Segregation in Manchester is a bleak vision of Britain’s future - "Britain’s sins came home to roost long ago. The grooming gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and across the country, the detonations in Manchester and London, the creeping surveillance of political discourse, and mass migration have all undermined the fundamental functions of the state and eroded liberties we took for granted. Thursday’s by-election in Gorton and Denton was simply confirmation of one last point: the distorting effects of transplanting foreign cultures into British towns and cities aren’t confined to occasional votes for George Galloway, or the endemic corruption of Tower Hamlets. Little by little, the country we live in is changing around us. The future of British politics looks more like France today than it does the United Kingdom 25 years ago... volunteer election observers reporting that 12 per cent of the votes they witnessed breached the secret ballot as family members instructed others how to vote. It would be naive beyond foolishness to assume that the notoriously abusable postal voting system wasn’t subject to greater pressure than this. Left-wing journalists joking about “family voting” with images of politicians attending the polls know perfectly well what the phenomenon actually means: patriarchs issuing instructions in the style of clan politics, following appeals to the interests of those clans. The dysfunction that keeps Third World countries Third World is now deeply rooted in the United Kingdom. Alternatively, you can just look at Gorton and Denton itself. The seat is one of the most segregated in England and Wales. Pick two random people in the constituency, and the probability they’d share religious beliefs is 48 per cent. Pick two random people in the same neighbourhood within the constituency, and it reaches 65 per cent. You can see this in census data as a tightly packed cluster of Muslim residents in the west of the constituency, and their total absence in the east. When asked at the 2021 Census, some 35 per cent of these Muslim residents answered that they did not see themselves as being British in any way, shape or form. There is some good news – the proportions among those who held a British passport or were born in the UK were far lower, at 4 per cent and 6 per cent respectively – but the point remains: the degree of churn in and out of the area has created a community fundamentally separated from the nation around it, and which practices a style of politics that is similarly separate. These patterns have been visible for years. Reports in Birmingham two decades ago showed Labour candidates altering postal votes in “predominantly Muslim wards”; 10 years ago, Eric Pickles’ review of electoral fraud showed that “pressure” was put on “vulnerable” women and young people, particularly in Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, to “vote according to the will of the elders”; letters from Imams instructing voters to back Lutfur Rahman resulted in a finding of “undue spiritual influence” in court. That same history also shows why the British establishment has lagged in reacting to it. As with the curious practice of allowing Commonwealth citizens on student visas and other short-term resident permits to vote in our elections, ethnic bloc voting largely benefited the Labour Party, which had little benefit to lift the rock on the practice; the Conservatives, as usual, shied away from potential controversy. In the long run, however, the effect of allowing these practices to continue was to help bury Labour. Politicians eyeing a more diverse future thought they could see the writing on the wall. As the economic conditions that gave rise to the Labour movement faded away, the party would survive by becoming the party of everyone else: feminism, gay rights, trans rights, minority migrants, Islam and the working classes too, tying up every group that could plausibly be described as disadvantaged. Over time, however, the wildly diverging views of those working class people and the new Labour coalition drove a wedge between the party and its traditional voters. Today, there is essentially no relationship between the white working class population in an area and Labour’s vote share. The new voters, meanwhile, found themselves wooed by parties without the institutional and cultural baggage of a Labour Party still paying lip service to its heritage. A previously reliable ethnic bloc vote drained away, leaving Labour high and dry. Which leaves us with the aftermath of Gorton and Denton. Look at how the population movements that led to this point happened – against the repeatedly expressed will of the country’s residents, in pursuit of short-term objectives the governments of the day largely failed to achieve, overlooked for electoral advantage that quickly dissipated – and it’s hard not to feel that the worst sin of Britain’s political establishment is that it destroyed and betrayed the country for nothing."
Sam Ashworth-Hayes on X - "This is not a diverse community. It's two different societies living parallel lives."
Left wingers see a plural society and celebrate it as "diverse"
The new migration system isn't working - "the employments data shows us the extraordinary changes since the introduction of the new migration system in January 2021: a system which is more restrictive towards EU migration, but much less restrictive towards migration from the rest of the world... it is pretty striking that the UK economy has created more additional employments for nationals of both India and Nigeria as single countries than for UK nationals over this period. If we were to look only at private sector jobs the contrast would be even greater - the number of private sector employments for UK nationals was marginally down (29,000) over the period, so all of the growth in private sector employments over this period was coming from a 1.2 million increase in employments for non-EU nationals... I think the most interesting thing in the new data is what it shows happening to the average earnings of the nationalities that have seen either more liberal or tighter rules. For India and Nigeria, the two largest growth groups, the average earnings of Indian and Nigerian nationals relative to UK nationals has sharply declined since the new and less selective system was introduced in 2021. And these numbers are comparing non-UK nationals to an UK average which includes many teenagers and pensioners, who have much lower earnings. If we look at the earnings of people of the same age the effect is even more striking: in fact, we see a cash decline in the median earnings of Indian and Nigerian nationals aged 22 to 40 - meaning a larger decline in real terms... migration has fixed costs for existing residents in terms of diluting our stock of capital, infrastructure and housing: stocks of capital which can only grow so fast, and have built up over long periods. For migration to benefit existing residents economically, we would ideally see new migrants being mainly very high skill and high earning. But the new system seems to be taking us away from that, with newer migrants among the biggest growth groups earning relatively less than previous migrants from the same places... If we want to make the UK the grammar school of the western world, we want to reduce the number of people who come and either don’t work, or work on low wages, and so are less likely to be net contributors to the public finances. The last government promised that the new migration system would attract the ‘best and brightest’. But instead, we seem to be going in the wrong direction."
From 2024. Proof that the Brexiteers were racist and xenophobic, since they flooded the UK with low wage brown and black people
Leo Kearse - see me on tour! Links in bio on X - "I'm astounded at the response of Edinburgh Council leader Jane Meagher to the migrant knife rampage that left people with life-changing injuries: "Moments like this remind us of the importance of tolerance" REALLY?? Don't you think it might show the limits or negative consequences of "tolerance"? "Our biggest strength [is diversity]" I'm sure the people bleeding in hospital will be relieved to hear that stabby migrants are such a strength. "...and we all have a part to play in making sure it stays that way" Or what? What are you threatening us with if we don't play along with your religious diktat?"
Salopian on X - "if diversity is our greatest strength then how come we were THE global super power with the largest empire in history before we imported all this diversity?"
GB News on X - "Iranian migrants massing along French coast with plan to cross English Channel"
WasAcop on X - "So… explain it to me like I’m five. We have British citizens trapped in the Middle East due to the lack of flights… And you’re expecting me to believe that Iranians have somehow magically managed to travel the whole of Europe in less than a week? Or is it more likely migrants are saying they are Iranian because they know it will help their claim? Shut the border. Immediately."
GAZAWOOD - the PALLYWOOD saga on X - "Muslim preacher in the UK 🇬🇧 “We are here to stay. THIS IS OUR LAND, WE ARE SETTLERS. And the current English flag is forbidden under Sharia law because it bears a cross. Instead, ‘England’ could be written on a white flag.”"
Multicultural Britain is becoming harder to defend | The Spectator - "‘Britain’s most precious asset is our diverse and cohesive democracy’, trilled the opening of a government social cohesion plan just two years ago. The very fact the plan had to be created may have suggested otherwise, but back then, the captains of the multicultural state were at least still trying to keep appearances up... Far from an ‘asset’, Britain’s ‘diversity’ is now understood only as a problem to be ‘approach[ed]’. The public, meanwhile, are implored forlornly to be ‘fair’, rather than exacting, in how we judge this. Even before one gets to the policy measures in this plan – many of which look deeply draconian – the PM’s foreword paints a revealingly grim picture of how the state views the nation it governs. The world is now so ‘dangerous’ and so ‘volatile’ that we are in nothing short of an integration ‘emergency’, Sir Keir openly admits. Starmer may be no Churchill, but he nonetheless hopes to issue a rallying ‘Call to Action’ to the British public, for ‘quiet act[s] of defiance against the forces of division’... This is all a far cry from the complacent bromides about our ‘successful multi-faith democracy’ and our ‘community of communities’ we had grown used to in recent years. In a development that no one ever asked for – which certainly never appeared in any postwar manifesto – the consequences of multiculturalism now means that ordinary Brits must channel the Blitz spirit just to live in their own country. Once ‘Protecting What Matters’ starts getting into the details, the picture is even more bleak. An overview of ‘demographic’ challenges admits that the previous government’s immigration policy was ‘unsustainable’ and that it has placed ‘huge pressure’ on wages and public services. Yet the problems of ‘social cohesion’, it has to admit, are really nothing new. It goes all the way back to Cantle Report into the Oldham and Bradford riots of 2001 to illustrate the ‘parallel lives’ many migrant communities are today living, which we are warned can ‘exacerbate tensions and limit the opportunities that a diverse society brings’. Meanwhile, everywhere and always lurks the ‘real threat’ of ‘extremists’, who ‘foment division and target UK institutions, including schools, universities, charities, and even local bodies such as Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education, to serve their purposes’. Strangely, despite this very specific concern, we are never told who these extremists are or what these purposes might be... Neatly smoothing over grievances about grooming gangs and asylum hotels will be a new ‘UK Town of Culture’ competition (to go with 2025’s Children’s Capital of Culture – Rotherham), £500,000 for ‘community-led school linking projects’ and an initiative to tackle male loneliness. These happy inanities sit alongside bungs for a Muslim hate-crime helpline (which encourages reporting of incidents even without ‘evidence or certainty’ they have happened), a sinister new ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ definition and a pledge to prosecute hate crime ‘with the full force of the law’ (presumably this will not apply to those against white girls). Some £1.5 billion will be spent on ‘cultural organisations’ with a further £150 million to ‘rebuild confidence in our high streets’, and Defra will draw up a Waste Crime Action Plan. Meanwhile, Ofcom will go after ‘harmful’ content on Netflix and the Online Safety Act (OSA) may well be beefed up with extra ‘crisis powers’, as Whitehall continues to act as if Southport would never have happened were it not for social media. For all the broad handwringing about nefarious ‘extremism’ and destabilising global trends, it is apparently online speech that nervous officials have decided is the real root of our ills... The Chief Scientific Adviser, who chairs Sage, will draw up a report on ‘misinformation’. Parents and carers in Yorkshire and the Midlands, whom the government apparently thinks are especially tech-illiterate, will be treated to ‘practical tools to help children build resilience to harmful, divisive and polarising online content’. Whether any of this would really improve ‘cohesion’ is highly dubious, but at least it will give a few wonks something to do. The Labour government’s cohesion plan, like many before it, is billed as the way to make more Britain ‘confident, cohesive, and resilient’. In reality, this bizarre smorgasbord of speech restrictions, municipal cultural initiatives and unsubtle ethnic pandering will do little to achieve these goals. What we could do with instead is a little more honesty. Our leaders need to admit not just that multiculturalism isn’t working, but that mass immigration was always reckless and foolish, as well as wholly undemocratic. The fractious mess it has now created is a tremendous social burden that urgently needs to be undone. For all the handwringing, we haven’t quite got that in this white paper. But it’s clear that even in Whitehall, the penny is starting to drop."
Labour will do nothing to prevent the Balkanisation of Britain - "Protecting What Matters. The title of the Government’s command paper this week on social cohesion is intriguingly vague. What does matter in creating a more cohesive country? Sadly you will be none the wiser, or even much better informed, after reading this paper. Its most important element is the new “anti-Muslim hatred” definition, a disastrous idea which will, if anything, make worse the problem it purports to be solving. But there is much more to concern us in this rambling and contradictory document. Quality of language is always a clue to dysfunction. This is among the most badly-written government papers I have had the misfortune to read – and as you can probably imagine, that is a pretty low bar. No doubt there is some modern Civil Service illiteracy in there. But I fear it is more. After all, muddled, disorganised and robotic writing can sometimes be an accurate expression of muddled, disorganised and robotic ideas. And so it is here. Our problem can be quite easily described. It is that over the last few decades, and especially in recent years, we have invited into this country large numbers of migrants from very different cultures. This has changed the character of parts of our major cities and towns. And it has generated a specific security threat from a small minority within these communities; led to a larger problem of integration – the parallel and distinct lives often led by these newer communities; and, finally, caused significant economic stresses as a consequence. Protect What Matters occasionally touches on this situation but cannot bring itself to describe it honestly, clearly, or at any length. When it tries, the issue is framed mainly as a problem generated by the existing population for engaging in “hatred and hostility”, for which the remedies are education and training plus a further crackdown on hate crime. Incredibly, “irregular” (that is, illegal) migration is mentioned only once in the whole paper. There is a commitment to “end the use of asylum hotels and return them to local communities” (the illegal migrants, one assumes, not the hotels) so as to “build strong community consent”, as if this was a response to popular demand, rather than a source of bitter resentment and seething anger. What is actually proposed to deal with these problems? On the one hand, lots of government process. Develop a “Social Cohesion Measurement Framework”. Introduce a “local cohesion risk assessment tool”. Hand out penny packets of money to so-called “Pride in Place” programmes, local media publishers, community groups, whoever. In other areas there just aren’t any real policy proposals at all. Take just one example. The Government recommends clearer “national integration expectations focused on English language proficiency”. Fine – but how? There will be a further “national consultation”. There will be a “review of English-language provision”. And so on. Why not be specific and – for example – require all public authorities to use English only in their official activities? We know why. For one thing it would probably be lawyered out of existence under the Equality Act or the ECHR. And for another the Government doesn’t really want to go that far anyway. In some policy areas, of course, the Government is happy to be more robust. Where it’s about free speech, well then there can be a crackdown, reflecting the general view within our establishment that people can’t be trusted to assess information themselves without falling prey to conspiracy theories and foreign subversion. The Online Safety Act is laughably described as a “world-leading framework”. We are promised actions to “build resilience to misinformation and disinformation”, to avoid the risk that “viral, harmful content can destabilise communities”. We know where all this is leading. The Government claims to want “space for honest discussion”, but what they will get is a chilling effect on free speech, an inability to debate things properly, and even less ability for us all just to rub along together. What lies behind all this? I suspect the Government, or at least the Home Secretary, knows perfectly well what the problems are. But they cannot face the solutions, so they resort to verbiage and vacuity instead. They and their party aren’t willing to contemplate the kind of measures that might actually make a difference: net negative immigration, leaving the ECHR, the compulsory use of English by public authorities, bans on face coverings and the burka, an end to Commonwealth electoral rights and “family voting”, tougher access to British citizenship as the only route to settlement, Danish-style breaking up of “parallel communities”, policing that doesn’t involve collusion with “community leaders”, and some priority for at least the gentle British version of cultural Christianity in the public sphere. Unless the Government is willing to do these things, there really isn’t much point in their strategy. It is beside the point. Instead, they could make their life easier by saying what, in their heart of hearts, they no doubt really think: “We have a huge problem of social integration and national loyalty. We don’t really know what to do. Here’s some money. Meanwhile, keep your mouth shut. Don’t you know diversity is our strength?”"
Do the British really need to ‘integrate better’ with immigrants? - "People who were actually born in this country may be feeling a touch put out by the Government’s insistence that, in multicultural modern Britain, “Integration is a two-way street.” In other words: the onus is not just on immigrants to integrate with the British way of life. It’s also on the British to integrate with the immigrants’ way of life. This, I would venture, is a somewhat contentious view. Still, it’s not the first time I’ve heard it. Last year, on the BBC’s Sunday Morning Live, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown – a Uganda-born pundit who has described herself as “a Leftie-liberal, anti-racist, feminist Muslim” – startlingly revealed that she often marches up to “white people” in Red Wall pubs and asks them: “What attempt have you made to integrate with those who come into your society?” She then complained: “Why is the pressure always on us? Why don’t we say to more white people: ‘Integrate better’?” How I would love to be a fly on the wall in one of those pubs. Because I’m dying to know how the working-class men in them respond. (“Frightfully sorry, madam, do please forgive this appalling oversight. I’ll pop straight home and slip into a nice niqab.”) The thing I want to know most of all, though, is this. Does the dictum that “integration is a two-way street” apply when British people move abroad, too? Imagine I were to emigrate to, say, Pakistan – and upon arrival, I strode straight up to a group of locals and said, “You chaps need to integrate with my way of life. Which means you’ve all got to start drinking lots of beer. And if you don’t – you’re racist.”"
The UK learning from Singapore once again
Shabana Mahmood has undermined the last immigration myth - "Shabana Mahmood has got something right. Suspending student visa applications from some countries where migrants use the UK’s immigration system as a backdoor for claiming asylum is long overdue. At the same time, it raises the question of why the Home Secretary hasn’t gone further. The current visa ban applies to student visa applications from Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan, and to work and study visas from Afghanistan. No such restriction has yet been placed on Pakistan: more Pakistanis claim asylum after entering Britain on a legitimate visa than citizens of any other nation. Shouldn’t restrictions extend here too? And shouldn’t we follow the logic of the move to its ultimate conclusion? The Home Secretary described the move as targeting “those nationals seeking to exploit our generosity”: a targeted approach, singling out applicants from particular countries. Mahmood seems to have realised that two migrants with the same visa, and the same job or university offer, will often have very different outcomes once they arrive in the UK, and that these outcomes are correlated with their country of origin. So why is the rest of the immigration system continuing to act as if this isn’t the case? Mention the idea of applying different rules to outwardly similar applicants from different countries, and British policymakers recoil. But that is exactly what Mahmood is now doing for a subset of visas in a subset of countries, and there’s strong evidence that we should apply this approach elsewhere. Different countries have different education systems. They offer different training, their public services have different levels of corruption. Their people come from different cultures. All of these things matter when working out who is likely to make a positive contribution when they arrive in Britain, and they should matter when we decide who can come here, too. Across the data available to the Government are figures on which nationalities are more likely to be arrested. There’s data on how their wages change over time, potentially allowing the Treasury to project their future earnings. There’s data on labour market attachment, and employment rates by sex and nationality, and there’s data on welfare claims, too. We can even estimate how many children people are likely to have, and how much they should earn to cover this cost. It should be possible to adjust thresholds such that every arrival is expected to be fiscally positive. Acting as if none of this data exists is ludicrous. Our current approach seems to be pretending as if every applicant carries the same risks, and set thresholds accordingly. The idea is that this is non-discriminatory and “fair”. But it doesn’t seem particularly fair, or sensible, to treat everyone as statistically average when we know this isn’t the case. It’s an obvious point, but one that bears repeating: most of the problems with Britain’s immigration system are because we aren’t selective in who we let into this country. We don’t screen applicants by their health, beyond asking for a TB test (Australia asks for a medical examination, x-rays, HIV tests, tests of kidney function, and often tests for hepatitis B). We don’t ask them to fund their own healthcare through the private sector, filtering for those able to stand on their own two feet. We set low salary thresholds and act surprised when migrant workers end up on universal credit, or when London’s social housing stock fills up with those born overseas. We act as if Ringroad Polytechnic’s Delivery Studies course should have the same right to sell the graduate visa route to overseas students as Oxford, Cambridge or Edinburgh, and then act shocked that so many international students end up as care workers. The result of this egalitarian, open-to-all system is that even when we look at applicants coming from the same country, the migrants arriving in Britain can be substantially worse than those going to other Western nations."
Watchdog censures Telegraph over ‘foreign benefits’ story – but accepts it was true - "The Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) upheld a complaint over the accuracy of an article headlined: “More than one million foreign nationals claiming benefits”, saying the information the article was based on did not prove the central claim. In fact, figures from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show that the article, published in March last year, underestimated the number of foreign nationals in receipt of benefits, which was actually 1.2 million. Nevertheless, The Telegraph has been told to print a correction online and in print, which includes Ipso’s ruling questioning the way the figures were presented. Ipso stated that because the DWP data on which the article was based recorded the nationality of claimants when registering for a National Insurance number, rather than the nationality at the time they were claiming benefits, some claimants might have since acquired UK citizenship, and would not be foreign nationals at the time they were claiming benefits, but that the article did not make this clear. Ipso agreed, however, that The Telegraph could also publish alongside its ruling the fact that DWP figures released more recently show that more than 1.2 million people with a non-British-citizen immigration status were indeed claiming Universal Credit at the time in question, and that the figure had been above one million since July 2023. Sir David Davis, the Conservative MP and free speech campaigner, said: “This seems to me to be an extraordinarily unwise decision by Ipso. “I really do think Ipso should look back at their own decision-making. This is not the only time we have had some odd decisions from them.”... “Britain’s press watchdog has forced a newspaper to print a correction about a migration story they themselves accept is true. “It looks like an attempt to massage the narrative and downplay the true scale of Britain’s migration crisis.”... It is not the first time a ruling by Ipso has attracted controversy. In April last year, the regulator was accused of undermining free speech after reprimanding The Telegraph for quoting comments previously made in Parliament. The watchdog upheld a complaint from the Muslim Association of Britain over allegations made in the House of Commons that it was “affiliated” to the Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation banned as a terrorist group in some countries. Lord Gove, who was still an MP at the time, made the comment in the Commons under parliamentary privilege, which protects politicians against legal action by organisations or individuals for comments made in Parliament. Ipso ruled that The Telegraph should have sought a response from the MAB, even though The Telegraph included in the article its rebuttal of Lord Gove’s allegations at the time he made them. Lord Gove said at the time that the ruling could stifle free speech."
