Friday, January 19, 2007

 

Big Brother anti-racism hysteria

Calling a woman from India an Indian is racism simply because the remark was made by someone white? And an alleged assault on a non-white by Janet Street Porter is racism because she too is white?

Not only is none of this (based on what we so far know) in any way at all racism, but indeed it IS racism to so construe a quite ordinary comment or assault by those thereby deemed actually guilty of nothing more than having a white skin.

That a lousy and failing reality TV series has prompted unprecedented numbers of complaints and moves to discuss motions in the Commons -- not to mention an inter-governmental row -- serves to highlight how utterly crazy anti-racism hysteria has become.

The furore stems entirely from the assumption that the feelings behind what is not in itself racist nevertheless renders the innocuous deeply offensive. However much we don’t like the bullying lout, Jade Goody, and hardly less the prat behind ‘yoof’ TV; they have done absolutely nothing -- so far as has emerged -- that is anything more reprehensible than delivering common insult and (allegedly) common assault.

Even the comment about Bollywood star Silpa Shetty’s hand was not in the ballpark of ‘beyond the pale’, as it were. And that would have been true even if the ‘joke’ had stemmed from the fact that traditionally people of some Asian cultures are known to use one hand to wipe the anus after defecation. As it was, the ignorant BB housemates were evidently unaware of this and instead had simply referenced eating with fingers.

Being bored silly in the BB fishbowl with nothing to do but cook, insults were mainly culinary it seems. It was also reckoned that Indians are thin because they don’t cook food properly. These are questions for food hygienists and chefs with expertise in a variety of cuisines; not for politicians, let alone the police.

One of the cabal of supposedly offending women -- a non-entity called Danielle -- was hauled in to the BB ‘diary room’ and asked if she has said that Silpa should go home. The hapless youngster admitted to going with the crowd and that she hadn’t meant it. Clearly she knew that racism was being hinted at, and just as clearly she had merely meant that Silpa should leave the BB house. Yet racism stayed as heavy subtext to the discussion. Big Brother really lived up to its name at this juncture.

It is a guffaw inducing irony that of all organisations Channel 4 is in the dock. Rightly it defended that there had been a clash that was not racist but merely about culture and class. A spokesman for JSP cited her public record on anti-racism, as if hysterical anti-racism is itself any defence. We live in the post-MacPherson world: any incident is officially deemed to be racist on the say-so of anyone deeming themselves the victim, or by anyone who witnessed it. Absolute lunacy. In any case, Shilpa is on record as saying that she did not consider Jade and Danielle's attack as racist. That leaves those BB viewers who sent in complaints. Pehaps we should use the more TV interactive viewers of Emmerdale to redaft the law on robbery or fraud?

If we can’t call an Indian and Indian, then we can’t call a Canadian a Canadian. We are already absolutely forbidden to call a Pakistan a Paki, yet Australians are always known as Aussies.

Wait for the backlash. It's coming. Anti-racist hysteria is anti-integration and deadening to the human spirit. The only place for it is as laughing stock. Being able to wind each other up is essential for social interaction, and all the idiots in politics and the media had better get wize to this and fast.


# posted by Steve Moxon @ 12:46 pm 0 comments
 

Hiding what's wrong inside the Home Office

The plot thickens inside the Home Office. Not only is it a freedom of information black hole, even (we have seen again this week) to ministers, the Public Accounts Committee, and the leader of the opposition at PMQs; but now apparently there is the tactic of pre-emptive suspension of officials to keep the lid on embarrassing failure.
 
Brazenly refusing to reveal the identity of their latest suspendee, the Home Office in referring to him/her as 'high ranking' (which could mean anything) would like us to think that a senior figure has been put on ice on the grounds of incompetence. Much more likely, the suspension is before another 'whistle-blowing' case could befall them, outside the 'inquiry' currently underway into the latest twist of the ongoing foreign prisoner debacle.
 
If they hadn't gone for suspension, then this official could have done what I did and come forward under the protection of the Public Interest Disclosure Act. That the Department now has a tactic of pre-emption in this regard was revealed by how one of my ex-colleagues was treated as soon as he began mildly questioning some practice -- the hopelessness of deportation procedure, and how the figures for deportation are a fraud. My own case was cited and they accused him of planning to go to the media. He wasn't suspended, but he only avoided this by convincing them that he was fully 'on-side'.
 
With an impressive track record of inquiries that are total 'whitewash' and scapegoating, the Home Office is keen to keep buried the foreign prisoners scandal which keeps threatening to revive. That is why the inquiry is being conducted by the Home Office's own head of personnel. The scandal is the complete failure to have any means of keeping tabs on anybody. This time it is our own nationals who had been imprisoned abroad, and most recently before this was the case of the missing killer of PC Beshenivksy. On that occasion Government 'intelligence sources' -- Home Office and/or Number Ten spin merchants, in other words -- put about the notion that the elusive killer must have fled abroad hidden in female Islamic dress, when of course the real story is that the Home Office has no way to track him down because there is no system in place for doing so.
 
Reminding us of this would prompt renewed questions as to the whereabouts of the great bulk of the two thousand or so foreign prisoners that John Reid had assured us he would move heaven and earth to find. They have not been found and are never likely to be. This scandal is where John Reid came in and it remains where he could very well go out. It is also where at last some very senior Home Office personnel could themselves find themselves exited.

Given how leaky the Home Office is -- the media have all sorts of internal sources -- we'll soon know who is the suspended official, but it is astonishing that the Home Office think they can justify keeping his identity secret just to keep the lid on incompetence. Not incompetence by the official in question, of course, but the Department's.

# posted by Steve Moxon @ 12:31 pm 0 comments

Monday, January 08, 2007

 

Mass migration benefits us just pence per head, but that's not including much of the cost

The report by Migrationwatch that mass migration benefits each of us to the tune of just a Mars bar a month, is in line with all other studies and is very welcome, but what about some of the major costs that offset this benefit to make mass migration heavily negative in economic as well as social terms?
 
Where is the quantification of the overall costs of immigration in terms of the disenconomies of scale that mass immigration's stretching of infrastructure produces? Costs of mass migration are not simply a balance between tax receipts and tax credits and benefits.
 
I question the wisdom of separating discussion of any benefit from the full range of costs and in any way ceding the demonstrably false notion that there is an overall positive economic impact, however minuscule. People may forget quite how tiny is the benefit, but what's more, are likely to ignore the other major costs.
 
Reliance on the Government's own figures as to numbers of migrants and dependents is a major distortion, and realistic figures would make the economic impact significantly negative even without factoring in infrastructure stress. Given that nobody accepts Home Office figures as remotely accurate, then conservative guesstimates surely are in order. As Migrationwatch has pointed out in the past: only one in five legal migrants comes to Britain to work, and the Government is always over-estimating economic activity rates of migrants and massively under-estimating their numbers.
 
The tiny benefit that may be apparent through looking only on the positive side, looks even sillier when you consider that now is a time of sustained economic boom. We already have high levels of unemployment in certain ethnic minority groups, and when there is a serious downturn it is expected that these and recent migrant groups more generally will figure prominently in the shakeout of jobs. The costs of mass immigration will then be inescapable. In the past, the economic blight and social problems were restricted to certain places, notably the Lancashire and West Yorkshire mill towns. In the future it will be country-wide.

# posted by Steve Moxon @ 10:05 am 0 comments
 

Not conning us, and not conning them

Re EU accession day for Romania and Bulgaria, January 1st:

The Government continues to try to con us about immigration, and now tries to con would-be migrants themselves. To us they say the tide is welcome and controllable; to would-be migrants they plead pathetically, 'please don't come'. The reality is that the flood -- a word no longer taboo -- will be unstoppable.

Today is D-day: the debut of the deluge from Romania/Bulgaria. These two countries became part of the EU just as Big Ben signalled cold baths in Trafalgar Square. Along with them can come much of the population of the former USSR, whose citizens either bogusly claim to be ancestral East Europeans or simply cross the new expanded EU border that is leakier than a sieve. So what has the Home Office been doing in anticipation?

Well they haven’t predicted the number of arrivals as they did before the 'A8' EU accession Mayday 2004, and for the very good reason they’re certain to get it wildly wrong. Instead is a radical departure.

Usually the Home Office tries to con the British population that there is an immigration policy/system. This IS the immigration policy/system, there being otherwise just a never ending rubber stamping exercise. The innovation is to try the same thing on outsiders.

Tony’s PR machine has been spending our money in Romania/Bulgaria on advertising that people need a work permit. No they don‘t. Migrationwatch reckons 300,000 will come -- albeit that many will go to Italy and Spain. Forged documents are cheap and easy to get on Bucharest streets, and in any case, Work Permits UK rarely check that people end up in the job they say they have come to fill. Most will work ‘on the black’, get jobs from employers happy to employ illegally for low wages, or exploit the loophole I exposed over two years ago and join the bogus 'self-employed'. The 'one-legged Romanian roof tiler' rides again.

Who will lose? (Would-be) British workers -- especially recent migrants -- already on the lowest wages. That's a main reason why a huge proportion of Bangladeshi men are on the dole. Many or most workers rightly will ask themselves: why work?

Can these new migrants get benefits instead? Yes. There is -- still -- no system in place at Benefits Agency offices/Job Centres to check anyone’s immigration status, so despite what the Government claims, anyone arriving in Britain can get benefits.

So as well as your pay going down and the sort of job you can hope to get becoming ever narrower; your taxes will continue to go up. Why work indeed.

Even as a skilled worker, you can escape to places like Australia only with difficulty. You can get into Romania though, and Poland: they’re low on workers at the moment, the Polish Government complains … because they‘re all here.


# posted by Steve Moxon @ 10:04 am 0 comments

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