LYING, VYING AND CRYING: POLITICIANS, IMMIGRATION & THE NATION STATE

As the UK’s Coalition government edges ever closer to collapse and its politician’s snipe and jostle with each other, maneuvering themselves into the best and most favourable  positions in which to jump ship or carry favour with the UK’s increasingly volatile media, so its leaders, Nick Clegg and David Cameron, appear ever more desperate and despairing. Clegg in particular seems to be on the verge of a breakdown, bursting into tears because he has become a hate figure to students for breaking his election pledge not to raise tuition fees, or getting hysterical and girly, worrying about all the anger ‘out there’. Yet it is his, and the nation’s, ridiculous leader David Cameron whose behaviour is really bordering on the manic. Cameron bigged it up with the Egyptian’s in Tahrir Square, then dressed down ‘man-of-the-people’ style with the Ryaniar regulars with nothing more than a change of socks for hand luggage for a long weekend holiday with his wife and as soon as he got back declared war on Libya. 

Then, with hardly time to pause or breath in between making dire threats against Colonel Gaddafi, Cameron, now wrapped in the robes of cultural diversity and multiculturalism, launched into a bitter diatribe against Oxford University describing it as a disgrace for only admitting one black student in the last academic year based on her merits - the implication being that from now on Oxford should dumb down to let in more ethnically desirable types regardless of their academic qualifications.  Then within days he had ditched the cultural diversity robes and wrapped himself in a Union Jack and set about attacking the number of immigrants in the UK, saying that Labour’s ‘open door policy’ was responsible and that the number of foreigners in the UK was dangerously high. 

No doubt in the days to come Cameron will threaten to invade Syria, announce further cutbacks in the armed forces, pledge to observe Ramadan and eat only Halal meat before denouncing the failure of immigrants to integrate and threatening to follow France and ban the burka. This is Cameron desperately playing to the gallery and failing as his inconsistency and insincerity make it impossible for anyone to know what he really means and what he really intends to do about any of these soundbite pronouncements. Nothing probably.

Yet in amongst these ramblings are real concerns that have been ignored for years and which should be addressed, which makes their being spewed out by Cameron like so much political ectoplasm all the more tragic. There are too many immigrants in the UK and successive governments not only opened the door, they wedged it open and no one, even now, has had the guts to close it. Likewise, as mentioned in an earlier Cameron rant, multiculturalism has failed, failed in ways that will potentially destroy our societies as the sinister Talabanisation of London’s Tower Hamlet’s and other UK cities shows. 

Here women, even non Muslim women, are being threatened and intimidated for wearing revealing Western clothes, and advertisements on billboards and bus shelters which feature scantily clad women are being painted black.  Yet as usual the politicians and police play it down, dismissing the threats as the actions of a small minority, a ‘minority’ that will one day knock on their door as well. This sort of action has been building for years, in Bradford over five years ago prostitutes were driven out of Muslim areas and Western girls were ‘advised’ to dress conservatively walking through them and, in a sign of things to come, advertisers avoided giving ‘offense’ by not booking ads in their area that showed women in underwear or bikinis. Always appeasement, always avoiding confrontation, always defeat.

Cameron’s reason for attacking multiculturalism and immigration is cynical in that there are elections coming up and he’s trying to win back Tory voters who have drifted away by talking tough on issues they care about, yet he will do nothing. Even when in Tower Hamlets again, Muslim radicals attacked another totem of our inclusive society, gay rights, the powers that be first blamed the mysterious ‘minority’ and then, once a paper had suggested that members of the ‘far right’ had done it to stir up trouble, blamed members of the English Defense League. Of course they had done it, they or anyone other than the crazed Islamists in our midst who can do no wrong in the eyes of our weak and increasingly impotent democracy. 

Again and again we are seeing the English revert to type, not the brave, bold warriors of legend, but the craven, subservient appeasers personified by Neville Chamberlain and the little man, the health and safety politically correct busy bodies that infest our councils and local government, whose aim is to facilitate our colonization as smoothly as possible. Yet nothing is done? Newspapers, websites and forums are full of vague threats and talk of people rising up, yet nothing happens. We are like the willing victims of massacres like Babi Yar, whereby thousands of people allow themselves to be marched out of their towns and villages, to be stripped and shot by a comparatively small number of soldiers. They often knew what was coming, heard the shots as they lined up over trenches of bodies and yet did nothing accept wait for death. The executioners often thought it was because the victims knew that their fate was to die and accepted it. 

Perhaps our fate, like England’s, is to die too... 

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Ever since the failure of 2010’s general election to produce a clear winner and the unedifying sight of Gordon Brown desperately trying to cling on to power finally persuaded the Liberal Democrats to get into bed with the Conservatives and form a coalition, the country has been slowly and inexorably pushed towards collapse. Forces outside the government who see any cuts in state expenditure or the welfare state as an attack are rapidly forming allegiances with more militant groups to protest each and every cut. Those groups in turn are forming lose understandings with far more extreme antiestablishment individuals and collectives who see in this wave of protest an opportunity to create wider disorder, sow division, and to possibly bring down the government and with it the Establishment.

Ever since the first student protest and the taking of Millbank Tower caught not just the police, but just about everyone else by surprise, every protestor and militant grouping worthy of the name, from anarchists to the Socialist Workers Party, are seeing the coming year as a real chance to smash the Tories, kill a few police and really smash the rich. And I think that they might just do it, as for once the all the necessary ingredients for creating an explosive are coming together, and the students have unknowing lit the fuse. 

It was Gordon Brown though who set everything in motion and who is conveniently now out of the public eye earning vast sums of undeserved money giving after dinner speeches and writing his memoirs while others have to deal with the results of his profligacy. Brown mired the UK in debt and created a false boom in house prices and borrowings by consistently keeping interest rates at historic lows. He compounded this when things started to go awry by using Quantitive Easing to try and buy the government out of debt in the short term by printing more and more virtual money to purchase its own government bonds. 

The financial icing on the cake though was his ‘save the world‘ moment when Brown pumped billions of pounds into the banking sector in order to save key banks like RBS and Northern Rock from collapsing under the weight of their own financial indolence. In doing so he undermined any validity capitalism has in claiming that companies stand or fall by their own actions and those of the free market. He showed instead that greed. failure and incompetence, when on a scale of ‘too big to fail’, carried no responsibility and could actually be rewarded by unprecedented bailouts from the taxpayer.

The US and most of the West has in turn followed the same model and the world’s economies are now awash with QE and bailed-out bankers demanding enormous bonuses again. Yet such is the level of debt of banks, hedge funds and some countries who have mortgaged everything up to the hilt and then borrowed even more to pay the interest on the interest that someone has to take steps try and reduce it and start paying the debt off. At this point Gordon Brown vanished and the UK’s students lit the fuse that Brown had left conveniently out for them on a plate.

Cuts are never easy, particularly when for years the UK government has handed out money as if we had a limitless supply. Soon people take State spending for granted; their benefits, grants, health care, education, housing and so on is seen as a right yet where that money comes from is often overlooked. People understood that the country was in debt, people began to take on board some of the issues surrounding bonds, QE and so forth and yet as the cuts were outlined they also saw smug bailed-out bankers and the billions pumped into failed banks. Banks that should have been allowed to fail, with the shareholders and investors taking the hit instead of the tax payer. Instead the moral high ground has been lost. How can the government demand millions in cuts when they have just given millions to some of the very individuals and companies responsible for causing the financial crisis in the first place? The bailout of the banks is another ingredient added to the explosive. 

The Coalition is yet another ingredient. A weak union between two weak parties that oscillate between indecision and niceties and along the way try and sneak in some ineffectual savings has no hope. Government spending in November 2010 was actually up on November 2009. It’s as if the government has lost control and despite desperately trying to do the right thing is secretly wringing its hands in despair. The Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is, according to some newspaper reports, suffering depression or cracking up and Prime Minister Cameron has yet to show he has the mettle to be as tough or as strong as he will need to be to stand up the coming storm. 

Alongside a weak government we have a dispirited police force that is disliked, maligned and restricted by politically correct dogma that has made its handling of anything from street crime to demonstrations the subject of discourse and remonstration. They are in effect damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Yet the police’s role in the coming year is crucial as they stand, often literally, between the force of the protestor and the Establishment. If they fall or fail then inevitably the Established falls with them. 

The protests themselves, the cuts, a weak unstable coalition government, bitterness at the bankers bailouts and the potential of a UK sovereign debt crisis; non of these in isolation would be enough to destroy the status quo, but combined they just might. 

Yet the Establishment as we know it has stood for over a thousand years and has weathered everything from the Spanish Armada and the second world war to the General Strike and flower power so why should this current situation be so different? Because the last ten to fifteen years has so changed both the make-up of the country, through immigration and social engineering, to the extent that nationhood nolonger binds the people together around a centre. Secondly the invasive and relentless attacking of the Establishment, by which I mean the State, Christianity and the values by which we live, have so undermined and devalued it as a core belief system that few would rush to defend it and many more would seek to destroy it. 

And then the lit fuse reaches its target and bang! No more Establishment, or rather the slow unravelling of our society and Establishment would begin. Some riots, some nastiness, some looting, some whatever .. And then what? David Miliband and New Labour? A utopian non-capitalist ideal where we trade sandals for lentils and plant trees in the City and sacrifice bankers on May Day? Or will it be a slow disintegration into anarchy, where the police force slowly crumbles, where the veneer of decency and morality decays bit by bit until finally its gone and a brutaligenzia reigns?

But have those wishing for the demise of the Established order thought things through? Smashing a window is easy, finding and paying someone skilled enough to replace it is harder. And who will invest in a Britain racked with civil disorder and strife. Who will pay the bills and who will govern? Left or Right, if those wishing for the destruction of the old order win, then whatever follows will, in all likelihood, be far worse.