LOVING EU…

The Today programme was particularly vile this morning. It ran TWO items between 7am and 7.30am. The first was with EU Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager and she there to tell us how the well intentioned EU could investigate how companies such as Amazon, Google and Apple conduct their tax affairs in the UK. The BBC continually play this “tax avoidance” angle up for all it is with – forgetting that these large corporations simply comply with the tax code the politicians put in place. The message was the EU was a force for good – defending us from the robber barons of these big companies.

The BBC also ran an interview with thew Chief Exec of Diageo. Lots of chat about how their brands are performing in different global markets and then…the BBC casually ask him whether he thinks the UK should stay in the EU. Absolutely – he responds. It would be madness for us to BREXIT. Gotta love how the BBC sets this pro-EU agenda up, don’t you?

Sleepwalking into segregation…and cultural disaster

 

Trevor Phillips’ 2005 speech in which he said that society was sliding into a dangerous segregation, and Muslims in particular were most at risk of doing so, is quite hard to find on the internet for some reason….at least I found it so.

In light of that I thought I would publish it in full here for you to read at your leisure…and as an easy place to find it in future…..

 

Here is the full text of the Trevor Phillips’ speech.
 
Contents
Britain: pride in diversity
America: a segregated society
The British balance
What makes us British
The path to integration
The drift to segregation
The integration agenda
Hard segregation
Soft segregation
Achieving integration
Equality
Participation
Interaction
Conclusion
Since extracts of what I will say tonight became public, some have rushed to comment on what they thought I intend to say. Some have even used the opportunity to have a go at the CRE and its partners. Others have decided, incorrectly, that I want to criticise the government. I don’t intend to answer these critics directly tonight except in one specific area, concerning the work of the CRE itself.

What I want to focus on tonight is a question many Britons are asking themselves: how much has 7/7 changed the prospects for race relations in Britain? How will that affect the CRE family and its work? And how should we respond?

Some people have been surprised, I think, by what they would see as the Commission’s relative silence over the past few months.

It is true that after the initial reaction, in which we focused on appealing for calm and unity, we played little part in the public debates which followed about the causes of 7/7, multiculturalism, and the place of the Muslim communities.

This was partly because much of the debate involved issues outside our scope (foreign policy for example); and because on some of the underlying issues – such as the ‘meaning’ of multiculturalism – we already have a public position, which has been stated and debated many times.

But also we may have seemed silent because at this moment of national crisis, the CRE family needed to act rather than ponder.

In the weeks following 7/7, Commission personnel and more importantly, the thousands of folk we support in communities around the country, were concentrating on three crucial tasks:

    • encouraging communities to come forward with information that would help us to tackle the threat of terrorism;
    • reassuring communities from which the perpetrators of the 7/7 and 21/7 outrages came, that they should not be the targets or scapegoats of retribution; and
    • combating the divisions that these events threatened to open up within communities, and preventing those who would exploit those divisions for racist or Islamophobic purposes from doing so.

In practice this meant that we and our voluntary sector partners were in constant dialogue, collating information and sharing it around the country; preventing rumours taking hold; anticipating where trouble might flare and taking steps to defuse tensions; and encouraging all public authorities, from Ministers to local authorities to the police, and the media, to tread carefully.

People talk a lot about the race relations industry, usually disparagingly. I am proud to say that this summer, our industry did its part in holding communities together at a time of great stress. We experienced no major conflicts, and despite the fact that there definitely was an upsurge in anti-Asian activity post 7/7, we understand that this has now subsided; the GLA tells us that in London for example, the level of such activity is lower now than it was before 7/7.

This is in no small part due to the work of the people often casually abused as race relations busybodies, working on the ground, calming, cajoling and conciliating. Many are paid, but tens of thousands are unpaid, and do it because they want our country to be a better place.

So I want to take this opportunity to say thank you to all those who worked with us in that period: the so-called race relations industry showed itself in reality to be a vital post-emergency service.

And our job has only just begun.
After the emergency services have done their lifesaving; the police have done their detection; the lawyers have done their prosecuting and defending; and the politicians have done their reassuring and legislating, they will pass on to new challenges. But we know that there will still be work for us to do.

It is the work of healing divided communities, reconciling black to white to brown, of Jew to Muslim to Hindu.
It is the work of reaching out to those so far out at the edge of our society that values common to the rest of us no longer have meaning for them.

It is the work of forging the common bonds of identity that should make it unthinkable for any of us to want to harm other people in pursuit of a political goal.

And it is about how we start that work that I want to speak tonight.
Britain: pride in diversity
As the mists have cleared over the summer, it would be all too easy to start congratulating ourselves on the silver lining to this cloud.

On July 6, the day we won the Olympics of 2012, Britain emerged as a beacon for diversity across the globe. There is no doubt that the IOC saw London as a place where anyone, whatever their background, could come and feel at home, could visit and know they would find a kindred spirit.

This is a tribute to the team that put together the bid, to our capital city, but most of all to our nation. And it provides part of an answer to that currently vexed question: what is Britishness?

I would put that question differently now, and ask instead: what makes us British?
July 6 and the days after showed that one thing that makes us special is our comfort with diversity.
Even in the desperate adversity of the days that followed the London atrocities, the fact of our multi-ethnicity and our ease with it stood out. Those who died came from myriad backgrounds. Likewise, those who rescued the survivors and reassured the city. It became clear that the people who planted, or wanted to plant, bombs, stood alone, without the comfort of any community that would support their actions.

Earlier this month, as we watched the tragedy of New Orleans unfold, many people, I think – and some said this to me – consoled themselves with the thought that such a thing could never happen here.

By such a thing I do not mean the hurricane itself. I mean the manifest neglect of a poor, largely African American district, and the criminal disregard of citizens who did not have the resources to get out of the way of Katrina. The fact is that these people were socially, economically, culturally and psychologically marooned outside the mainstream of American society.

It wasn’t that nobody cared about them. What happened was worse. The fact is that nobody who mattered even remembered that they existed. In a society where whites and blacks choose to live entirely separate lives, the black poor become invisible to the decision-makers and the powerful, unless and until they get themselves some guns and start to terrorise their own neighbours.

We, here, watching, could not imagine British people behaving like this.
Really?
Maybe we too have become blind to anything that isn’t on the TV news or tabloid newspapers. Perhaps it’s time that the cameras returned to the slow massacre of young men and women that is taking place on our streets in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham, for example. Perhaps it’s time that the newspapers showed us the gang warfare that goes on just yards away from our front doors or in children’s playgrounds, in communities we pass through but do not see.

We cannot and must not be complacent. We should learn from America’s failure to act until they were in too deep to get out of the state they are now in.
America: a segregated society
Until New Orleans held up the mirror to the USA, Americans, too, prided themselves on having found the holy grail of integration, with black millionaires, academics, business people and politicians alongside the sports and entertainment stars.

But in New Orleans the truth broke the surface. It showed us a society in which the average black child still attends a black majority school. A society in which the average white person returns home at the day’s end to all-white suburbs, where they won’t see a non-white face until they go back to the city the next day. A democracy in which black politicians, with a few notable exceptions, represent black districts, gerrymandered in order to provide the minimum of black representation. An economy in which black businessmen sell their wares largely to a black middle class. And an education system in which most black academics are teaching at all-black colleges or in urban institutions disproportionately packed with ethnic minority students.

This is a segregated society, in which the one truth that is self-evident is that people cannot and never will be equal. That is why, for all of us who care about racial equality and integration, America is not our dream, but our nightmare.

I think here we also have a different idea of what integration means. There I think the focus is purely on equal rights for different groups. Amongst America’s hyphenated identities, the part of their identity that marks them out as different seems to have become as important, even more important, than the part that binds them together. Americans have all fetched up at the same restaurant; but every group has its own separate table, with its own menu, its own waiters and its own way of paying the bill.
The British balance
I think we have a richer interpretation here that prizes both our individuality and our nation over and above our ethnicity. There are some old-fashioned types who think of integration as just another word for assimilation. But no-one seriously believes that we should all, speak, look, dress, worship and act the same.

However, there has to be a balance struck between an ‘anything goes’ multiculturalism on the one hand, which leads to deeper division and inequality; and on the other, an intolerant, repressive uniformity. We need a kind of integration that binds us together without stifling us. We need to be a nation of many colours that combine to create a single rainbow.

Yes, that does mean recognising diversity and rejecting assimilation. But I believe we are in danger of throwing out the integrationist baby along with the assimilationist bathwater. In recent years we’ve focused far too much on the ‘multi’ and not enough on the common culture. We’ve emphasized what divides us over what unites us. We have allowed tolerance of diversity to harden into the effective isolation of communities, in which some people think special separate values ought to apply.

For example:
Evangelical African churches that see it as acceptable to traumatise a child, claiming they are ridding her of evil spirits.

Sikh activists who think that their feelings of offence caused by a play are more important than the principle of freedom of expression.

The almost casual acceptance that the majority of children in the African Caribbean community grow up without a father-figure, in spite of all the evidence that this causes immense damage both to them and to the community as a whole.

And white communities so fixated by the belief that their every ill is caused by their Asian neighbours that they withdraw their children wholesale from local schools, and allow their children to make a sport of persecuting every local family that is not white.

The fragmentation of our society by race and ethnicity is a catastrophe for all of us. That is why the most important outcome of this summer’s events should be a new resolve to bring our people together, and to remind them what being British is about.
What makes us British
Too much that is too abstract is already being said on the subject of Britishness, but there are some simple truths that should bind us together.

First and foremost, our shared values: for example an attachment to democracy, freedom of speech, and equality, values which anyone who expects to live in Britain must respect and abide by, both notionally and in practice.

Second, we share common traditions which, whatever we do at home, we all agree to respect and observe in our everyday encounters. Central to these I would say are our common language, our good manners, our care for children.

We also cherish a tradition of poking fun at politicians, priests and do-gooders, and – though I qualify for mockery on two counts – I think that is a tradition not to be tampered with lightly. And as long as new customs do not conflict with our values, let’s embrace them as part of the fabric of our community life. They too will one day join our shared traditions, the outstanding example of course, being the Indian restaurant – now not Indian at all but almost wholly British.

Thirdly, we maintain diverse, individualistic, even eccentric lifestyles in our private lives. No-one tells us how to speak, how to dress, what we should eat or how we should worship. These are all individual choices, to be respected as long as they do not interfere with our fundamental values, or our long-cherished traditions. And unlike some other countries, we tend to embrace new additions to our lifestyle choices – whether it is new music, or new kinds of clothes.
The path to integration
Having set that out, I think we must also be clear that integration has to be a two-way street, in which the settled communities accept that new people will bring change with them. Newcomers realise that they too will have to change if we are to move closer to an integrated society.

We already know a lot about what an integrated society looks like. It has three essential features:

    • Equality: everyone is treated equally, has a right to fair outcomes, and no-one should expect privileges because of what they are.
    • Participation: all groups in the society should expect to share in how we make decisions, but also expect to carry the responsibilities of making the society work.
    • Interaction: no-one should be trapped within their own community, and in the truly integrated society, who people work with, or the friendships they make, should not be constrained by race or ethnicity.

This is a big agenda. It won’t happen without positive action and loads of effort.
Some people believe that with time and goodwill we will inevitably move towards a more integrated society.
Others say that it isn’t inevitable, but that what we need is more law and more aggressive enforcement of anti-racist principles.

Yet others argue that integration has little with race or identity. That if we can get the economics right – more jobs, more equal pay – then all will be fine.

I believe all three views are wide of the mark. Let me deal with the first two now; I’ll return to the ‘it’s all economics’ school a little later.

Where we work at the CRE, and on the front lines patrolled by our REC colleagues, we know that we need strong anti-discrimination law, as discrimination is undoubtedly one cause of inequality. But it’s not the only one. It may no longer even be the most important one.

As the United States has proven, powerful anti-discrimination laws, including affirmative action, will not, by themselves, lead to an integrated society. In much of America, non-white Americans are relatively poorer and more excluded than ever before.

In fact the dismal truth is that sixty years after segregation in American schools was ruled illegal, and massive resources were pumped into backing up that decision, the integration process is in reverse gear.

And by the way, in case you think this is political, that process began just before Bill Clinton took office and continued unabated through his eight years and the five years of George W Bush’s administration. So the law, though necessary, will never be sufficient by itself.

What, then, about the passage of time? Won’t familiarity and goodwill, given enough opportunity, close the gaps, bring us together, and instil fairness? I don’t think so. I agree with Geoff Mulgan, speaking at a CRE conference in July, when he said that integration doesn’t just happen:

Integration is a learned competence – like maths or driving a car. It is not instinctive. And these skills determine whether events escalate
or dampen down. In the way that they know what to say and what not to say, when to be firm, when to turn a blind eye …………These are very subtle skills, and where they are abundant societies can cope with great shocks. Where they are thin on the ground small issues can become crippling crises.

So we can’t rely on law, and we can’t just sit waiting for trouble to take place.

The drift to segregation
In fact, I believe that time is becoming our enemy in the fight for an integrated society. Here in the north I think you see things more clearly. We who live in London can all too often persuade ourselves, as we sit around the dinner table, that we are a model for the world, because we eat exotic foods, we watch foreign films, we take our children to the park to play with children whose names are not like ours; and because we ourselves would never dream of discriminating racially.

But the writer Max Hastings, formerly the editor of both the Telegraph and the Evening Standard, where he made strenuous efforts to diversify his newsroom, cut through this smugness recently when he wrote that, having though about it, he could not remember ever having invited a Muslim to his house, and rarely saw a black face at parties. I know he is right about the latter, since I was often one of those isolated black faces.

Yes, some individuals and some ethnic groups are doing comparatively well. But many are not. And among those who are not doing well are some white groups: poor white boys are failing at school. New migrants from Eastern Europe are struggling to make ends meet.

Nor is this just a matter of class, though as ever in Britain, who and what your parents were cannot be ignored. What your parents earn and own still matters. But where they came from and how they worship may now be just as significant in determining what sort of life you have, how you do at school, what work you do, who you marry, where you live, and indeed, when and how you die.

The fact is that we are a society which, almost without noticing it, is becoming more divided by race and religion. We are becoming more unequal by ethnicity. Our schools – and I mean the ordinary schools, not faith schools – are becoming more exclusive.

Our universities have started to become colour-coded, with virtual ‘whites keep-out’ signs in some urban institutions; and if you look closely at the campuses of some of our most distinguished universities, you can pick out the invisible ‘no blacks need apply’ messages.

Residentially, some districts are on their way to becoming fully fledged ghettoes – black holes into which no-one goes without fear and trepidation, and from which no-one ever escapes undamaged. The walls are going up around many of our communities, and the bridges that so many of you in RECs and the voluntary sector have laboured to build are crumbling.

If we allow this to continue, we could end up in 2048, a hundred years on from the Windrush, living in a New Orleans-style Britain of passively co-existing ethnic and religious communities, eyeing each other uneasily over the fences of our differences.

This is not only, or even principally, about Muslims. But the aftermath of 7/7 forces us to assess where we are. And here is where I think we are: we are sleepwalking our way to segregation. We are becoming strangers to each other, and we are leaving communities to be marooned outside the mainstream.

We could have a different future. But if we want that different future, we have to put policies and programmes in place to stop the drift towards disaster. If we don’t, two things will happen.

First, when the hurricane hits – and it could be a recession rather than a natural disaster, for example – those communities are set up for destruction.

And second, even if there is no calamity, these marooned communities will steadily drift away from the rest of us, evolving their own lifestyles, playing by their own rules and increasingly regarding the codes of behaviour, loyalty and respect that the rest of us take for granted as outdated behaviour that no longer applies to them. We know what follows then: crime, no-go areas and chronic cultural conflict.

We have the chance to prevent this happening; but we have to act now. We have a vital duty: to make sure that, insofar as it lies in the hands of our own communities, we are a safer society, not just next week, or next year, but in the next generation and the one after that.
The integration agenda
The integration agenda for the next two generations rests squarely on our shoulders.
We know that the next generation’s migrants won’t look like the last. They are likely to be more European, more diverse in their origins, not English speaking. Whatever their faith – Somali Muslims, Polish Catholics, African evangelicals – they will, unlike most of us, probably take that faith very seriously and live by what they profess.

They will be both highly skilled and unskilled, fitting the requirements of the so-called hourglass labour market. They will probably, for a while, be more male, and many may not stay as long as did the post-colonial, Windrush wave – and as a consequence may not regard the need to ‘fit in’ as being so important.

None of this should disturb us, as long as we are prepared for it, and as long as we make a positive effort to integrate these newcomers – many of whom may become new Britons.

Some people will think that because of their personal experience, things are getting better. They (especially if they live in London) see teenagers of different races chatting together in the streets; they work with diverse groups of people; they stand in the bus queue or on the underground platforms with folk of every shade or shape imaginable. But personal experience may not tell the real story. New research from leading academics is giving us a different picture about both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ segregation in the UK.
Hard segregation
Increasingly, we live with our own kind. The most concentrated areas, what the social scientists call “ghettoes”, aren’t all poverty stricken and drug ridden. But they are places where more than two-thirds of the residents belong to a single ethnic group.

    • Residential isolation is increasing for many minority groups, especially South Asians. Some minorities are moving into middle class, less ethnically concentrated areas, but what is left behind is hardening in its separateness.
    • The number of people of Pakistani heritage in what are technically called “ghetto” communities trebled during 1991-2001; 13% in Leicester live in such communities (the figure 10.8% in 1991); 13.3% in Bradford (it was 4.3% in 1991).
    • To get an idea of what this looks like, compare it with African Americans in Miami and Chicago, where 15% live in such communities.

Even among those who don’t live in the most concentrated areas, the ethnic separation is far too high for comfort.
Social scientists now use what they call the index of dissimilarity to describe just how segregated a district is. The figure tells us what percentage of any given group would have to move house to achieve an even spread across the district. Below 30% is regarded as low or random (for which read tolerable, even if we don’t like it); 30–60% is moderate (for which read cause for concern); and above 60% is high (for which read that if a black person is seen in a white area, it’s time to call the police; and if a white person is seen in a black area, he’s lost).

Happily, we aren’t yet in this range – mostly. But too many communities, especially those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage in some cities, are up around the 60s and the 70s, even in London.

This is not primarily a class problem. Professor Ceri Peach of Oxford University suggests that less than 10% of ethnic segregation is explained by economic factors; much more is down to history and to choice.

Most of us would hope that, even if this level of residential separation stays put, we can make the future look different by ensuring that children meet each other at school. New work from Bristol University throws some cold water on that hope. Professor Simon Burgess and his colleagues, in an exhaustive study, show that far from schools becoming sites of integration, children are slightly more segregated in the playground than they are in their neighbourhoods; and that means that not only are the children not meeting, but nor are their parents.

A study by the Young Foundation in London’s east end, to be published as ‘The New East End’ next February, shows that, despite heroic efforts by the local education authority, the choices made by parents themselves in Tower Hamlets are also entrenching segregation. There:

In primary schools in 2002, 17 schools had more than 90% Bangladeshi pupils; 9 schools had fewer than 10%.
In the 15 secondary schools, figures from Ofsted reports since 2000 show that three denominational schools (of which two are Roman Catholic) had fewer than 3% Bangladeshi pupils, whereas two schools had over 95% Bangladeshi pupils and a further three over 80%.

I want to emphasise one point here. People make the mistake of believing that most racial segregation in school arises from faith schools. This is wholly incorrect.

First, where such schools tend to be exclusive because of the faith qualification – Jewish, Sikh and Muslim schools, for example – the numbers are tiny and unlikely to grow substantially. There are just five maintained Muslim schools out of 25,000 schools in England and Wales. Even a twenty-fold increase would still be educating a tiny minority of Muslim children.

Second, the third or so of schools which owe their existence to the Catholic or Anglican church, where the faith qualification is less of a hurdle, actually tend to be more diverse than most, in the true sense of the word.

Data from OFSTED shows that when we look at the ethnic mix of schools, Catholic schools tend to be far more mixed than local authority schools. A healthy mix might be a school with a proportion of ethnic minority pupils somewhere between 5% and 40% – where these children neither predominate, nor are they isolated.

Among state schools, about a quarter (25.6%) fall into this group. But among Catholic schools, a third (32.5%) would fit this description. So the passion being spent on arguments about whether we need more or fewer faith schools is, in my view, misspent. We really need to worry about whether we are heading for USA-style semi-voluntary segregation in the mainstream system. That would be a grim prospect.

In the USA, according to the 2000 Census, whites form 69.1% of the population; African Americans are about 12.5% of the population; Hispanics the same; and ‘Asians’ around 3-4%. For some years in the 1950s and 1960s, levels of segregation decreased; but in 1970 the process went into reverse.

The average white child now attends a school that is 78% white, 9% black, 8% Hispanic, 3% Asian; the average black child attends a school that is 57% black. The proportion of the average black child’s schoolmates who are white has dropped from 32% in 89/90 to 28% in 99/00.

Nine out of ten white children are in white majority schools – and nearly half (45%) are in schools where more than 90% of the children are white.

Among African American children, nine out of ten go to black majority schools, and one third are in schools where they account for 90% of the pupils.

Why does all this matter? First, for the obvious moral reason that no human being should have their destiny determined by the colour of their skins.

And second, because segregation destroys talent. The evidence shows that the quality of school in the US is also colour coded; most black children are in rubbish schools, most whites in good ones. We believe that data on universities will show tell the same story.
Soft segregation
If we all lived separately but knew, liked and mixed with people of different races and backgrounds, we might regard that as a tolerable compromise. But we know that human nature is not like that. And our own research at the CRE is damning.

Alongside hard, spatial segregation, we increasingly inhabit separate social and cultural worlds. Attendance at football matches where there are black players, the odd bit of identity tourism in Chinatown, or the local Indian restaurant really doesn’t cut it.

When we leave work, most of us leave multi-ethnic Britain behind.
Last year, we showed that most Britons could not name a single good friend from a different race; fewer than one in ten could name two – and even in London, which is one-third black or brown, a derisory proportion of whites had non-white friends. Just as alarmingly, we showed that young people from ethnic minorities were twice as likely to have a circle of pals exclusively from their own community, as were older ethnic minority folk.

This year we repeated the exercise.
Behaviour in white Britain has not changed a bit. Last year, 94% of white Britons said that all or most of their friends are white. This year it is 95%. Once again a majority – 55% – could not name a single non-white friend, and this was true of white Britons of all ages, classes and regions.

What the figures tell us about the behaviour of ethnic minority Britons is even bleaker. Last year, 31% of ethnic minority Britons said that most or all of their friends were from ethnic minority backgrounds; we found that this trend was stronger among the young than the old. This year the figures show a marked turn for the worse.

The 47% of ethnic minority Britons who last year said that most or all of their friends were white has now shrunk to 37%; and the proportion who have mainly or exclusively ethnic minority friends has grown from 31% to 37%. This is way beyond any statistical fluctuation.

It also remains true that younger Britons are more exclusive than older Britons. It must surely be the most worrying fact of all that younger Britons appear to be integrating less well than their parents.

I can imagine the glee in some quarters at the picture we are reporting. But those who see this as an argument against immigration should not take comfort from what I am saying. History does not support their case. The speed and scale of immigration have had little impact on the levels of integration in the past sixty years.

For example, among minority groups who seem to have found integration easiest, East African Asians arrived in a rush – over a period of months, whilst Jews took decades to get here in numbers. There are twice as many African Caribbeans as there are Bangladeshis, but their levels and ease of integration are very different.

More relevant is a new issue on the horizon: the majority-minority city, where the majority of the citizens are not white.

This will come about within the next decade in Birmingham and Leicester, as well as in Amsterdam and one or two other European cities. There is no intrinsic problem with a city in which white people are in a minority – it’s true of many cities in the world.

But research by John Logan in the USA suggests that when minority groups form over 20% of a city’s population, it becomes harder to reduce their isolation.7 It will take all the ingenuity and skill of the leaderships of these new majority minority cities to arrest the trend towards separate and competing ethnic fiefdoms within their city walls.

I’ve painted a pretty bleak picture. But the point is that it does not need to be like that. In this as in other things, Britain can walk its own, better path than its American cousin, or its European neighbours.

We can start by deciding what we want to achieve. In my view, there are two clear priorities for government and the nation:

    • Now: protection of citizens, and reassurance on security.
    • Soon, very soon: maximising integration, minimising extremism.

We do not want the second to compromise the first: we shouldn’t seek to achieve integration by sacrificing security. But we won’t find lasting security without integration; so achieving the first should not be allowed to compromise the second.
Achieving integration
I identified earlier the three preconditions for an integrated society: equality, participation and interaction. This is a three legged stool – without all three, none of them will really be achieved. As I showed earlier, people who are unequal do not interact; societies where not everyone participates don’t treat everyone equally. And so on.

So there are ways in which we could get it very wrong. One crucial error we could make is to forget that equality is an absolute precondition for integration. A society in which most ethnic minority Britons are poorer, less well educated, less healthy and less politically engaged won’t be integrated. Another is to imagine that because we don’t have battles in the streets we are content with each other. To paraphrase Spinoza’s remark about the absence of war, the absence of racial riots does not imply the presence of racial integration.

But we do start with a great advantage. Modern Britain is ready for the challenge of integration.
CRE research shows that for the first time in sixty years we are growing more relaxed about our ethnic differences. We accept that there is a need for immigration:

    • in our April YouGov poll, one quarter of our respondents said there should be no arbitrary limit on the proportion of the UK’s population which is immigrant; while
    • two-thirds think a proportion of over 15% is okay.

Since the migrant and ethnic minority populations are still below 10%, we have a way to go before Britons feel threatened by pure numbers.

But, while we are tolerant of more immigration, we are clear that we need to be sure that newcomers will fit in. We are very specific about what’s expected of migrants: first, a job or qualifications, and demonstrable skills including English; second, good health; and third, some evidence of loyalty to Britain. In short we are looking for migrants who have the ability to participate in our national life, and the willingness to interact with the rest of us.

Minority Britons by and large share these sentiments. They would understandably like a greater focus on equality. Some minority communities are restive about the relentless public focus on Muslim communities, feeling that perhaps this might lead to their communities being neglected.

But there is no doubt that Britain has a clear demand from us, the CRE family: to make the process of integration real, active and urgent. So this autumn the Commission is setting out its plans for an ambitious new programme to encourage greater integration. It will inform everything we do, and we want the whole CRE family to play a part in this work.

At its heart will lie three aims:

    • a relentless focus on greater equality;
    • a drive towards more equal participation; and
    • steps to promote renewed interaction between Britons of different backgrounds and different traditions.

Equality
At the core of our equality work lies our enforcement of the Race Relations Act. We are this year spending over a million and a half pounds on support of meritorious legal cases brought either to the CRE or to our local grassroots partners. We intend to continue that support.

There has been some suggestion that the CRE has, in recent times, been less than vigorous in its enforcement work. This is particularly surprising since we have just seen a record award in an employment tribunal in a case of race discrimination – an award of £1.6m. It is surprising given that the CRE is spending well over a million pounds on grassroots legal support, in addition to handling several hundred cases directly. This year we expect to win in excess of a million pounds in settlements of cases handled by CRE staff; this will be multiplied several times by our partners in grassroots law firms, RECs, trades unions and CABx.

We have begun and concluded nearly 300 enforcement actions against public authorities in the past 18 months; we started and completed the largest ever formal investigation – into the police – in the Commission’s history; and we have just expanded our enforcement team after many years of its being starved of resources.

It may be that in the past, people got used to the CRE talking a lot and doing little. We now prefer it the other way around.

But we intend to go further. We will step up our efforts to work with government and public authorities to enforce the race equality duty. A vital weapon in this work is our raceequality impact assessment. We will expect public authorities, including government departments, to conduct serious impact assessments on anti-terror laws, or whether, for example, the move of jobs from London will have a disproportionate and adverse impact on ethnic minorities.

If the answer is yes, we expect the policy to change. And let me be clear, if it does not change, we will seek redress in the courts.

But in our equality work we won’t ignore the fact that racial inequality and disadvantage strikes all kinds of people. Our investigation into the treatment of Gypsies and Travellers is all about people who are white; and the work we are doing on the educational achievement of boys may pay as rich dividends for white boys as I hope it will for black boys.

We will also be seeking new approaches to tackling institutional racism in both the public and private sectors: equality audits, new powers for company directors to demand information about equality performance of potential partners, and new incentives for shareholders to hold their boards to account on equality issues.
Participation
However, we know that real commitment to equality in government, in our neighbourhoods, and in the workplace won’t happen until minorities have a voice. That is why this year we will be working with you to increase the diversity of those appointed to public bodies and positions such as health boards, school governors and cultural institutions.

We also intend to start the drive early to make political parties more inclusive in their nominations for parliamentary and council seats. Since 2001 the proportion of ethnic minority councillors in the UK has slumped. There are still only 15 ethnic minority MPs when there should be more than 50. That has to change.
Interaction
The work in equality and participation will be taxing enough. But I believe that it is in ensuring greater interaction that we face the hardest challenge and the most urgent need. I have already spoken about the way that our communities are drifting apart. We need practical action to reverse the trend.

The CRE intends to bring consult with its partners on concrete steps and to put serious resource into this area. We need big ideas and radical steps. Let me give you a flavour of what we have in mind.

    • Sport

We have already announced that we will, over the next three years, with our partners in Sport England, spend over £2m in supporting integrated sport.

We heard that one of the bombers of 7/7 was a keen cricketer. The suggestion was that made him puzzlingly normal. Unfortunately if he only ever took the field in a team of eleven people exactly like him, playing another eleven from the same community, his sporting activities may have served to separate him from the real life of Britain, rather than to encourage a sense of commonality with the rest of us.

As we’ve seen this summer, sport can bring all of us together; but it has to go beyond the rare occasion of national triumph. It has to do that job every evening in every gym or sports centre, and every weekend on every playing field. That is why we will be making grants available to create more integrated sport, especially for young people.

I hope that some time in the next twelve months we will be able to announce a similar scheme in relation to the arts and music – activities which can either serve to keep us in our separate ghettoes, or to bring us together.

    • Summer camps

We believe that bringing young people together has to be the key to eliminating isolation and prejudice. Contact won’t necessarily make you like someone, but it may stop you fearing them and regarding them as an enemy. That is why we believe that American style summer camps, or French colonies de vacance, offer an exciting prospect for integration.

Whether it is football camps, music camps, or art courses, where young people do the thing that interests them, perhaps under the tutelage of professionals – think of the David Beckham football camp, or the Jamie Oliver cooking week – any opportunity that puts young people in the same place as people they would not otherwise mix with, has to be a contribution. That is why we will also be working with government ministers and the private sector to promote a growing programme of summer camps for young people of all backgrounds.

    • Schools

These are important initiatives and we believe they could make a difference. But none of this will work if we find that young people are daily separated in the place where they spend the greatest part of their time: schools and universities.

I told you earlier about new research demonstrating that schools tend to be more segregated than the neighbourhoods they are in. I also pointed out that partly as a result, our universities are becoming racially coded. The impact on jobs and life chances is inevitable.

I wish that we could reverse these trends without government or statutory intervention. But we may not be able to do so.

That is why the time may soon come for us to consider how best we prevent schools becoming mono-ethnic and monocultural – whether the ethnicity is all white or all Asian, or the culture all Christian or all Muslim.

Let me be clear. I do not favour quotas, and I think that bussing showed itself to be a failed solution. But we cannot simply stand by and see the next generation schooled to become strangers. We need to think of creative solutions.

For example, should we be considering using the funding system to encourage schools to attract a diverse range of children? Should we, the CRE, as part of our monitoring of local authority race equality schemes require them to show us that their catchment areas are being drawn in a way that encourages integration, rather than cutting people off from others who do not share their race? Ultimately, should we have a national understanding of what kind of mix is desirable and what undesirable?

These are all difficult questions, which will no doubt provoke cries of “social engineering”. So be it. I would rather bear that albatross than allow our children to continue marching into educational ghettoes.
Conclusion
Much of what I’ve said tonight is controversial, I am aware. But my job as chair of the CRE cannot involve sitting on the sidelines when we are facing such a huge challenge. And you would rightly feel betrayed if we continued playing the same old, failed tunes while you are facing new realities.

I know that there are many who would rather I did not raise these issues in this way, or indeed at all. Others I am sure will say that I am being alarmist. But isn’t this the way it’s always been when we fight for racial equality? When we are polite and euphemistic, our friends criticise us for being too soft. When we tell it like it is, and say what has to be done, they attack us for being too strident.

Well, we all of us have a job to do, and we need to start it now. Race campaigners are fond of quoting Martin Luther King, speaking of his dream. But it’s time to wake up.

In a letter written during one of his regular incarcerations in jail, he wrote this:
Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say “wait”…… But there comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.

We are a long way from that abyss. But we can see it and unless we stop our drift now we too will one day look over the edge. That is why, as King said, “We can’t wait”.

 

 

 

Submission to…intellectual, legal, political and media terrorism

 

One of our commenters (apologies can’t remember who) linked us to a tale of the ‘Lancaster Plan’...an alleged plan that was concocted by the Establishment in order to not have to deal with the ‘Muslim problem’ that was inevitably going to ensue as bunches of Muslims swarmed into Europe…their plan was to prevent any objections and opposition to the encroaching Islamisation and silence debate and criticism to stop people realising there was a problem until it was too late.  By doing so they hope to prevent outbreaks of violence against Muslims as people woke up to the realisation that British society was being conquered and colonised by Islam.  They prefer to see Islam dominate than to see possible violence on the streets.  Never mind that Islam is the end of history and the beginning of a new Dark Ages.

There is of course no such plan, in writing.  However it most certainly is the plan in reality, by default and as a result of  overweaning cowardice. A plan in which the BBC has a leading role in trying to quell discontent and disharmony by spreading disinformation…to ‘maintain cohesion and civil society’….the classic example being the repeated, and false, mantra that Islam is the religion of peace.  Politicians are scared witless of actually doing anything concrete and taking the necessary actions to prevent the Islamisation of society, they would rather see Britain become Islamic than be the ones to go down in history as the racist and Islamophobic politicians who ‘fought’ Islam and Muslims…Cameron makes some ‘brave’ speeches denouncing so-called Islamism (that’s not Islam mind) and headline grabbing but half-hearted policies such as teaching Muslim women English or  wishy-washy policies on the veil in schools and other public places but doesn’t actually make any of it law, leaving it to others to decide ‘in the circumstances’ if it is appropriate that someone should wear a veil…knowing full well most will not brave the storm of abuse they receive if they do stop a Muslim wearing the veil.

We have others who actually endorse the Islamification of Britain….remarkably so many of them Christian clergy…..Rowan Williams suggesting we should allow a parallel Muslim legal system to develop, one of his chums astonishingly suggests Christian clergy should wear beards to engratiate themselves with Muslims…and then there’s Trevor Phillips.

Trevor Phillips’ journey into Submission illustrates perfectly how the ‘Lancaster Plan’ works……the plan isn’t so much a pro-active plan needing a positive investment of thought, policy and ideology, it is merely a plan to stand back and let things happen, quell any voices of opposition (such as the EDL) and allow Islam to gradually dominate society as leading public figures eventually cave in to the relentless pressure from Muslim attack groups and their supporters in the media not to make negative comments about Islam and indeed finally submit and go the other way and start advocating for Islam for a quiet life.

That old bogey-man, Hitler, mastered the take-over of a society by terrorising it and at the same time making the Establishment think he was the answer….Muslim activists employ the same tactics….propaganda is far more effective when backed by terrorism…everytime a bomb goes off they are there denouncing the violence but claiming Muslims are the real victims and that the media needs to silence any debate about the role of Islam in terrorist ideology otherwise Muslims will feel ‘besieged’ and become ‘radical’….a blackmailing bluff that politicians dare not call…..these activists  launch relentless attacks, in the media, poltically and in the courts, to bully and intimidate opponents who they know will eventually tire and submit as Hitler himself understood……

I realized the infamous intellectual terrorism of this movement targets the privileged-class, which is neither morally nor spiritually a match for such attacks. They tell a barrage of lies and slander against the individual adversary it considers most dangerous and keep it up until the nerves of the group being attacked give in and they sacrifice the hated figure just to have peace and quiet again. But the fools still do not get peace and quiet. The game begins again and is repeated until fear of the villain becomes a hypnotic paralysis.

They  are  successful  in  creating  the  impression  that  giving in  is  the  only  way  to  win  peace and  quiet  from  them  while  they  quietly,  cautiously,  but  unerringly,  conquer  one  position after  another,  either  by  quiet  extortion  or  by  actual  theft  when  the  public  attention  is  on other things. The public is distracted and either unwilling to be interrupted or they consider the  situation  too  small  to  worry  about  and  believe  it  is  not  worth  provoking  the  angry  foe again.

 

Trevor Phillips has fallen victim to the enormous pressure that any critic of Islam or Muslims is forced to endure.

In 2005 Trevor Phillips told us that we were sleepwalking into a segregated society with the Muslim community especially ‘marooned outside the mainstream’ and he predicted that this will have serious consequences …..

Those communities are set up for destruction.

And second, even if there is no calamity, these marooned communities will steadily drift away from the rest of us, evolving their own lifestyles, playing by their own rules and increasingly regarding the codes of behaviour, loyalty and respect that the rest of us take for granted as outdated behaviour that no longer applies to them. We know what follows then: crime, no-go areas and chronic cultural conflict.

We have the chance to prevent this happening; but we have to act now. We have a vital duty: to make sure that, insofar as it lies in the hands of our own communities, we are a safer society, not just next week, or next year, but in the next generation and the one after that.

A vital duty to stop that segregation….to stop crime, no-go areas (yes those) and chronic cultural conflict (bit late for that).  How times change….no doubt due to the barrage of abuse Phillips received as a result of that speech in 2005.

Trevor Phillips now says that Muslims should be allowed to live separate and parallel lives as they will never integrate..indeed...“it was disrespectful to suppose that Muslim communities would change”….

Muslim communities are “unlike others in Britain” and “will not integrate in the same way”, according to the former head of the equalities watchdog. 

He claimed that we should accept that Muslims “see the world differently from the rest of us.”

Mr Phillips said part of the integration process was for “the rest of us to grasp that people aren’t going to change their views simply because we are constantly telling them that basically they should be like us.”

Phillips has blown apart the narrative that there is a ‘British Islam’, that Muslims will integrate, that Islam will reform to fit in with a liberal, democratic, Western progressive society.  It won’t.  We’ve always known that.  The BBC et al just refused to admit it because then they would have to start explaining what that will mean for Britain, for Europe, for the World, as Europe, one of the main bulwarks of freedom, democracy, liberal beliefs, succumbs to an ideology that is directly opposed to so much of its own beliefs.

Any wonder that the BBC has not published a word of Phillips’ speech, nor has the Guardian?  The BBC knows full well he has made the speech…Nicky Campbell had quotes from it at the ready this morning because he knew it would be mentioned on his programme….he used the quotes to try and crush criticism of Islam strangely enough.

Campbell’s programme was about the Ofsted announcement that schools could be marked down if they allowed pupils or staff to wear the veil.  Consider that Phillips’ comments were a highly dramatic and devastating admission about how society is being shaped, one that has enormous and unpleasant ramifications for everyone, you would be justified in asking why the BBC chose instead to talk about a relatively minor matter of wearing the veil in public.

Campbell thinks of himself as an expert in Islam and the Koran having been mentored and intellectually succoured, or is that suckered, by the clown Mo Ansa.  As we’ll see, Campbell is mistaken…Mo Ansa had no answer.

John Morris, former Ofsted official, stated (8 mins 50 secs in) that Trevor Phillips said that Muslim communities were “unlike others in Britain” and “will not integrate in the same way”.

Campbell jumps in and states that Morris was quoting Phillips ‘rather selectively’…Phillips said it would be disrespectful to expect Muslims to change…Trevor Phillips is actually calling for tolerance Campbell claims.  Campbell says Morris is ‘falsely inferring from what he is saying’.  No he wasn’t, he quoted exactly what Phillips said and did so in correct relation to what was being discussed.

It seems a highly appropriate quote in a discussion about the veil in that it shows that Muslims have no intention of integrating, and indeed cannot…the veil is jst one very obvious example of that.  It is Campbell who selectively quotes and inteprets as he wants….is Phillips calling for tolerance or is he saying because Muslims refuse to integrate we should just roll over and accept that?…that’s submission not tolerance.

At least we know Campbell knows what Phillips has said…so again I ask why is that not the subject of this discussion when it is such a bombshell admission with cataclysmically dire consequences for our society?

Campbell, who as you may expect, is always edging towards acceptance of the veil, then claims that this is not a religious requirement but merely cultural…..if that is the case then why do Muslims have such an issue with a ban in certain places?

Campbell states that the Koran makes no mention of the veil and there is no Koranic requirement for the veil to be worn.   The Koran however does clearly stipulate that women must cover up if they go out in public…but in fact the preferred place for a woman is to stay closed up in the home away from the eyes of other men.

And stay in your houses and (do) not display yourselves (as was the) display (of the times of) ignorance the former.

It shall be no offence for the Prophet’s wives to be seen unveiled by their fathers, their sons, their brothers, their brothers’ sons, their sisters’ sons, their women, or their slave–girls. Women, have fear of God; surely God observes all things.

Prophet, enjoin your wives, your daughters, and the wives of true believers to draw their veils close round them. That is more proper, so that they may be recognized and not be molested. God is ever forgiving and merciful.

And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof; that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty.

Campbell also has an oft repeated mantra that there is no one Muslim community…there are many different ones….however, again, that’s just not true…there may be different cultural communities who happen to be Muslim but there is only one Islam, one God, one Faith, one Mosque…that’s the founding essence of Islam…it was revealed because Christians and Jews did not follow their scriptures to the word and broke up into sects…the Koran orders…..

Turn to Him and fear Him. Be steadfast in prayer and serve no other god besides Him.
Do not divide your religion into sects, each exulting in its own doctrines.

Do not divide your religion into sects…hence break-away sects such as Shias and Ahmadis etc are not considered Muslims.

There is a reason the Islamic State hold up one finger, it has a very real meaning…and there is a reason they feel able to kill Shias and anyone else not considered Muslim.  It’s in the Koran.

Campbell is either entirely ignorant and is bluffing his way or knows what the Koran says and is lying.  Either way he is covering up the truth, a very important truth and one that reveals exactly the thinking of those who ‘radicalise’ and explains their actions.  You might think that was important.  It is.  Which is why the BBC doesn’t like to admit it as it owuld start to raise very difficult and unpleasnt questions about Islam…as lefty academic David Goodhart said…the more people get to know about Islam the more alien they will find it.  The BBC’s aim is to stop you finding out those inconvenient truths.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Question Time Live Chat

David Dimbleby chairs this weeks spectacle from Stamford, Lincolnshire. On the panel are Conservative transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin, Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley Jess Phillips, Moray MacLennan, boss of M&C Saatchi with Angus Robertson from the SNP and Independent columnist and whitey-hater Yasmin Alibhai-Brown tussling for last place in order of relevance.

Kick off tomorrow (Thursday) at 22.45

Chat here

Register here if necessary.

Stranger Danger

 

The ardent pro-mass immigration, open borders lobby, and that includes the BBC, live inside a delusional bubble in which the real world, and the consequences of their actions, don’t penetrate in the slightest.

On Monday Marr and three other lobbyists teamed up against the lone Daniel Hannan as they pressed for unrestricted immigration without regard to what is happening in the world around them.  Steep rises in all sorts of crimes, anti-Semitism, European towns and cities where it is unsafe to walk the streets, attacks on migrant women and children by male migrants (Studiously ignored of course by the Left unlike attacks on migrants by racist groups)…and that’s not even venturing down the road of cultural differences due to religious affiliation.

These people just don’t seem to understand, or don’t care, that Europe is being torn apart by the incursion of millions of foreigners who have little intention of integrating least of all of reforming Islam and abiding by the cultural norms and practises of the countries they go to exploit.

Norman Tebbit spells it out…

These are dangerous days for Western civilisation

We must make a choice: close our frontiers to those unwilling to respect cultural values or admit as many migrants as are delivered

There is a choice to be made. One way is to close our frontiers to those who are unwilling to respect or share our cultural values which spring from our Judeo-Christian inheritance. The other is to admit as many migrants as the people smugglers deliver to our frontiers in the hope that they will adopt our culture and values, knowing that if they did not, we would have to adopt theirs, or risk sinking into a struggle between irreconcilably divided communities.

 

Even the lefty Der Spiegel admits the migrants are causing chaos and are using or liberal attitudes against us…

Has the German State Lost Control?

It is the clash of two cultures: A constitutional state that emphasizes de-escalation, integration and the empathetic re-socialization of young offenders; and immigrants from authoritarian societies who misunderstand the approach and take advantage of the fact that they, even if they break the law, are neither deported nor toughly punished.

The consequence is that, in some places, law and order is restricted, or doesn’t exist at all. Like in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. Or in troubled city quarters in Frankfurt and Berlin during the entire year.

The state has accepted its own impotence, and it was perhaps possible to accept so long as tens of thousands of asylum-seekers weren’t entering the country every year. But now Germany is facing an enormous task: that of absorbing and integrating hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of refugees. It is a challenge that can only be met if Germany once again begins to consistently enforce its rules.

Being a left wing paper it likes to try and put the blame upon the police, or rather the lack of police and the failure to resource them sufficiently….but in the square in Cologne there were over 100 police officers..more than sufficient you might think for a normal crowd….who would have expected the events that did happen?

However in doing so the paper admits that the real problem is migration itself, migration of people with little intention of conforming to societies rules and norms….and that Germany has lost control….due to its liberal, progressive attitudes towards the migrants.

Who will take control is the question…the government or will it be left to the People to police the streets themselves with all that that leads to…..all out conflict.

Still, Marr and his crowd are happy fiddling whilst Rome burns and Swedes (ironically immigrants themselves once) say Sweden is no longer safe, and 10 year old boys are raped repeatedly.

Con Coughlin in the Telegraph examines the dangers of the Liberal’s open door, look-away approach as ISIS use the migration crisis to inflitrate its terrorist cohorts into Europe….

Isil is actively using the migrant routes to dispatch scores of highly trained terrorists throughout Europe with detailed instructions on how to carry out atrocities on a similar scale to the mass attacks carried out in Paris last November, which claimed 130 innocent lives.

The skilful exploitation of migrant routes by jihadi terror cells will certainly add to the pressure on EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and his aides who, despite months of warnings that the refugee influx would seriously jeopardise European security, have failed miserably to appreciate the scale of threat.

Rather than trying to improve checks made on the backgrounds of those seeking refuge, EU officials have preferred the easier option of lecturing member states on why they need to accept ever-larger migrant quotas.

The result is that European politicians now find themselves overwhelmed by a wealth of security and social concerns .

 

Curiously the BBC seems less than interested in the reports of terrorist inflitration via the immigrant routes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A balanced EU interview? Well, a good try…

 

We import far more from the EU than we export to them…who needs who?

 

 

The Today programme ran two interviews, one each with a pro and anti EU group.  Justin Webb did both interviews, the pro-EU managed to bag the apparently prime 08:10 spot on Monday and the antis got 07:50 on Tuesday.

Perhaps the barrage of criticism the BBC received for the highly inaccurate/dishonest programmes by Jonty Bloom and the subsequent attention on their EU coverage meant that Webb was given a heads up on how to deal with these interviews in a balanced and impartial manner for the interview with Lord Rose from the ‘in’ campaign (08:10) was highly critical of the campaign’s propaganda and Webb did his job as well as anyone could expect.

In contrast the interview with Jon Moyniham from VoteLeave (07:50) was a mixed bag and rather uninspiring, a let down for either side in the debate.  Webb seemed more interested in trivial matters and off-thread themes than keeping to the attack.

Moyniham said that we don’t have a say in how any money the EU generously returns to us is spent…Webb made the odd counter that ‘We know how it is spent’….which wasn’t Moyniham’s point at all….that being, we want a say in how it is spent.

Similarly Webb went off on a tangent and alluded that Moyniham’s policy was to  cut spending on agriculture as if Moyniham himself would have that say.  Moyniham of course would not be in government, he is only part of the Brexit campaign….as he pointed out it would not be his job to make the decision, the important thing was that it was the British government that did make it and not the EU….a difference that Webb couldn’t seem to grasp.

On trade with the EU Webb preferred to say that 50% of our exports (later he corrected that to 45%) went to the EU and 10% of the EU’s exports came to us…he could of course have said that 53% of our imports came from the EU…a different emphasis and it shows how statistics can be used to change a narrative.

Webb insisted on mentioning that although we give a large contribution to the EU we get some back, what he didn’t mention was the cost of all the EU regulations imposed upon our businesses which amount to £33 bn a year apparently.

From a government briefing paper:

Various studies have attempted to quantify the benefit or cost to the UK of its membership of the EU. This is a very difficult exercise and depends on a wide range of assumptions. Estimates vary significantly. For example, a 2005 study by the Institute for Economic Affairs found a cost of between 3% and 4% of GDP while a 2013 study by the CBI found a net benefit of between 4% and 5% of GDP. A 2015 study by Open Europe found that the cost of the 100 most burdensome EU regulations was £33.3 billion a year.

Webb ended on a duff note about the campaign group itself and whether or not it would join forces with other Brexit groups which seemed more a weak attack on the Vote.

David Keighley notes the links the BBC has to pro-EU groups such as the CBI…

In effect, a Radio 4 programme broadcast on Thursday [by Jonty Bloom] was a clear declaration that the Corporation will be actively campaigning to amplify such messages – especially those about the single market.

Perhaps there is no surprise in this – after all an ex-BBC strategy chief, Carolyn Fairbairn, is now director-general of the fanatically Europhile Confederation of British Industry and  has been declaring her referendum plans to the Guardian; and Sir Roger Carr, a former president of the CBI, is now deputy chairman of the BBC Trustees. The Corporation is so steeped in the importance of Brussels that it cannot see or think outside that bubble.

At what point, however, does biased BBC reporting tip over into being deliberately untrue?

 

The most important point from these interviews is the claim that we would be shut out of European markets….just how likely is that?

The EU bloc is massive…,..

How large is the EU Economy?

Since its formation in 1993, the European Union(EU) has become larger than any individual economy in the world, with its GDP surpassing the USA’s in 2003, for the first time since 1998, as shown in Figure 1. Despite this, the EU’s share of global GDP has fallen from 30% in 1993 to 24% in 2013. This is because growth in non-EU economies has outpaced growth of EU economies, mainly driven by strong growth in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies.

 

But would it lock the UK, the 5th largest economy in the world and an important trade partner with the EU, out of its markets?  Hardly seems likely when it is committed to open markets and free trade……import tariffs very low or zero…..

The EU benefits from being one of the most open economies in the world and remains committed to free trade.

  • The average applied tariff for goods imported into the EU is very low. More than 70% of imports enter the EU at zero or reduced tariffs.

  • The EU’s services markets are highly open and we have arguably the most open investment regime in the world.

  • The EU has not reacted to the crisis by closing markets. However some the EU’s trading partners have not been so restrained as the EU has highlighted in the Trade and Investment Barriers Report and the report on protectionism.

  • In fact the EU has retained its capacity to conclude and implement trade agreements. The recent Free Trade Agreements with South Korea and with Singapore are examples of this and the EU has an ambitious agenda of trade agreements in the pipeline.

And to re-emphasise that….. the EU is only 10% of world demand….there is a whole wide world of opportunity out there…..and the EU is very keen to make deals with non-EU trade partners……

Over the next ten to 15 years, 90% of world demand will be generated outside Europe. That is why it is a key priority for the EU to tap into this growth potential by opening up market opportunities for European businesses abroad. One way of ensuring this is through negotiating agreements with our key partners.

As tariffs are relatively low in world trade today, trade barriers lie behind the customs borders: hence the EU aims to conclude Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreements (DCFTA) that, on top of removing tariffs, also open up markets on services, investment, public procurement and include regulatory issues.

If the EU was to complete all its current free trade talks tomorrow, it could add 2.2% to the EU’s GDP or €275 billion. This is equivalent to adding a country as big as Austria or Denmark to the EU economy. In terms of employment, these agreements could generate 2.2 million new jobs or an additional 1% of the EU total workforce.

 

Highly unlikely that the UK will be locked out of that.

Fascinated to know what we import from Antarctica (£2,771) and North Korea (£1,654,042)

 

Doors to another Holocaust?

 

 

Whilst some MPs exploit fabricated stories of asylum seekers being marked for persecution in order to promote their hard left agenda others are more interested in finding the truth.

 

Remember the furore about the asylum seekers marked out for persecution by having red doors to their homes?….seems all is not so clear cut…or rather it is…..if a rabble of MPs can find this out why not the enormously resourced BBC?

From The Spectator:

The whole purpose of parliamentary select committees was supposed to be to help inform policy-making. Instead, they have sunk to becoming rather vulgar kangaroo courts used by wannabe barristers of the backbenchers to boost their egos. It took about five minutes at today’s session of the Commons Home Affairs Committee to establish that neither G4S nor Jomast (the landlord which provides properties in Middlesbrough for the housing of asylum-seekers) have a policy of deliberately painting front doors red in order to help identify the occupants as asylum-seekers. Only 59 per cent of properties in the town occupied by asylum-seekers are red, it turns out. Moreover, the doors have been painted red for 20 years – long before they were used to house asylum-seekers.

 

Still, that doesn’t stop the sorry sagas of the red doors and the red armbands entering Left-wing hall of infamy as they weave their tales of the terrible lives asylum seekers live in this country…..Marr was quick to mention the armband nonsense as an example of our attitude towards migrants as he trailed his programme on immigration yesterday.

The Home Affairs Committee hasn’t published the findings yet.

 

Red doors and red armband ‘outrage’?   Just examples of migrant ‘lawfare’ and the agitprop of the ‘charity’ migration industry and Left-wing anarchists.

 

 

Band Wagon

 

 

Got to laugh, or cry, as the politicians make fools of themselves and the media bandy this story about as if it was true.

Food wristbands scrapped for Cardiff asylum seekers

A firm providing meals for asylum seekers in Cardiff has dropped demands they wear wristbands as a condition for receiving food.

The coloured bands were given to asylum seekers staying at Lynx House.

But some said it was dehumanising and made people targets for abuse.

The Clearsprings Group, which runs the service, said wristbands were seen as a “reliable and effective way” to guarantee service delivery but, as of Monday, they would no longer be used.

First Minister Carwyn Jones said he was “appalled” by the wristbands.

Heard the BBC giving this important story a good deal of prominence all day…question is, is any of it remotely true?  Do these immigrants really get the slightest bit of abuse because they wear a red arm band that is undoubtedly, firstly, hidden beneath their sleeve, secondly, are probably completely meaningless to anyone on the street…especially as so many people wear armbands for all sorts of causes these days.  The BBC reported that people passing in cars would shout ‘Go back home’ to wristband wearers….might suggest the colour of their faces might actually be the cause of that racism not a probably invisible armband….but hey, before we mock, the armbands were a ‘mental torture’ for one chap….he’d suffered sneeking into the country under a train but couldn’t face another day wearing this rubber band…..any thought that he’ll soon be contacting a solicitor and demanding a pay out in compensation for this oppressive requirement that is so redolent of slavery and the plantations?

What an arse….

Carwyn Jones tweet

I’ll bet he has to wear an ID badge everyday to go to work….same as those at the BBC do……

ID Card Policy

It is the policy of the BBC that staff wear their ID card in a visible manner at all times while on BBC premises. This is a mandatory requirement.

 

Poor old Eddie Mair is so oppressed and brainwashed that he even complains that he hasn’t got a pass anymore….

My BBC security pass has stopped working. I knew this day would come but a letter would have been nice.

 

 

 

 

 

75 NOT OUT….

Well, the BBC is making headlines itself today.

“People over 75 may be asked to give up their free TV licence or make a voluntary contribution to it, under plans being considered by the BBC.  The corporation must absorb the loss of £650m worth of licences for over-75s from 2020 as part of a funding deal agreed with ministers last year. A report on ways to appeal for voluntary contributions is due in 2016. The BBC has refused to comment on suggestions that older celebrities might front a publicity campaign.  The Times reported that such a campaign could be run by personalities such as Sir Michael Parkinson and actress Dame Helen Mirren.”

I was on BBC5Live this morning discussing this with Nicky Campbell. My contention remains the same. The BBC funding model is bankrupt, morally and financially. It’s not just over 75 year olds that should be offered a choice as to whether they should pay the BBC poll tax, we ALL should. Using millionaire oldies to try and flog us the idea is an indication as to how detached from reality the BBC has become.