British Screed

There's quite the screed at The Spectator about Britain's immigration/multi-cultural problem. Link. Excerpts:

At the entrance to my local library there is a large glossy poster which carries the slogan 'Celebrate Diversity'. It sounds like an order. We citizens must express our joy at the changing nature of Britain, or else. But that means we must ignore the evidence of our eyes and ears.

All around I see mounting social anarchy, gross corruption in the democratic process, the destruction of liberty, mass ignorance and brutality, paralysis in the police, the breakdown of the family and the loss of any faith in the justice system. Only last week an Algerian migrant twice refused asylum in this country was sent to prison for 17 years for plotting a terrorist campaign, while a 15-year-old black girl was stabbed to death at a party in east London, allegedly for standing on another teenage reveller's toes. Yet I am informed that I must celebrate diversity, celebrate the new richness of multi-ethnic Britain.

Any challenge to the official line is met with cries of outrage and abuse. When Michael Howard called for some tightening in immigration controls, he was accused by Labour of using 'scurrilous and ugly' tactics and by the Liberal Democrats of indulging in 'the politics of fear'.

Even some Labour MPs admit that the current immigration system is a shambles. Roger Godsiff, the MP for Birmingham Sparkbrook and Small Heath, told me that there was a 'culture of institutional chaos' within the system. 'I find official indifference astonishing,' Godsiff said. 'What the immigration authorities are admitting is that they do not have a clue how many people are settling in this country.'

We are continually told about the substantial economic contribution that immigrants have made to Britain, said by the government to be worth £2.5 billion a year in terms of a net gain to the Treasury. This is the line peddled by the three main parties. But that ignores the huge cost to our social infrastructure, especially in urban areas and the overcrowded Southeast. Again, as the Labour MP Roger Godsiff put it to me, 'unrestricted, unrecorded migrant growth' is placing 'intolerable pressure on services such as housing, social care and education'.

According to the Department for Work and Pensions, an astonishing 61 per cent of Bangladeshis in Britain are either unemployed or economically inactive, compared with just 23 per cent of the white population, while 45 per cent of Africans are unemployed. Overall, 41 per cent of ethnic minorities are without jobs – hardly the dynamic contribution so often portrayed in state propaganda. And ethnic minorities are far more likely to be welfare claimants than their white counterparts: 28 per cent of all ethnic minority groups and 34 per cent of blacks receive income-related benefits, compared with 18 per cent of whites. When it comes to housing benefit or income support, blacks are twice as likely as whites to be claimants.

But the problems go far beyond economics. Britain was once renowned as a place of gentleness, where even the policemen were unarmed, but we now have urban violence on a scale that would have been unthinkable for the postwar generation of Britons. Some of this is no doubt the result of a degenerate culture, and a reluctance by the police and courts to enforce the law, but some is clearly the long-term result of immigration.

You, the reader, can draw whatever parallels to America you want.