77% of the British population think that immigration is too high and should be controlled and reduced.
A small liberal, metropolitan elite think otherwise and are intent on importing as many immigrants as possible regardless of the consequences….and they are ready to denounce you as racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic in order to try and silence you and any criticism of them that you may have.
The pro-immigration lobby, of which the BBC is a prominent and powerful member, is fanatical and reckless in its abandonment of all reason as it presses for completely open borders to allow in unlimited numbers of people who have no loyalty to this country, no idea of its laws, its culture, its norms, and often have no intention of adhering to those anyway.
It is a quite extraordinary example of people who allow their ideology to over-rule common sense and a total and deliberate failure to address the issues that such a policy might result in, ultimately the total breakdown of the society this mass influx of immigrants profess they want to join and, we are told, will ‘improve’.
It was known that the EU was intent on importing millions of Africans into Europe and now with wars in the Middle East the UN is trying to force millions more upon us…
The UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants has said wealthy countries should agree to accept one million Syrian refugees over the next five years to help end the series of boat disasters.
Not sure millions of Muslims entering Europe would be good for social cohesion and stability.
The Times on Monday told us that 25% of Britons will be from an ethnic minority by 2051, double what the level is now….driven of course by immigration…the population rising to over 77 million.
This will have dramatic effects upon services, infrastructure and of course society itself especially if different groups fail to integrate and continue to segregate based on race or religion.
David Coleman, professor of demography at the the University of Oxford, said:
“Many of the consequences of large scale migration are damaging. We do not need up to 13 million more people by the mid century. Almost all that increase will be immigrants and their children. It will not make the UK a happier or richer place. Crowding and congestion will have entirely negative effects, increasing pressure on schools, hospitals and particulary housing.”
Simon Ross, director of Population Concern, said it was time people looked at the consequences migration had on quality of life.
“There’s a lot of people with vested interests in immigration, the universities and employers for instance….People talk about the taxes that migrants pay but that is a short term view. Migrants have children and get old and we need to take account of the services they will eventually use. We should not reduce migration simply to a taxation issue. We should talk about its effect on British society including the need for more housing which effects the green belt and transport infrastructure. These are quality of life issues.”
Such thoughts would be ‘ramping up the rhetoric’ and an unacceptable tone for Evan Davis and Co.
Left leaning David Goodhart also had his doubts…..
Too diverse?
Is Britain becoming too diverse to sustain the mutual obligations behind a good society and the welfare state?
The nation state remains irreplaceable as the site for democratic participation and it is hard to imagine how else one can organise welfare states and redistribution except through national tax and public spending. Moreover, since the arrival of immigrant groups from non-liberal or illiberal cultures it has become clear that to remain liberal the state may have to prescribe a clearer hierarchy of values.
Goodhart did conclude something similar in this BBC programme….
The gulf between conservative Islam and secular liberal Britain is larger than with any comparable large group….for those of us who value an open, liberal society it is time to explain why it is superior to the alternatives.
He told us that…
Some claim that if people understood Islam more everything would be fine, they would be more tolerant, I think quite the contrary….the more they understand about it the more alien they would find it…authoritarian, collectivist, patriarchal, misogynist…..all sorts of things that Britain might have been 100 years ago but isn’t now.
He also said this in another interview…..
I am pro-immigrant but against mass immigration.
I believe in human equality and the unity of the human race, but I am sceptical about the economic benefits of large-scale immigration for the bottom half of British society, and worry about too much rapid change leading to segregation of communities and a withering of the kind of fellow-feeling needed to sustain welfare states.
There is nothing remarkable about those views and there are now plenty of others on the centre-Left who share them — Jon Cruddas gave my book a favourable review in the New Statesman — though official Labour remains somewhat uncertain of its position on this territory.
Like many metropolitan liberals I had very little direct experience of immigration yet I came to see it as beyond the normal trade-offs and interest calculations of political life. It was simple: good people were in favour of it, and bad, bigoted people were against it.
Alongside this belief was a twitchy ambivalence about my own country, no doubt reflecting a twitchy ambivalence about myself. Left-wing and liberal intellectual scepticism about the national was particularly strong in England because of its dominant imperial past.
I now, of course, believe this disdain for the national was immature and premature as well as loftily dismissive of majority opinion.
How did I come to change my mind about that and about large-scale immigration?
No doubt becoming a more grounded person and mixing with a wider spread of people knocked some of the undergraduate ideological gaucheness out of me as I entered my thirties. But what I like to think really changed my mind was good ideas, or openness to better ideas than I had been carrying around.
It was David Willetts, the leading Tory, who had first drawn my attention to the “progressive dilemma”. Speaking at a Prospect debate on the welfare state in 1998, he noted that if values and lifestyles become too diverse it becomes more difficult to sustain common norms and hence the legitimacy of a risk-pooling welfare state.
“This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the US you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests.”
That is to say, people are readier to share and co-operate with people whom they trust or with whom they believe they have significant attributes, and interests, in common.
Willetts’s dilemma seemed to me a true and powerful idea. I remember thinking when I first heard it: why is this issue not discussed more, particularly on the Left?
Having experienced the tribal irrationality of part of leftist Britain on the issue of diversity I found myself extending my critique to other aspects of the argument: the nature of community, the role of national identities in liberal societies and more.
The other idea that broke through my inchoate left-liberal instincts was even simpler than the progressive dilemma. It is this: embracing the idea of human equality does not mean we owe the same allegiance to everyone.
For most people commitments and allegiances ripple out from friends and family to neighbourhoods, towns and nations. This does not mean we should not care about the global poor. But we have a hierarchy of obligations that means we spend 30 times more every year on the NHS than we do on development aid. Is that wrong?
Immigration, at least on a significant scale, is hard for both incomer and receiver, especially when multi-generational poverty is being imported. People are not blank sheets, societies are not random collections of individuals, and objection to the arrival of a large number of outsiders in a community is not necessarily racist.
When middle-class social scientists like Michael Young in the 1950s and 1960s discovered what a high attachment people in working-class communities had to stability and continuity it was considered something to celebrate by left-wing sociologists. When people objected to that continuity being disrupted by the churn of mass immigration they were denounced.
You may want to read this forecast from 2007 of what the future may well bring….and indeed has…