Conspiracy Of Silence

Last night's Ten O'Clock News had a good report on the rise of neo-nazism in Russia, including an interview with Nikolai Kuryanovich, a member of the extreme nationalist Liberal Democratic Party and deputy of the State Duma. Unfortunately, it left the viewer with the impression that ill-feeling towards the "ten million foreigners" who have moved to Russia in recent years is only to be found in the country's equivalent of the BNP. However, the truth is that Central Asians, such as the Uzbek they interviewed who had been beaten up for being "dark-skinned filth" (a rather tame translation of regular abuse that is actually as harsh and inflaming as was "filthy n****r" in America), were always treated as second-class citizens in the former Soviet Union and, as economic migrants today, continue to be harassed and exploited by both the authorities and population at large. Anti-Turkic, anti-Muslim, anti-Western, and even anti-Georgian or anti-Ukrainian stereotypes dominate the mainstream, Kremlin-controlled media.

I say that not simply to point fingers at the racist attitudes endemic in another country, but to question to what extent race has been allowed to subvert a proper and reasoned debate over immigration here† and to question whether we are aware of the ways that our attitudes towards "outsiders" are shaped by our own positive perceptions of national identity and expression of national pride. I am conscious that these are inconvenient questions that the politically correct might like to brush aside, but they are ones on which our elected representatives cannot afford to remain silent.

† Consider, for instance, the recent over-reaction to comments made by Nigel Hastilow, the now former Conservative parliamentary candidate for Halesowen and Rowley Regis, who observed:

"When you ask most people in the Black Country what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most people say immigration. Many insist: “Enoch Powell was right”. Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 “rivers of blood” speech warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably.

He was right. It has changed dramatically. But his speech was political suicide. Enoch’s successors in Parliament are desperate to avoid ever mentioning the issue. It’s too controversial and far too dangerous. Nobody wants to be labelled a racist. Immigration is the issue that dare not speak its name in public."

Immigration: Not A Racial Problem

Once again, Simon Heffer does not mince his words in today's Telegraph:

This week, we were told there were 11,000 foreigners in our prisons – one in seven of those inside – and the Government, with typical incompetence, is struggling to negotiate deals to have these people serve their sentences back home.

Yesterday, an independent body called the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit said that the Government's plans to build three million new homes by 2020 were not nearly adequate.

Of course they are not, because of the state's determination to allow unlimited immigration and, with it, the end of the indigenous cultural identity. The tensions of what used to be called "multi-culturalism" are dangerous enough: but so are the practical issues.

Large parts of England will be concreted over to accommodate all these new people. There will have to be new roads, railways and airports. And since we are already full up, and our public services buckling, where are we going to put everyone?

Labour has covered up its failure to control our borders by saying that our economy needs immigrants.

Well, if you are determined to have a welfare state that tolerates about eight million economically unproductive people of working age – the unemployed, those in "training" and those on various benefits because they believe they are unfit for work – then of course you will. It is time someone got serious.

Shibboleth: Political Art

Colombian artist Doris Salcedo's 500-foot crack, Shibboleth, in the floor of Tate Modern is supposed to be a statement about racism, representing "borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred, the experience of a Third World person coming into the heart of Europe."

Clearly intended to be a more serious installation than Carsten Höller's Test Site, let us know if you think the artist has been successful ... or is this just another expensive piece of modern art whose sole function is to separate the liberals from the traditionalists?

Obama, Islam & The West

Religion, as everyone knows, is a big deal in American politics. Which is why Barack Hussein Obama might be just what the world needs as successor to George W Bush.

Described as "a liberal's liberal" and "way to the left of the repositioned Mrs Clinton," the media has understandably latched onto the question of race and asks whether he could become America's first black president. However, the question of faith is equally interesting. For, although he is a committed Christian, as is indicated by his non-Western names, he comes out of a Muslim background. Last October he wrote in a piece called "My Spiritual Journey" in Time magazine: "I was not raised in a religious household ... In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology." So, like the vast majority of the world's Muslims, it may be a nominal Muslim background. Nonetheless, Muslim it is — as is evident from his 1996 biography, Dreams from My Father, which describes how his father was a Muslim, he was raised by a Muslim stepfather, and his first two years education was at a Muslim school. To any orthodox Muslim, that makes him a Muslim — and, as a professing Christian, an apostate Muslim, at that.

Just as Obama is quick to reject any suggestion that his campaign represents "an easy shortcut to racial reconciliation," neither does his candidacy promise any swift solution to the problem of radicalised Islam. However, it does offer him a unique opportunity to reach out to moderate Muslims, who represent the majority within Islam, and invite them to affirm article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that "Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief."

Writing "The next president" in the current issue of The Difference, Michael Veitch concluded, "Whichever candidate ultimately ends up in the White House, the sort of relationship they choose to forge with Britain and the rest of the world promises to be a spectacle no less fascinating than the election itself." Taking a personal stand against the kind of rhetoric we have heard preached even this week by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden's deputy, over "apostate" Salman Rushdie's knighthood, may not win Barack Obama the American presidency, and would almost certainly make him the prime target of Al-Qaeda's hatred, but it would go a long way in helping draw a clear distinction between the radical and the moderate sections of the Muslim community.

As this week's Newsweek notes, "From his earliest days as a politician, Obama has made a career out of reconciling opposing sides." Having consistently opposed the Iraq war, he might be uniquely placed to help reconcile Islam and the West.

Generation Blair

A child's start in life is still determined by the class, education, marital status, and ethnic background of its parents. By the age of three, children from disadvantaged families are already lagging a full year behind their middle-class contemporaries in social and educational development.

That is the damning conclusion of a study monitoring around 16,000 families of children born across the UK in 2000-2. An assessment of vocabulary revealed that children of graduates are ten months ahead of those with the least-educated parents, and a separate assessment measuring children's understanding of colours, letters, numbers, sizes, and shapes found an even wider gap of twelve months between the two groups.

Parents' education was not the only significant factor, however. For, although black African parents were more likely to have degrees than white parents, a quarter of the black Caribbean and black African children assessed were delayed in their development, compared with only 4% of white children. Here the difference appears to be caused by the children's family background: a third of black African (32%) and almost half the black Caribbean children (47%) were being brought up by lone mothers, compared with just 14% of white children and 5% of Indian children who had lone parents. This is an important factor, as the analysis also showed nearly three-quarters (72%) of children with single parents live below the poverty line.

In a worrying confirmation of the extent of another problem that has emerged in the last five years, the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, who carried out the research, also reports that almost one child in four is overweight (18%) or obese (5%) at age three. This study also revealed a similar difference attributable to race and class. Just 9% of Indian children overweight or obese compared with 23% of White and 33% of Black Caribbean children. Equally, children in more advantaged areas of England and Scotland were less likely to be overweight or obese than those living in less advantaged areas.

Late last year, Tony Blair claimed the Sure Start programme, designed to help the children in Britain's most deprived families, was "one of the Government's greatest achievements." Can anyone tell me what NuLabour has actually achieved with the £3,000,000,000 of tax-payers' money that it has poured into the scheme?

British Hate Crimes Surge

European governments have been "burying their heads in the sand for more than a decade" according to a new survey showing that the number of hate crimes has increased dramatically since the 1990s. The 2007 Hate Crime Survey, produced by US-based Human Rights First, reports:

In the United Kingdom, a dramatic surge of racist and religiously-motivated violence followed the July bombings of the London Underground and a city bus. The spike of violence diminished within weeks, but a high level of violence preceded the incidents and continues.

Contrary to what you might think, this increase in hate crimes was not only directed against Muslim or Asian communities. For instance, the report also notes that anti-semitic attacks rose by 31% to unprecedented levels in 2006, with attacks against individual Jews (as opposed to Jewish property) increasing by 37%, in part owing to a surge in anti-semitic incidents coinciding with the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Among its recommendations, Human Rights First is urging European governments to undertake parliamentary or other special inquiries into the problem of hate crimes to investigate ways of responding better to hate crimes and to seek creative ways of dealing with the roots of intolerance through education. That would be in line with today's report from the Conservative's Democracy Task Force (as commented on by Power to the People) calling for greater Parliamentary scrutiny. However, given the excessive proliferation of legislation we've suffered over the last decade and the Government's defeat over its controversial Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, I suspect Labour will be more inclined to latch onto the recommendation to enact new laws that expressly address and provide enhanced penalties for hate crimes.

Linguistic Time-Bomb

As a one-time teacher of English as a foreign language, who established a language school for adults in the developing world, I feel a crucial factor has been missed in today's reporting of the sharp increase in children who do not speak English as their first language.

Take the recently-arrived child in the class where my wife works as a teaching assistant – Fresh off the plane from the other side of the world, barely able to read or write in any language, and not speaking a word of English, he was thrown into a class of nine-year-olds, albeit with full-time one-on-one support. Even though he was no further forward academically than the pre-schoolers soon to move up to reception, he was expected to gain something from the exercise and, presumably, catch up with the rest of the class at some point.

That one in ten secondary school-aged children and one in seven primary school-aged children speak a language other than English at home should worry us profoundly. Not simply because of what it reveals about the transformation that unlimited immigration from Eastern Europe is having on our communities or the pressure that it is placing on housing, the health service, or jobs. Neither should we simply be concerned, as the Commission for Racial Equality policy director warned today, that growing racial segregation in our schools represents a racial "time bomb," that risks exacerbating issues such as the recent wave of violent crime.

When China was first opening up to the West, it issued visas to teachers of English as a foreign language but warned them only to teach English. They did not want any new cultural, political, or economic ideas brought in. What they failed to understand is that a language comes as part of and is inseparable from a whole cultural package. The teaching of a foreign language is one of the most politically subversive actions a person can engage in.

The increasing proportion of children in this country who do not have English as their first language are therefore not simply a significant drain on teaching resources. More than that, it is the cultural divide that we should be most concerned about. Not sharing the language, they will not share the same worldview and will be exposed to a different set of ideas and ideology. If we do not understand the significance of this now, then, like the Communist Chinese authorities, we will one day wake up and discover that we are living in a different country.

Poverty or Race?

Mr Blair claims that recent violence is "not a symptom of a broader social malaise and should not be treated as part of a general crime wave." Instead he blames London's spate of knife and gun murders on a distinctive black culture and says people have to drop their political correctness and recognise that the violence will not be stopped "by pretending it is not young black kids doing it."

The Prime Minister may be right in maintaining that "what we are dealing with is not a general social disorder but specific groups or people who for one reason or another are deciding not to abide" by society's codes of conduct. And he is surely right when he implies that we have all taken political correctness too far. However, is he also right to dismiss any connection with other factors?

Home Office minister Lady Scotland clearly thinks not, as just last month she told the Home Affairs Select Committee that the disproportionate number of black youths in the criminal justice system was a function of their disproportionate poverty, and not to do with a distinctive black culture. The chair of the National Black Police Association also thinks not, saying "Social deprivation and delinquency go hand in hand and we need to tackle both."

What do you think?