barroso's feelings: it makes the EU look ridiculous to say that it will examine the consequences of a policy - after rather than before the member governments agreed to implement it.
More here
BBC bias again: "Here's a great example from the BBC of the presumably unthinking double standard that guides so much Middle East reporting: "Egypt has sent 1,200 extra security personnel to the border area with Gaza, officials say. The Egyptians fear another breach of the frontier by Palestinians trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. A senior member of Hamas, which controls Gaza, threatened on Tuesday to repeat a breach of the border with Egypt earlier this year." So Egypt is trying to prevent "a breach of the border," while Israel is imposing a "blockade." Yet there is no difference between what the two countries are actually doing."
Penny-pinching British government under fire: "Families of British troops killed in war zones because of faulty equipment may be able to sue the Government for a breach of human rights after a landmark High Court ruling yesterday. The court set out new grounds for legal action by stating that the Army's duty to protect soldiers could extend to patrols outside a military base and even to a battlefield. After the judgment, some relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq - and who blame the Ministry of Defence for inadequate equipment, training or care - said they would consider bringing a group legal action. Mr Justice Collins, in a judgment on the conduct of inquests into the deaths of service personnel, said that members of the Armed Forces serving abroad could not receive absolute protection. But he ruled that the MoD had an obligation to avoid or minimise risks to the lives of its troops"
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