Multiculturalism as Thought Control

The multicultural thought police Nov. 1, 03

The BBC report on the racist police recruits has given new ammunition to those who are curbing our legitimate freedoms, says Leo McKinstry

[. . . . ] For in Britain today we have our own powerful creed — multiculturalism — which is imposed on the public by a political establishment that is brimming with self-righteous fervour. And anyone refusing to accept this dogma is likely to be branded a heretic, bullied and brainwashed until they change their opinions.

Only two decades ago, the central principle of anti-racism was that all individuals in our society should be treated equally, regardless of ethnic origin or religion. Yet through multiculturalism, the malign ideological spawn of anti-discrimination, we have moved far away from that stance. We are now told that, in the name of ‘celebrating diversity’, we must respect every aspect of every culture in our midst. Not only must we act correctly in word and deed, but, more importantly, we must also be trained to harbour no negative thoughts about the behaviour of any other ethnic group.

This outlook is utterly inimical to personal freedom and equality before the law, the very pillars of our civilisation. Far from ignoring racial differences in the search for harmony, it actually seeks to emphasise them. Such an attitude was summed up by the 1999 report of Sir William Macpherson into the death of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence: ‘Colour-blind policing must be outlawed. The police must deliver a service which recognises the different experiences, perceptions and needs of a diverse society.’

[. . . .] But perhaps most worrying of all is the attempt to reclassify racism as a mental illness. In the United States there is now a serious debate over whether those accused of being racists are actually suffering from delusions which require treatment by the state, including the use of anti-psychotic medication. [. . . . ]

Psychiatry has often been used to silence those who refuse to accept the official doctrines of the state. The Soviet Union was notorious for branding political dissidents as ‘mentally ill’, incarcerating them in psychiatric institutions. In communist China it has been estimated that 15 per cent of psychiatric inmates may be in custody for political reasons, many of them suffering from what the gruesome Ministry for Public Security calls ‘political abnormality illness’.

We should remember that, even in our own country’s past, single parenthood and promiscuity in women were sometimes treated as signs of insanity. And today, tens of thousands of children who would once have been seen as boisterous are said to be suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and are treated with the chemical cosh of the drug Ritalin. [. . . .]

Iraq is not Worth the Life of a Single British Private

Iraq is not worth the life of a single British private Frank Johnson, May 1, 04

Mr Blair’s Iraq war seems to be becoming more and more unpopular among British voters, especially among the only ones who now tend to vote: the middle classes who switched from the Conservatives to Mr Blair and ensured his two landslides. Yet the official opposition does not look like winning a single vote out of the war’s unpopularity.

If the Conservatives want to win more seats at the next general election, they should come out against the war. [. . . .] But individual Tory candidates, at the election, should strive to make known to their voters their opposition to the war. This will be difficult. Few voters are aware that their local candidates differ from their party leadership. But local debates are held in local venues, such as churches. There is also the local press. These afford ways in which Tories can make known their opposition to a war which Middle England — which is at heart Tory England, even when it votes for Mr Blair — opposes.

To be opposed to this war is not left-wing. The war can be opposed on sound Tory principles. Sound Tory principles teach that Britain should only go to war in defence of our national interest and our security. Mr Blair told the Tories, as he did the country, that our national interest was threatened by Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. MI6 told Tory frontbench spokesmen in private ‘briefings’ that this was the case. It has become clear that they were, at best, mistaken. Mr Blair secured Tory support for the war either erroneously or misleadingly. The weapons of mass destruction had either themselves been destroyed or had never existed. Otherwise the United States, with all its resources, would have found them.

[. . . .] Iraq threatened no British national interest. It was but one among many horrible regimes. They cover the globe. We go to war against few of the others. Only the Left ever suggests that we should. Tories know that that would result in perpetual war. Their ancestral wisdom tells them that we should go to war only when a horrible regime threatens Britain — as Saddam’s, with his lack of weapons of mass destruction, did not. He was a threat to Iraq, not to Britain. We should weep for the Iraqis.

Simply Incredible! A Societal Death Wish?

Sex and violence begin at 12 -- Rod Liddle says that children in care are out of control and social workers can do nothing about it

When they speak, it is with the lilting cadences of Jamaican street slang. And the vocabulary, too: bling, baad, bitch, ras, ho and, of course, inevitably, motherf***er. This would be understandable if they were Jamaican street children, or even black British street children. But they’re not, they’re white. Many of them have never seen a black person in the flesh. So where did the accent come from?

It’s presumably aspirational, acquired from the industrial effluent which passes, right now, for youth culture. It is one of the many little pleasures to be had from working with these kiddies. The children I’m telling you about are problem children; not inner-city problem children, but the benighted offspring of our market towns. They’re the ones who, aged between 12 and 15, are in what are inaccurately called local authority ‘homes’, at a cost of roughly £70,000 per year per child. I’ve been speaking to three residential social workers who have had, by now, enough. They want to help these horrid little people but they can’t — the law won’t let them. Everything they try to do seems to be an infringement of the children’s human rights.

All of the children take drugs. If they didn’t when they arrived at the home, peer pressure ensures that they soon do. And there is perpetual sex and violence. [. . . .]

All the social workers can do is watch — they have no leeway. ‘There is absolutely no sanction. If they say they’re going out at ten o’clock at night, then we can’t stop them. We can ask them politely not to, but this, you know, doesn’t really work,’ said one residential care worker. So a 14-year-old rent boy is allowed to go out to meet paedophiles — as happens every night in one of the homes I’m dealing with here — and all the social workers can do is inform the police that there is a missing person and hope that he gets picked up before he’s turned another few tricks. But they rarely are picked up by the police.

‘We know this kid is in touch with a paedophile ring, a central telephone number he can call which will provide him with lots of work. We know this, but there’s not a thing, legally, we can do about it.’

There was the case recently of a promiscuous 14-year-old girl who was receiving letters from a paedophile serving time in prison for his activities. The social workers knew about the letters and so did the prison authorities. But the prisoner could not be stopped from sending them because this would infringe his human rights. And the girl could not be stopped from receiving them because that would infringe hers.

[. . . .] But the real scandal, of course, is the total absence of any means by which these children can be persuaded to change or modify their behaviour. A deliberate, institutionalised absence. Anything which might instil fear into the children — fear of opprobrium or sanction — is specifically outlawed.

This sounds a bit like the situation in Canada in the schools. Certainly, there has been a concerted effort to prevent teachers from teaching students respect; anything that might curb students' self-expression or self-esteem--whether warranted or not--has been stifled. It is not a happy work situation as young teachers tell me now. Many want to get out of it. It is a thankless job where the teacher is treated rudely and undermined at the administrative and departmental level. Students appear to have rights; the teachers, few -- and the teacher's word counts little at all. This is no way to build a civilized member of the citizenry. I suspect the curbs upon social workers as described above in the UK are similar.

The Lies of the Land

Forget Dame Shirley Porter, says Theodore Dalrymple. If it’s real scandal you are after, consider the millions wasted as a result of public service corruption

[. . . . ] Were earnestness of demeanour a guarantee of efficiency, Britain would have the finest public services in the world. Alas, such earnestness is a guarantee of nothing except lack of sense of humour. And a very high proportion of public servants know perfectly well that they are parasites, that their so-called work would be much better left undone, and that it is nothing but outdoor relief for the unimaginatively ambitious, which is why their earnestness is combined with furtiveness and an inability to look you in the eye. Of course, if asked about their work they would claim to ‘care passionately’ about its ostensible aim, because the verbal expression of passionate concern is now the sine qua non of promotion. The public services are thus rife with institutionalised lying. They have become an instrument of clientelistic politics.

The [public service] rot is everywhere, including (I regret to say) in the medical profession. The number of adults in this country without a job has remained more or less constant over the last 20 years, but as unemployment has fallen, so disability has risen; there are now two-and-a-half times as many people who are supposedly too ill to work as there are people who are simply unemployed, and this at a time when the population has been growing steadily healthier. No doubt the large-scale switch from unemployment to sickness suits government propaganda well — and the present government is not the only one guilty in this respect — and is also pleasing to people who would find only the worst-paid menial jobs if they found any jobs at all; but the switch could not have occurred without the connivance of thousands of doctors who wrote and continue to write millions of certificates knowing them to contain falsehoods. No doubt the doctors would claim to be acting from kindness where it is not from self-preservation, but if so, a system that requires mendacity on so institutional a scale in order that kindness should be done by doctors is deeply and irremediably corrupt.

We cannot even organise a public examination system for schoolchildren in this country so that the results mean what they appear to mean. As for our universities, they blatantly steal the money of foreigners by virtually selling degrees that will soon start to devalue like the mark after the first world war. No longer scholarship and learning, but bums on seats and grade inflation to guarantee yet more bums on seats next year, these are the aim of our institutions of higher education.

You have to look no further than the job advertisements [. . . .] whose titles convey no meaning, let alone entail specific duties: co-ordinators, facilitators, evaluators, strategic planners, directors of organisational development and so forth. These jobs are designed for people who are overtrained for nothing in particular, and whose main aim in life is a pension or — better still — early retirement on medical grounds.

One symptom of the corruption of the public services is the inability of public servants either to speak or to write comprehensible, straightforward English. . . . an example from the Clinical Governance Bulletin, . . . . from an article entitled ‘Supporting the development of a strategic approach to effective services: a framework for directorates’. The first paragraph reads: ‘The development of an “effective services agenda” has enabled us to co-ordinate research and development, clinical effectiveness and audit, evidence-based practice, user involvement in evaluating services and ensuring appropriate responses to national guidance papers and reports, such as guidance from the National Institute for Clinical Excellence.’[. . . .]

How Islam has Killed Multiculturalism

How Islam has killed multiculturalism -- Rod Liddle says that Blair’s great U-turn on immigration has placed the Labour party to the right of Ray Honeyford — the man once vilified as a racist May 1, 04

Do you have a core of Britishness within you? Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, is anxious for us all to have one, even if we are not quite sure what it is. Trevor reckons he has one, at any rate. Perhaps it was implanted along with his OBE back in 1999.

His attachment to this notional thing, a core of Britishness, is nonetheless excellent news — and also a little surprising. Because Trevor’s enormous quango, the Commission for Racial Equality, has spent the last 30 years arguing that there is no such thing at all. The CRE was never hugely keen on the idea that we might all of us, white and black and brown, share a common set of values and beliefs; it smacked of — what was the phrase? — cultural imperialism. The ruthless imposition by the colonial white hegemony of alien norms and values upon a subject people powerless to resist. Core of Britishness? Sounds a bit racist to me, a bit Lord Tebbit.

So it’s a U-turn which beats, hands down, any so far executed even by Trevor’s friend and mentor Tony Blair. It is a quite astonishing volte-face, when you think about it. Trevor, chairman of the CRE, is effectively telling us that multiculturalism is finished, dead and buried. A discredited idea from two discredited decades. The rest of us might have suspected that multiculturalism was officially dead on 12 September 2001; but to hear multiculturalism disavowed, in public, by an organisation hitherto dedicated to its propagation is something else entirely.

Perhaps, before the CRE cheerfully moves on, a few apologies are in order to those people who, ahead of their time, stuck their heads above the parapet to complain about the iniquities of multiculturalism and, frankly, copped it as a result. There has been no greater insult these last 20 or so years than the barked deprecation ‘racist’, even though, when thus barked, it rarely meant ‘racist’, as one would correctly define the term, at all.

Frank Johnson on the BBC -- Could Be Describing the CBC

Here’s my plan for a BBC that you would allow your wives and servants to watch Feb. 7, 04, Frank Johnson

The issue, for those of us whose disposition is conservative, with either sized ‘c,’ is whether we would wish it otherwise. For us, the broad lib-left-wingery of BBC current affairs and drama adds savour to life. It is something by which we measure our Conservatism or conservatism. We positively enjoy pointing out the sublimely ignorant one-sidedness of the BBC’s employees and contributors about almost anything political, either when they talk of the present or of the past.

We listened rapt to a recent radio series about the 1945 Labour government, which was actually called, apparently without irony, something like The New Jerusalem. Hardly any room was given to the possibility that that government’s lumbering NHS, vast housing estates, nationalisations and taxation might have stored up trouble for decades to come. We did not hear, for example, that the Attlee government’s hospital building compared unfavourably with that before the war. Nor did the programme dwell on Aneurin Bevan’s forecast that, because of his health service and because people would be healthier in general under successive Labour governments, the cost of the NHS would fall. It was bliss for us. We contentedly mocked or fumed for days, until it was replaced by a discussion of the Spanish civil war by experts, none of whom mentioned any Republican wickedness — only Franco’s.