Job Discussion Forums

[Sashadroogie]

Fascinating chat show debate:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14513517

[eurobound]

Interesting opinion piece from The Daily Mail (*cue sniggers all round I imagine*) this week from a man called Tony Sewell.

I'd never heard of him before, but he gives a good assessment of what historian David Starkey was rambling on about on television the other day. It's an interesting article from a man who can clearly think critically; more so than those who got their knickers in such a twist over the original comments made by David Starkey.

I'll make clear here that I'm not really a fan of Starkey, but the response to his comments in the UK from certain quarters has been very silly (and sinister, in that anyone who wants to stifle what could be a genuine debate simply cries racism at the person they don't want to engage in a debate with).

Here's the article...

'As the aftershocks from last week's violent disorder ripple across Britain, a febrile mood hangs over the nation.

The air is filled with tension and anxiety. Explosive controversies are now flaring up over a host of issues, from zero-tolerance policing to public expenditure cuts.

Now, the historian Dr David Starkey has sparked a conflagration of his own.

During a debate about the disturbances on BBC2's Newsnight, Dr Starkey argued that one of the central problems was the influence of a 'violent, destructive and nihilistic' black culture that had corrupted too many of Britain�s youngsters.

Warming to his theme, he said: �A substantial section of the chavs have become black. The whites have become black. Black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together . . . which is wholly false, which is a Jamaican patois that�s been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.�

He then further stoked the flames by adding that Enoch Powell was right in warning, more than 40 years ago, that immigration would ultimately cause conflict across our cities.

Dr Starkey�s outburst not only outraged his fellow panellists in the BBC studio, but also many commentators who watched the show, even though over the weekend he insisted that he �was not talking about skin colour but gang culture�.

Piers Morgan called him a �racist idiot� and pronounced Starkey�s television career to be over. Robert Peston, the BBC�s business editor, accused him of �nasty ignorance�.

As a black academic and head of an organisation that encourages young blacks to apply for university, I might be thought of as an obvious candidate to join this swelling chorus of disapproval.

And I cannot dispute the fact that David Starkey is guilty of blundering, both through his unfortunate choice of expression and through the falsity of some of his opinions.

It is absurd, for instance, to claim that last week�s carnage proved that Powell was right.

As Dr Starkey should know, what Powell predicted on our streets were race riots, but the recent looting was nothing of the sort. The violence was not perpetrated by one ethnic group against another. There was no racial dimension to the targets of the attacks. Asian, white and black shopkeepers and businesses all came under assault, while many of the criminal gangs, especially outside London, were multi-ethnic.

David Starkey is not a figure who has much credibility when pontificating about black youth culture. With his donnish demeanour and Fifties voice, he hardly exudes experience of the wider world. Cloistered lecture rooms and candlelit dining halls are his province, not the mean urban streets of London and Birmingham.

And he seems to take an almost malicious delight in provoking rows. Not for nothing was he once known as �the rudest man in Britain�.
Yet, for all my dislike of what he said, I feel uneasy about the howling, strident anger that has been unleashed against him. This is partly because I think that, in the current debate about our social malaise, it is wrong to silence any voice through a form of politically correct McCarthyism.

We will achieve nothing if we create a mood of absolute conformity by hurling accusations of racism at those with whom we disagree. Freedom of speech is too important to become another casualty of the riots.
More importantly, I feel that Dr Starkey, in his own clumsy way, may have stumbled on a difficult truth about the influence of black youth culture.

For, despite the attempts of some apologists to dress up the looting as a political act against an oppressive Tory establishment, the fact is that the ethos of materialism � or �bling� to use the street term � that pervades urban black youth played a major part in the widespread criminality perpetrated by rioters of all races.

That is why the looters targeted specific stores that are cherished in this culture, such as those selling mobile phones, trainers, sports clothes or widescreen TVs. Let�s face it, there were no reports of the vandals looting bookshops or public libraries.

What motivated the troublemakers was not genuine poverty but rather a raw acquisitiveness that is fuelled by so much in this black-led youth culture, from the imagery in rap videos to the lyrics of hip-hop music. The twin central themes of this world are sex and material possessions.

It is a milieu that glories in loose women and fast cars, in macho dominance and easy wealth. Concepts of restraint, hard work and personal responsibility are absent. Respect is something to be demanded rather than earned.

So much of the music and the video output is close to pornographic, with women degradingly treated as little more than sex objects. In this world, the highest ideal to which a man can aspire is to be a philandering, gun-wielding gang leader.

Where I believe Dr Starkey is right is that it is now just as likely to be a white or Asian teenager posing on the internet in baggy designer clothes and dripping in gold chains, either waving a weapon of some kind or pointing their fingers at the camera in a grotesque parody of a shooting.

Tragically, this has become the acme of �cool� for a generation of youngsters, regardless of the colour of their skin.

Even the boy whose Spanish-born mother may be evicted from her council house after his arrest for looting last week was photographed in an oversized rapper-style cap and T-shirt with a skull motif.

A key aspect of �gangsta� culture � one that we saw writ large on the streets last week � is an utter disregard for the police and the rule of law. You only have to consider that one of the most controversial rap songs of the past two decades was called Cop Killer to understand the danger posed by these influences.

This is all a far cry from the black music culture that used to exist in the Sixties and Seventies. There were two main strands then, entirely different to those of today.

One was the demand for social justice for blacks, inspired by the flowing rhetoric of leaders such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The second strand was a belief in the importance of romance, with men encouraged to be chivalrous and treat women properly.

But from the mid-Eighties there was a dramatic change in tone. Justice and romance were out. Aggression and materialism were in. This was partly due to the rise of the television music channel MTV, which allowed explicit videos to be seen.

Cynical producers quickly realised there was a huge commercial market out there for this material, especially among young urban males. The arrival of the internet gave further impetus to this new style.

Furthermore, the continuing collapse of the traditional family meant many young blacks looked to their peers in street gangs for an alternative structure of support, which again reinforced the appeal of hip-hop and rap, in which those gangs were glorified.

All this helped to make black culture truly global. It soon became the dominant force among the world�s youth, from the U.S. to all of Europe.

That�s why young white and Asian, often middle-class, Britons � anxious for a bit of street cred � adopted the language and clothes of the culture, as Sacha Baron Cohen so mercilessly parodied in his comic creation Ali G, a white teenager from Staines who is desperate to be seen as black.

And here, I think, we are getting at what David Starkey wanted to convey.
So prevalent is this �gangsta� culture that, if you get on a bus in London and shut your eyes, you will often not be able to tell the ethnicity of the young people who are speaking, since they all use the tone, phraseology and language patterns of black youths.

Now some might view this as a welcome development, a sign our society is truly a melting pot. But my great fear is that, in practice, we are limiting the opportunities of young people and denying them the chance to use the wonderful richness of English. If they all speak in a type of
African-Caribbean creole, they will cut themselves off from mainstream society, which will drastically hurt their job prospects.

The sadness in all this is that, because of its global dominance, black culture could be a force for good if it were re-fashioned and channelled in a different direction. The willingness of white and Asian youths to embrace black music and culture shows that racism is not nearly as ingrained as some of the professional grievance-mongers claim.

But, at present, the culture is heading down the wrong street, a demeaning and negative one that can only lead to more social problems. In his own awkward way, that is precisely what David Starkey was trying to say.

* Tony Sewell is CEO of the charity Generating Genius.'

[Phil_K]

This is the full text of Enoch Powell's so-called 'Rivers of Blood' speech, which was delivered to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on April 20 1968.

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature.

One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: "If only," they love to think, "if only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen."

Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.

At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.

A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries.

After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: "If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country." I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this government wouldn't last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: "I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan't be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?

The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children.

I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking - not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General's Office.

There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.

As time goes on, the proportion of this total who are immigrant descendants, those born in England, who arrived here by exactly the same route as the rest of us, will rapidly increase. Already by 1985 the native-born would constitute the majority. It is this fact which creates the extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take, action where the difficulties lie in the present but the evils to be prevented or minimised lie several parliaments ahead.

The natural and rational first question with a nation confronted by such a prospect is to ask: "How can its dimensions be reduced?" Granted it be not wholly preventable, can it be limited, bearing in mind that numbers are of the essence: the significance and consequences of an alien element introduced into a country or population are profoundly different according to whether that element is 1 per cent or 10 per cent.

The answers to the simple and rational question are equally simple and rational: by stopping, or virtually stopping, further inflow, and by promoting the maximum outflow. Both answers are part of the official policy of the Conservative Party.

It almost passes belief that at this moment 20 or 30 additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week - and that means 15 or 20 additional families a decade or two hence. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fianc�s whom they have never seen.

Let no one suppose that the flow of dependants will automatically tail off. On the contrary, even at the present admission rate of only 5,000 a year by voucher, there is sufficient for a further 25,000 dependants per annum ad infinitum, without taking into account the huge reservoir of existing relations in this country - and I am making no allowance at all for fraudulent entry. In these circumstances nothing will suffice but that the total inflow for settlement should be reduced at once to negligible proportions, and that the necessary legislative and administrative measures be taken without delay.

I stress the words "for settlement." This has nothing to do with the entry of Commonwealth citizens, any more than of aliens, into this country, for the purposes of study or of improving their qualifications, like (for instance) the Commonwealth doctors who, to the advantage of their own countries, have enabled our hospital service to be expanded faster than would otherwise have been possible. They are not, and never have been, immigrants.

I turn to re-emigration. If all immigration ended tomorrow, the rate of growth of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would be substantially reduced, but the prospective size of this element in the population would still leave the basic character of the national danger unaffected. This can only be tackled while a considerable proportion of the total still comprises persons who entered this country during the last ten years or so.

Hence the urgency of implementing now the second element of the Conservative Party's policy: the encouragement of re-emigration.

Nobody can make an estimate of the numbers which, with generous assistance, would choose either to return to their countries of origin or to go to other countries anxious to receive the manpower and the skills they represent.

Nobody knows, because no such policy has yet been attempted. I can only say that, even at present, immigrants in my own constituency from time to time come to me, asking if I can find them assistance to return home. If such a policy were adopted and pursued with the determination which the gravity of the alternative justifies, the resultant outflow could appreciably alter the prospects.

The third element of the Conservative Party's policy is that all who are in this country as citizens should be equal before the law and that there shall be no discrimination or difference made between them by public authority. As Mr Heath has put it we will have no "first-class citizens" and "second-class citizens." This does not mean that the immigrant and his descendent should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to imposition as to his reasons and motive for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.

There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it "against discrimination", whether they be leader-writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads. They have got it exactly and diametrically wrong.

The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming.

This is why to enact legislation of the kind before parliament at this moment is to risk throwing a match on to gunpowder. The kindest thing that can be said about those who propose and support it is that they know not what they do.

Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth immigrant in Britain and the American Negro. The Negro population of the United States, which was already in existence before the United States became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they have only gradually and still incompletely come. The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knew no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free treatment under the National Health Service.

Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration, but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different from another's.

But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.

They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. They now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by act of parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.

In the hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received when I last spoke on this subject two or three months ago, there was one striking feature which was largely new and which I find ominous. All Members of Parliament are used to the typical anonymous correspondent; but what surprised and alarmed me was the high proportion of ordinary, decent, sensible people, writing a rational and often well-educated letter, who believed that they had to omit their address because it was dangerous to have committed themselves to paper to a Member of Parliament agreeing with the views I had expressed, and that they would risk penalties or reprisals if they were known to have done so. The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine.

I am going to allow just one of those hundreds of people to speak for me:

�Eight years ago in a respectable street in Wolverhampton a house was sold to a Negro. Now only one white (a woman old-age pensioner) lives there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.

�The day after the last one left, she was awakened at 7am by two Negroes who wanted to use her 'phone to contact their employer. When she refused, as she would have refused any stranger at such an hour, she was abused and feared she would have been attacked but for the chain on her door. Immigrant families have tried to rent rooms in her house, but she always refused. Her little store of money went, and after paying rates, she has less than �2 per week. �She went to apply for a rate reduction and was seen by a young girl, who on hearing she had a seven-roomed house, suggested she should let part of it. When she said the only people she could get were Negroes, the girl said, "Racial prejudice won't get you anywhere in this country." So she went home.

�The telephone is her lifeline. Her family pay the bill, and help her out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house - at a price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his tenants in weeks, or at most a few months. She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. "Racialist," they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder.�

The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word "integration." To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.

Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.

But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.

We are on the verge here of a change. Hitherto it has been force of circumstance and of background which has rendered the very idea of integration inaccessible to the greater part of the immigrant population - that they never conceived or intended such a thing, and that their numbers and physical concentration meant the pressures towards integration which normally bear upon any small minority did not operate.

Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population. The cloud no bigger than a man's hand, that can so rapidly overcast the sky, has been visible recently in Wolverhampton and has shown signs of spreading quickly. The words I am about to use, verbatim as they appeared in the local press on 17 February, are not mine, but those of a Labour Member of Parliament who is a minister in the present government:

'The Sikh communities' campaign to maintain customs inappropriate in Britain is much to be regretted. Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.'

All credit to John Stonehouse for having had the insight to perceive that, and the courage to say it.

For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood."

That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century.

Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

[Phil_K]

For a little background, Enoch Powell was a man I admire immensely. He started as a precocious classics scholar, questioning even his tutor, the great classisist of the time, A.E. Houseman. He became professor of classics at the University of Sydney at the age of 25.

From there he joined the army at the beginning of WWII as a private, and rose to the rank of Brigadeer during the course of the war. After, he became an MP and rose to ministerial level.

His political career was all but finished due to above speech; fired from his ministerial position (just to show that popularist politics is nothing new!), he joined the Ulster Unionist Party and won a seat in Northen Ireland.

Throughout all this, he was a hard-working person, continuing his scholarly pursuits, writing poetry, and learning something like 10 languages.

In an age when TV journalists and Irish rockstars want to run the world's agenda, I think Enoch Powell's words, always highly articulate, are worth studying and digesting.

[Sashadroogie]

Better the rockstars than members of the UUP...

[Guy Courchesne]

Blair checks in...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14605459

[ancient_dweller]

Got to give Tony some credit with that article.

I still think, and my point has been proven in this thread. The more extreme your comment the more one has to expect criticism. Starkey's comments, in my opinion, are not civilised comments and by making them he is simply lowering himself to whatever level he is trying to criticise. Likewise, I suggested that such comments should be criminalised. I suppose, equally, mine was just as moronic looking back with hindsight.

[eurobound]

[johnslat]

Dear eurobound,

As a fellow moron, can I join in the toast - though only with Adam's ale for me. I'm a (non-drinking) alcoholic (oops, there goes my anonymity ?)

Regards,
John

[eurobound]

[Sashadroogie]

Unite, morons! You have only your claims to lose and ...something to gain hic!

[johnslat]

Dear Sasha,

We ARE united - we're called the human race .

Regards,
John

[johnslat]

Has it come to this?


http://www.usacarry.com/forums/members/2nd_amendment_knight-albums-funny-gun-pics-picture1805-queen-gun.jpg


Regards,
John