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THE REAL RACISTS
David Lovibond
THE SPECTATOR 10 April 2004
Reviewed by David Hughes-Jones
( David Lovibond tells why he is angry with the multiculturalists, who make colour, not culture, the measure of all things. Is it any different here in Australia? - Substitute " Australia for "England or "Britain" and his remarks have resonance with what has happened and continues to happen here in OZ - D.H-J )
Lovibond informs that by 2026, Britain’s population is predicted to reach 65 million. Immigration by ethnic minorities or birth rate will drive this population growth. Migrationwatch UK, confirms these figures and says that ethnic minorities will comprise at least a fifth of England's population.
While proselytisers of multiculturalism point out that immigration is nothing new, such as television personalities like Eddie Izzard who has asserted that England is a mongrel nation and the British themselves are immigrants!.The indigenous British he implies ought to feel grateful for the benefits brought to these islands by the recent newcomers!
Lovibond continues... that some of these benefits as a consequence are that Britain now has Labour MP’s demanding to honour IRA murderers, the scrapping of a statue of a wild boar in a Derbyshire park lest it offend Muslims,the banning of England football shirts from a school play- ground in case they outrage cultural minorities, and a Clergy twittering away on a "Thoughts for the Day". How jolly lucky we are!.
Mostly Lovibond is angry about the matter-of- fact way his daughter described one weekend, she and her friends had been surrounded by a gang of black youths armed with knives and robbed of everything they had. It had happened before and no, there was no point in telling the Shepherd's Bush police they would do nothing about the matter.
This was the moment Lovibond became a fully-fledged Angry Old Man - when the reality of mass-immigration, multicultural England -- where black English youths are encouraged to regard themselves as a people apart and 'whites' as an opposing community, a legitimate enemy.
Now it appears the head of the Commission for Racial Equality (Trevor Phillips)has doubts about multiculturalism.
The same weekend that young Muslims (whose fathers and grandfathers were born here) burn a image of the Union flag, and a week after in which ten other Muslim Englishmen are arrested on suspicion of planning a bomb attack on their fellow countrymen, Trevor Phillips pronounces that multiculturalism has had its day.
Phillips appears to recognise that this demoralising and inherent absurd doctrine is inimical to national unity and social cohesion. He will disappoint the great and all-powerful left-liberal elite, the Blunketts and Blairs, the Toynbees and Kennedys - and all the other self important and “so moral” elites who enforce the orthodoxy of multiculturalism and who are so wilfully blind to the huge and unprecedented movement of peoples that has engulfed Britain.
Lovibond asks the question of the left-liberal “progresssives”, “Do they really think that people disagreeing with their views are "know-nothing racial ignoramuses?" In his opinion they clearly do.
The disparate Germanic tribes who arrived in the 5th and 6th centuries as warrior farmers became a nation not by edict or invention, but by the accumulation of local attachments and associations which fastened them to the land, by shared experience, and by taking at least part of their meaning from the older races who preceded them here.
The characteristic institutions of England, the countryside, the villages and market towns, manor houses, church and vernacular buildings, were not bor- rowed or the cultural property of some other race but the unique consequence of long association between national people and national home. Invasion and conquest, like dynastic changes in kingship, might have affected aristocratic ownership but they did not suppress English national life. The fugitives who over the centuries flowed into the country sought assimilation, like true immigrants, so that their different ideas and practices seeped almost coincidentally, imperceptibly into the national culture.
This history of change did not challenge the unity of England or confuse English identity. If in the Canterbury of 1300, or in the Doncaster of 1800, the inhabitants were asked whether they considered them- selves to be Angles, Saxons, Huguenots, Jules, Danes, Brigantes or Cantiacti the question would have been incomprehensible to the Englishmen who lived there.
The great migration to which England has been subjected since the second world war has overwhelmed the assimilative instinct letting in the incubus of multiculturalism. England is the target of most immigrants and by comparison few settle in Wales, Scotland or Ireland..
(Nevertheless many Welshmen and Scotsmen who still regard themselves foremost as "British" rather than Welsh or Scots are just as concerned as any "Englishman" at the impact of alien enclaves & cultures on Britain - D.H-J )
Education under the multiculturalist regime requires British children to take their identity as much from the other cultures present in this country as from that of their fore- bears.
By being deprived of any sense of the continuity of the country’s experience and traditions in their lives, children are being carefully and deliberately denied their own nationality and taught simply to categorise themselves by colour, thus making colour, not culture, the measure of all things.
( People - especially foreigners but also English residents, confuse "England: with "Britain". Often "England" is used when Britain is actually meant. There are today more Welsh, Scots & Irish derived people living in "England" than there are in Wales(2.5million), Scotland,(7 Million) or Ireland,(8 Million).- D.H-J.)
Lovibond attacks this shift in education as a form of racism. Meanwhile the burgeoning ethnic minorities, cling to their languages, dress, ways of life and, most importantly, their religions.They maintain the cultural integrity of their communities; but they do more than that. Islam, for example, is not only and narrowly concerned with theology, but also encompasses fundamental issues of loyalty and affinity.
These people are supported by the British tax-payers through government, protected by laws designed to enforce the multiculturalist state allowing ethnic minorities to disregard any challenge to their right to behave as if they remained in their countries of origin.
The ethnics are rewarded for refraining from publicly applauding the words and activities of their more extreme agitators, by not being required to make the smallest concession to their new homeland - Britain.Their rewards are having their demands appeased by faith schools, positive discrimination, publicly funded cultural programmes and the condemnation of any opposition as racist.
Immigration is used now to reinforce what have ceased to be cultural minority communities and have become national communities.These communities have ceased to be immigrants they are now colonising Britain!.
British citizenship, the Britishness to which these national communities make nominal claim, is nothing more than a political convenience, a right of abode. Far from claiming a belonging, these communities implicitly reject any connection to the folk memories, shared history, deep continuities and usages that have shaped this country.
The policy makers and noisy promoters of multiculturalism are wealthy and can remove themselves from the consequences of their prejudices,but the old, the unskilled, the unemployed, the poor who cannot move away -- they know what it means.
The black gangs steaming through the markets, the open drug dealing, the shootings and routine muggings, the entire districts where barely an English word is spoken.
In the South-east, there are plans to compound the misery of chronic overcrowding by covering the remnant countryside with countless thousands of tiny houses to satisfy a demand fuelled by migrants who cannot care for what will be lost.
Denied or ignored, the ordinary citizen can no longer depend on the institutions that were once central to the idea of Britain.
The royal family delighted with its Commonwealth now has an heir who pronounces himself “Defender of Faiths”. rather than “Defender of the Faith”. The Church of England rushes into absurdity and excuses every affront, every attack on our national life, and seems almost eager to turn its back on the people who gave it resonance and purpose no wonder the pews are so empty every Sunday!..
The Tory party, formerly thought of as the patriotic party loses no opportunity to display its multicultural credentials no longer seeing or caring that this shameful doctrine is inimical to English unity.
In this desolate time of retreat and abasement. the English take solace in nostalgia television on Sunday nights and repeats of Dad's Army. or sublimate national feeling by joining re-enactment societies and conservation trusts.
For those who remember England and have memories of a blurred stone of a war memorial, the old music of names, in the way a hedgerow twists on a Dorset hillside can only rage as the millions come, rage at this invasion by stealth.
Britain not by conquest but through languor and a myopic kindliness and outright apathy and stupidity has subsided into a clacketing Babel.- a mere confusion of tongues?
It is not a question of colour or racial origin. It matters not at all of colour- Britain is and always was a multiethnic nation but never a multiculturalist country.
But multiculturalism won't work; ethnic minorities should be encouraged to surrender the culture they left behind, with all its nationalistic implications, and take their identity from these islands and from all that made them. There is a need to reconnect with the English achievement and repudiate those gainsayers who preach that England belongs to anyone and no one.
It may be necessary to obtain a new political party after all, one that is colour-blind and welcomes migrants prepared to share an Anglocentric world-view.
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with acknowledgments to
Britain's Chief Rabbi :Jonathan Sacks
"Multiculturalism has run its course, and it is time to move on. It was a fine, even noble idea in its time. It was designed to make ethnic and religious minorities feel more at home, more appreciated and respected, and therefore better able to mesh with the larger society. It affirmed their culture. It gave dignity to difference. And in many ways it achieved its aims. Britain is a more open, diverse, energising, cosmopolitan environment than it was when I grew up.
But there has been a price to pay, and it grows year by year. Multiculturalism has led not to integration but to segregation. It has allowed groups to live separately, with no incentive to integrate and every incentive not to. It was intended to promote tolerance. Instead the result has been, in countries where it has been tried, societies more abrasive, fractured and intolerant than they once were.
Liberal democracy is in danger. Britain is becoming a place where free speech is at risk, non-political institutions are becoming politicised, and a combination of political correctness and ethnic-religious separatism is eroding the graciousness of civil society.
Religious groups are becoming pressure groups. Boycotts and political campaigns are infecting professional bodies. Culture is fragmenting into systems of belief in which civil discourse ends and reasoned argument becomes impossible. The political process is in danger of being abandoned in favour of the media-attention-grabbing gesture. The politics of freedom risks descending into the politics of fear."
, from “The Home we build together:Recreating Society”. Continuum, just out. Oct 2007
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