The EU IN/OUT referendum: strategy and tactics for those who want to leave the EU

Robert Henderson

The general strategy

A) How to leave

Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty states

1. Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.

2. A Member State which decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council of its intention. In the light of the guidelines provided by the European Council, the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union. That agreement shall be negotiated in accordance with Article 218(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It shall be concluded on behalf of the Union by the Council, acting by a qualified majority, after obtaining the consent of the European Parliament.

3. The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period.

4. For the purposes of paragraphs 2 and 3, the member of the European Council or of the Council representing the withdrawing Member State shall not participate in the discussions of the European Council or Council or in decisions concerning it.

A qualified majority shall be defined in accordance with Article 238(3)(b) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

5. If a State which has withdrawn from the Union asks to rejoin, its request shall be subject to the procedure referred to in Article 49. (http://www.lisbon-treaty.org/wcm/the-lisbon-treaty/treaty-on-european-union-and-comments/title-6-final-provisions/137-article-50.html).

The OUT camp must make it clear that  it would be both damaging and unnecessary for the UK to abide by this Treaty requirement. It  would allow the EU to inflict considerable damage on the UK both during the period prior to formally  leaving and afterwards if  the price of leaving with the EU’s agreement was  for  UK to sign up to various obligations, for example, to continue paying a large annual sum to the EU for ten years . It would also give  the Europhile UK political elite  ample opportunity to keep the UK attached to the EU in the manner that Norway and Switzerland are attached. More of them later.

There is also the danger that the stay-in camp could use Article 50 to argue that whether the British people want to be in or out, the cost of leaving would be too heavy because of this treaty requirement.

The Gordian knot of Article 50 can be cut  simply by passing an Act of Parliament repealing all the treaties that refer to the EU from the Treaty of Rome onwards. No major UK party could  object to this because all three have, at one time or another,  declared that Parliament remains supreme and can repudiate anything the EU does if it so chooses.

If the stay-in camp argue that would be illegal because of the  treaty obligation, the OUT camp should simply emphasise  (1) that international law is no law because there is never any means of enforcing it within its jurisdiction is a state rejects it and (2) that treaties which do not allow for contracting parties to simply withdraw are profoundly undemocratic because they bind future governments.

The OUT camp should press the major political parties to commit themselves to ignoring Article 50. If a party refuses that can be used against them because it will make them look suspicious. Before the vote

B) The parties’ plans of action if there is a vote to leave

It is important that all the parties likely to have seats in the Commons after the next election are publicly and relentlessly pressed to give at least a broad outline of what action they would adopt in the event of a vote to leave.  Left with a free hand there is a serious danger that whatever British  government is  in charge after a vote to leave would attempt to bind the UK back into the EU by stealth by signing the UK up to agreements such as those the EU has with Norway and Switzerland which mean that they have to (1) pay a fee to the EU annually, (2) adopt the social legislation which comes from the EU and (3) most importantly agree to the four “freedoms” of the EU – the free movement of goods, services, capital and  labour throughout not merely the EU  but the wider European Economic Area (EEA).

It is probable that the Westminster parties will all resist this, but that would present them with two problems. First, a refusal to do so would make them seem untrustworthy; second, if one party laid out their position but the others did not, that would potentially give the party which did say what it would do a considerable advantage over the others which did not.  If no party puts its plans before the public before the referendum, there should be demands  from those who want the UK to leave the EU that  any new treaties with the EU must be put to a referendum and, if they are rejected, the UK will simply trade with the EU under the WTO rules.

C) Repudiate re-negotiation before the referendum

Supporting the negotiation of a new relationship between the UK and the EU before a referendum is mistaken because it would seem to many to be giving tacit approval for renegotiation and legitimise the possibility of the UK remaining within the EU.  It is also rash  because  the likelihood  of the EU giving nothing is probably very small.  Indeed, they might well  give something which is substantial,  because the UK leaving the EU would be a very great blow to the organisation. The UK is the country with the second largest population within the EU with , depending on how it is measured,  the second or third largest   economy  and the country which pays the second largest contribution to the EU budget.   For the EU to lose the UK would not only be a blow in itself, it would also create a very strong precedent for every other EU state, especially the largest ones.  If  the UK left and prospered the temptation would be for other EU states to leave.

But even if negotiation  produced  nothing of substance as Harold Wilson’s “renegotiation” did in 1975, it would be a mistake to imagine that it would not influence the referendum result. The electorate is divided between the resolute come outs, the resolute stay-ins and the wavering middle.  A claim by the stay-in campaigners that something had been conceded by the EU, however  insignificant,  would provide the waverers with an excuse to vote to stay in because they could convince themselves they were voting for change.

It would be also be a mistake to see the EU offering  nothing  at all as a gift for the OUT camp. This is  because the waverers might simply see that as evidence that the EU was too powerful to oppose and shift their votes to staying in.

Those who want the UK to leave should unambiguously put the case for no renegotiation.  Dismiss anything Cameron (or any other PM) brings back from the EU by way of altered terms as being irrelevant because the EU has a long record of  agreeing things with  the UK and then finding ways of sabotaging what was agreed. In addition, a future British government  may agree to alter any terms offered at the time of the referendum.  The classic example of this changing of agreed terms happening in the past is Tony Blair’s  giving up of a substantial amount of the Thatcher rebate in return for a promised reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), a promise which was never met.  That episode produced my all-time favourite amongst Blair’s penchant for lying. Two days before he went to the EU meeting at which he  gave away a  substantial part of the rebate he declared during Prime Minister’s Questions  that  the rebate  was “non-negotiable – period”

It is difficult to envisage any British prime minister not trying to  negotiate with the EU before a referendum, but it might just  happen if whoever is in power when the referendum is announced were to be told privately by the  major EU players that nothing will be given and the prime minister of the day concludes it would be best to pretend that a decision had been made not to negotiate rather than risk the humiliation of getting nothing, perhaps not even a pretence of negotiation before nothing is given.  Why would the EU do this? They might calculate that it would be a gamble worth taking to send a British PM away  with nothing  whilst hoping the referendum vote would be to stay in because then the power of the UK to resist further integration would be shot.

If the EU offer nothing, the OUT camp should welcome the fact and stress to the public that if the referendum is to stay-in the EU could force any federalist measure through because not only would any British government be much weakened in its opposition to more federalism, the UK political class as a whole would more than willing to go along with it because of their ideological commitment to the EU.

D) After the vote

Ideally the government which deals with the EU after a vote to leave will have committed themselves to a plan of action before the referendum vote.  However, as described above,  it is quite possible that this will not happen because  the UK’s overwhelmingly Europhile political class will try to re-entangle the UK with the EU. To prevent them doing so there should be a concerted campaign after the vote to ensure that the  British public understands what is being done on their behalf with a demand for a further referendum to agree any  new treaty.

The terms of the debate

It is essential that the Europhiles are not allowed to make the debate revolve around economics.   If they do it will effectively stifle meaningful debate. As anyone who has ever tried to present economic ideas to an audience of the general public will know it is a soul-destroying experience.  Take the question of how much of UK trade is with the EU. The debate will begin with the stay-in camp saying something like 45% of UK trade is with the EU. Those wanting to leave the EU will respond by saying it is probably less than 40% because of the Rotterdam/Antwerp effect . They will then be forced to explain what the Rotterdam/Amsterdam, effect is. That is the point where the general public’s concentration is lost and the debate ends up proving nothing to most of the audience.

But  although nothing is proved to the general audience by detailed economic argument ,  the audience will remember  certain phrases which have considerable  traction.  In amongst the serious debating on the issue of trade there will be phrases such as three million jobs in Britain rely on the EU and dire threats about how the EU will simply not buy British goods and services any more.  This is nonsense but fear is not a rational thing and many of those who vote will enter the voting chamber with fear of losing their jobs  in their heads regardless of what the OUT camp says if the debate is predominantly about economics.  Shift the debate away from economics and the fear inducing phrases will be heard less often.  If the BIG LIE is not repeated often enough its potency fades.

National Sovereignty

How should those wanting to leave the EU shift the focus of debate? They should put the matter which is really at the core of the UK’s  relationship with the EU  – national sovereignty – at the front of the  OUT camp’s referendum campaign.   Campaign under a slogan such as Are we to be masters in our own house?

Making national sovereignty the primary campaigning issue has the great advantage of  it being something that anyone can understand because it is both a simple concept and speaks directly to the natural tribal instincts of  human beings.   Being a simple concept readily  and naturally understood,   it is a far more potent debating tool than arguments attempting to refute the economic  arguments  beloved of the stay-in camp.  The fact that the natural tribal instincts have been suppressed for so long in the UK will increase its potency because most people will feel a sense of release when it begins to be catered for in public debate.

The appeal to national sovereignty has a further advantage. Those who support the EU are unused to debating on that ground.  That is because uncritical support for the EU has long been the position of both the British mainstream political class as a class and of the mass media.  That has meant that the contrary voice – that which wishes Britain to be independent – has been largely unheard in public debate for thirty years or more. Where it has been heard the response of the pro-EU majority has not been rational argument but abuse ranging from patronising dismissal of a wish for sovereignty as an outmoded nationalism to accusations that national sovereignty amounts to xenophobia or even racism.   These tactics – of excluding those who want to leave the EU from public debate and abuse substituted for argument – will no longer be available to the  pro EU lobby.

Immigration

The most threatening and energising subject relating to the EU for the general public is immigration. The public are right to identify this as the most important aspect of our membership of the EU because immigration touches every important part of British life: jobs, housing, education, welfare, healthcare, transport, free expression  and crime besides radically changing the  nature of parts of  the UK which now have large populations of immigrants and their descendants.

The public rhetoric of mainstream politicians and the media is changing fast as they begin to realise both what an electoral liability a de facto open door immigration policy is  as the effects of mass immigration become ever more glaring.  The argument is shifting from the economic to the cultural.  For example, here is the Daily Telegraph in a leader of  25 March:

“The fact is that, for many in Britain (especially those outside the middle classes), it is not just a matter of jobs being taken or public services being stretched, but of changes in the very character of communities. Those changes may not necessarily be for the worse: as the Prime Minister says, Britain’s culture has long been enriched by the contributions of new arrivals. But as long as ministers treat immigration as a matter of profit and loss, rather than the cause of often wrenching social change, they will never be able fully to address the grievances it causes.” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/9952717/Immigration-and-the-limits-of-the-possible.html)

This new frankness in public debate means that the OUT camp can use the immigration argument freely provided they keep the language within the confines of formal politeness. The subject will naturally dovetail with the emphasis on national sovereignty because the most important aspect of sovereignty is the ability to control the borders of the territory of a state.  Judged by their increasing willingness to talk publicly about immigration, it is probable that the mainstream UK parties will be content to go along with  ever more frank discussion about  immigration.

The economic argument must be kept simple

It will not be possible to avoid  economic arguments entirely. The OUT camp should concentrate on repeating these two facts:

-          The disadvantageous balance of payments deficit the UK has with the EU

-          The amount the UK pays to the EU

Those are the most solid  economic figures relating to the EU.   There is some fuzziness around the edges of the balance of payments deficit because of the question of where all the imports end up (whether in the EU or outside the EU through re-exporting) ,  while the  amount the EU  receives  is solid but it has to be broken down into the money which returns to the UK and the amount retained by Brussels.  Nonetheless these are the most certain  figures and the least susceptible to obfuscation by the stay-in side.

The best way of presenting the money paid to the EU is simply to say that outside the EU we can decide  how all of it is spent in this country and to illustrate what the money saved by not paying it to the EU would pay for.

It will also be necessary to address the question of protectionist measures the EU might take against the UK if the  vote was to leave.  It is improbable that the EU would place heavy protectionist barriers on UK exports because:

1.   The massive balance of payment deficit between the UK and the rest of the EU which is massively in the EU’s favour.

2.  Although the rest of the EU dwarfs the UK economy, much UK trade with the EU is heavily concentrated in certain regions of the EU.  The effect of protectionist barriers would  bear very heavily on these places.

3. There are strategically and economically important joint projects of which the UK is a major part,  for example, Airbus, the Joint-Strike Fighter.

4. the Republic of Ireland would be a massive bargaining chip for  the UK to play.  If the UK left and the EU rump attempted to impose sanctions against Britain this would cripple the RoI because so much of their trade is with the UK  The EU would be forced to massively subsidise the RoI  if protectionist barriers against the UK were imposed.  The EU could not exempt the RoI from the sanctions because that  would leave the EU open to British exports being funnelled through the RoI.

5. The EU would be bound by the World Trade Organisation’s restrictions on protectionist measures.

The economic  issues which are not worth pursuing in detail because they are too diffuse  and uncertain , are those relating to how much the EU costs Britain in terms of  EU-inspired legislation. It may well be that these load billions a year of extra costs  onto the UK  but they are not certain  or easily evaluated costs, not least because we cannot in the nature of things know what burdens an independent UK would impose off its own bat.   Getting into detailed  discussions about such things will simply play into the hands of  the stay-in camp because it will eat up the time and space available to those promoting the OUT cause.

Other Issues

Apart from the economic issues the stay-in camp will use these reasons for staying in:

-          That the EU  has prevented war in Western Europe since 1945.  This can be simply refuted by pointing out that the EU was not formed until  twelve years after WW2; that until 1973 the EU consisted of only six countries, three of them small,  and  of only nine countries until the 1980s. Consequently it would be reasonable to look for other reasons for  the lack of war. The two causes of   the peace in Western Europe have been the NATO alliance and the invention of nuclear weapons which make the price of war extraordinarily high.

-          That nation states such as the UK are too small to carry any real diplomatic weight in modern world.   That begs the question of whether it is an advantageous thing to carry such weight – it can get a country into disastrous foreign entanglements such as Iraq and Afghanistan – but even assuming it is advantageous , many much smaller countries than the UK survive very nicely, making their own bilateral agreements with other states large and small.   It is also worth remembering that the UK has such levers as a permanent seat on the UN Security  Council (which allows the UK to veto any proposed  move by the UN) and considerable influence in institutions such as the IMF and World Bank.

Robert Henderson

1 April 2013

The white working-class and the British elite – From the salt of the earth to the scum of the earth

Robert Henderson

1. How it used to be 

Thirty years ago the Labour Party primary client base was the white working-class, while the Tories still had remnants of the heightened sense of social responsibility towards the poor created by two world wars. Fast forward to 2006 and the white working-class are treated by the entire British political elite as a dangerous, almost subhuman species.

The mixture of contempt, fear and hatred which the white working-class now draws from the political class is echoed by the elite generally, indeed by not just the elite but the middleclass as a whole. Where once the white working-class were next to uninsultable publicly, sneering references to “chavs” and “chav culture” are now commonplace in the mainstream media where they pass with barely a critical public word, while ethnic minorities seemingly have licence to publicly  insult the white working-class with impunity, vide the Coronation Street episode in January 2006 where a male Asian character accused his sister of behaving like “poor white trash”.

What caused this immense change in the status of the white  working-class? There were three direct primary engines of change. The first was the success of Thatcher and her ideology, the second a critical point was reached in post war mass immigration, the third Britain’s membership of the EU and other restrictive treaties which tainted her sovereignty.

2. Globalism and laissez faire economics

When Margaret Thatcher became Tory Leader in 1975 the neo-paternalist stance the party had adopted since the smashing Labour victory of 1945 was changed to one of laissez faire non-interventionism, with its an inherent disdain for public provision and service. Thatcher threw away the protectionism which had sustained the white working-class, allowed much of British industry, especially heavy industry, to go to the wall, and privatised the nationalised industries. Unemployment, already at a post-war high at the end of the Callaghan government, rose dramatically to around 3 million. The unions were then weak enough to successfully attack with severe legal restraints on strikes and a ban on secondary picketing.

Unemployment has remained high since the early 1980s – the current official employment figures are bad enough taken at face value (around 2.7m by the international Labour survey method) – but in reality it is probably considerably higher – there are 2-3 million on long term sick benefit now compared with around 600,000 in the early 1980s  ago. Common-sense says the country cannot in 2012 have four or five times the number of seriously incapacitated people it had 30-odd  years ago. This high unemployment has kept the white  working-class largely quiescent and the unions emasculated.

Thatcher also threw away the post-war consensus that the white working-class was admirable, or at least deserving of special consideration because of their disadvantaged social circumstances. Thatcherite Tories were only interested in the working-class insofar as its members were willing to buy into the narrow aspirational template which Thatcher promoted. If you were working-class and wanted to buy your council flat and were happy to gobble up the shares of privatised national industries, the Tories approved of you; if you wanted to maintain traditional working-class employments and communities, you were a soldier in the ranks of the enemy.

Labour did not immediately cast off the white working-class as clients. That took 18 years of opposition. Through four election defeats Labour gradually jettisoned all that they stood for in their cynical quest for a way back to power. The end result was a supposedly Labour Government headed by Blair which became, quite bizarrely, even more fanatically committed to “free markets” and “free trade” than the Tories.

3. Immigration reaching a critical level

By 1979 immigration had swollen the population of blacks and Asians in Britain to a point where their numbers were significant enough to pose a serious threat to British society if racial conflict got out of hand.

Until the end of the 1970s the official line on immigrants from all the mainstream parties was they must assimilate. Towards the end of the decade it was obvious to even the most fervent advocate of integration that assimilation was not happening. Rather, large populations of various ethnicities were stubbornly continuing to form ghettoes in the major British towns and cities and were attempting to lives which as far as possible replicated those of their ancestral countries.

To avoid having to admit what a disaster immigration had been, the British liberal left adopted an ideology to fit the facts of what was happening. That ideology was multiculturalism, a creed which rested on the fantasy that a coherent society could be produced by allowing every ethnic group in Britain to retain its separate identity. Indeed, the multiculturalists did more than say we should allow such a development, they positively encouraged ethnic minorities to remain separate. The kindest interpretation of their behaviour is that these were people enthusiastically pouring paraffin onto a fire in an attempt to put it out.

But the multiculturalists were faced by a most awkward fact. The white working-class was and always had been resolutely opposed to mass post-war immigration. Not only that but they were willing to say so publicly – the dockers had marched with Enoch Powell. Therefore, the liberal left had to do two things to prevent the white working-class from expressing their discontent both with the immigration which had occurred and with the new policy of multiculturalism , in which the native British culture was to have no privileged place but was to be merely one amongst many competing cultures. Worse, in practice the  native culture (or cultures if you prefer) was not even to be  allowed to compete because to do so would be to give the native population a public voice and a focus for their discontent.

The Labour Party at the parliamentary level was generally willing to espouse the new ideology uncritically because it fitted with their internationalist rhetoric. It also helped that the immigrants overwhelmingly voted Labour and were neatly consolidated in ghettos in the larger towns and cities where their votes were likely to elect Labour candidates more often than not.

Of course there was the seemingly ticklish problem for the multiculturalists of Labour being out of power for 18 years. In practice it did not matter, for it was not only the overt liberal left who embraced multiculturalism. Whatever their rhetoric, in practice,

the Tories climbed on the multiculturalist bandwagon quickly enough. Thatcher had spoken not long before being elected in 1979 of Britain being “swamped” by immigrants. But once in office she did nothing and the position continued to worsen, not least because she signed the Single European Act in 1985 which granted any person legally resident in another EU state the right to work in Britain. And of course throughout the 18 years of Tory office, people with the “right” multiculturalist views controlled the media, academia and increasingly the civil service. They were always on hand, both behind the scenes and publicly, to ensure the Tory Government did not actually do anything to disturb the multiculturalist programme.

Worse was to follow. In opposition the Tories followed the course of the Labour Party. Three election defeats in a row persuaded them elect as leader David Cameron, a man who adopted the same strategy for the Tories as Blair had pursued when he dumped everything Labour stood for. Cameron quickly got rid of everything which was considered “Old Tory” . This included wholeheartedly embracing multiculturalism. The electoral circle on immigration was formally closed. There is no major party to vote for if you do not want further mass immigration.

The silencing of the white working-class voice on immigration was achieved by a number of means over the past quarter century. Most potent was the mixture of legal threats such as the various Race Relations Acts and associated legislation such as the Public Order Act of 1986 and  the religious exclusion of anti-immigration views from the mainstream media. British culture was gradually relegated to a less prominent place in schools. Pupils were taught, if they were taught anything about the past, of white wickedness. The Atlantic slave trade was represented as the greatest crime of history, the British Empire nothing more than a cruel invasion and subjugation of defenceless peoples. Any sign of publicly expressed native English pride was jumped on from everyone from politicians to teachers and denounced as xenophobia at best and racism as worst.

It did not take long for anyone who was not a supporter of multiculturalism to be beyond the liberal elite Pale. By 2006 multiculturalism had been formally embedded into public life through a mixture of ideological sharing amongst the elite and their auxiliaries and the law, most notably in recent years by the Race Relations (Amendment Act) of 2000 which effectively places an obligation on all employers who receive public funding to demonstrate that they are not being discriminatory.

The contemptuous mentality of those who currently permit and advocate mass immigration to Britain is epitomised by a speech in 2006 to business leaders by the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King:

“If the increased demand for labour generates its own supply in the form of migrant labour then the link between demand and prices is broken. Indeed, in an economy that can call on unlimited supplies of migrant labour, the concept of output gap becomes meaningless….The UK is not in that extreme position, but the inflow of migrant labour, especially in the past year or so from Eastern Europe, has probably lead to diminution of inflationary pressure in the labour market,relative to previous experience.

“The Home Office estimates that around 120,000 workers entered the UK from the new member countries of the European Union between March 2004 and March 2005. Without this influx to fill the skills gap in a tight labour market, it is likely earnings would have risen at a faster rate, putting pressure on employers, and, ultimately, inflation”.’ Daily Telegraph 14 6 2006.

There you have the elite view of the day: human beings are to be treated purely as factor of production along with land and capital. No greater contempt for the masses, including the white working-class, can be held.

4. The EU and other treaties

Whatever their public words, both the Tory and Labour parties were generally nationalist in their behaviour until well after the second world war. Traditional Tories were nationalists by conviction, while even the Labour left were in practice protective of the nation state because they strongly opposed the importation of cheap goods and cheap labour. British membership of the EU (then the EEC) from 1973 onwards changed the rules of the game for both parties.

The Treaty of Rome made Britain generally subordinate to a foreign authority. It was not like a normal treaty such as that of NATO which is formed simply for a particular limited purpose and which can be ended or withdrawn from cleanly. The Treaty of Rome was a full blown political project with the specific aim of creating a supranational political entity. Even when Britain joined, the EU’s powers to interfere with British political decisions were substantial, although nothing like as extensive as they are in 2012. It simply was not possible to be a wholehearted nationalist any more. That undermined traditional Toryism and paved the way for Thatcherism, which was predicated on the individual rather than the community.

For the Labour Party learning to love the EU took a long time. Their 1983 manifesto advocated withdrawing because the EU was viewed as a capitalist club. But as the Party painfully lurched towards accepting the globalist market-led creed, there came the realisation on the left that both globalism generally and membership of the EU were wonderful promoters of internationalism. They did not deliver the internationalism which the left had traditionally sought, all brotherly love and material sharing, but they accomplished a central part of the internationalist dream, the destruction of nations. This realisation, together with the fear they would never hold power again drove Labour away from their practical nationalism.

As the years passed the entire political class also discovered general benefits from globalism and EU membership. Being in international clubs such as the EU and the WTO effectively destroyed democratic accountability. Any policy relevant to a treaty could be pushed through with the excuse that Britain was legally bound by treaty to do this. Membership of the EU in particular ensured that the excuse could be used over vast swathes of policy. This loss of democratic accountability removed the last vestiges of white working-class power because there was no mainstream Party with a chance of forming a government to speak or act for them. The white working-class might as well have stopped voting then for all the good it now did them.

5.Devolution and demonising the English

Up to 1997 the white working-class in the UK as a whole suffered much the same decline in prestige and strength. Blair’s victory in that year altered matters fundamentally. Primarily for the self-serving political reason that Labour normally depends heavily on Scots and Welsh MPs to achieve a working majority in the Commons, the Party adopted a policy of devolution for Scotland and Wales. (Northern Ireland was also brought into the devolution mix but for other reasons). It was one of the first major pieces of NuLabour manifesto-promised legislation to be enacted.

Devolution created a ticklish problem. How could it be that England, where more than 80% of the population of the UK resided and where even more than 80% of the UK’s GDP was generated, should have no national representation? Why did England not deserve its own political voice if Wales and Scotland and even tiny Northern Ireland did? Because there was no reasonable answer to that question Labour (and the liberal left generally) invented unreasonable ones: England was too big, there was no such thing as Englishness, the English had no desire for a parliament, such a parliament would only mean more politicians and expense and, most tellingly, the English could not be trusted with nationalism, a claim best translated as “The ruling liberal elite are determined at all costs to prevent the English having a voice because if they do they will look after their own interests which are currently being outrageously neglected”.

When I say ruling liberal elite I am of course including the entire political elite. A prime example of the cross-party agreement on the “dangers” of English nationalism came in a BBC Radio 4 programme Brits which went out on 10 January 2000. The then Home Secretary Jack Straw and the Tory leader of the moment William Hague appeared. This is what they said:

Straw: “[the English] are potentially very aggressive, very violent [and had in the past] used their propensity for violence to subjugate Ireland, Wales and Scotland”.

Hague:” English nationalism is the most dangerous form of nationalism that can arise in the United Kingdom, because England is four-fifths of the population of the UK…Once part of a united country or kingdom that is so predominant in size becomes nationalistic, then really the whole thing is under threat…”

The unresolved question of English devolution within an otherwise devolved UK led to a shift by politicians from the denigration of the white working-class generally to denigration of the English in general and the English white working-class in particular, the latter being commonly portrayed by politicians and the media as brutish people with the unspoken subtext “they cannot be trusted with power”. As most of the British white working-class are English, the white working-class were further marginalised.

Devolution also had a direct material effect on England and in particular the English poor. The amount spent per head on public services has for a long time grossly disadvantaged the English, viz:

According to official figures from the Treasury, 2010/11 projected average UK government spending per person was £10,212 in Scotland, compared to just £8,588 in England. Spending was also higher in Wales (£9,829) and Northern Ireland (£10,706). (http://tinyurl.com/cxmgwly)

The rate of increase of the per capita payments accelerated after devolution and consequently weakened public provision in England compared with the rest of the UK . That diminution of provision has struck most profoundly at the English white working-class.

6.The ethnic minority problem

Where do ethnic minorities stand in a devolved UK? German-born Labour MP Gisela Stuart writing in online magazine openDemocracy.net in December  005 described the problem, whilst also gaily insulting the English: “It  as only been in the last five years or so that I have heard people in my constituency telling me ‘I am not British – I am English’. That worries me.

“British identity is based on and anchored in its political and legal institutions and this enables it to take in new entrants more easily than it would be if being a member of a nation were to be defined by blood.

“But a democratic polity will only work if citizens’ identification is with the community as a whole, or at least with the shared process, which overrides their loyalty to a segment.” (Quoted in Birmingham Mail 18 11 2005)

The problem for people such as Ms Stuart is that Britishness was destroyed by devolution. There is no longer a comfortable overarching label of British under which everyone can be placed. All that is left for the people of Britain to cling to are emotional ethnicities.

The situation is most acute in England because that is where the majority of ethnic minorities in the UK live. There is hard evidence that ethnic minorities in England routinely do not think of themselves as English. In 2005, the CRE commissioned from the research firm Ethnos a poll designed to discover how Britons identify themselves (http://www.cre.gov.uk/downloads/what_is_britishness.pdf). A couple of passages are particularly telling:

“In England, white English participants identified themselves as English first and British second, while ethnic minority participants perceived themselves as British. None identified as English, which they saw as meaning exclusively white people.”

“Britishness was associated with great historical and political achievements, but only amongst white participants (whether from England, Scotland or Wales), not those from ethnic minority backgrounds”.

This tells us two things: ethnic minorities in England routinely reject the idea of Englishness and ethnic minorities everywhere in the UK have no identification with Britain’s past. So much for Britishness.

 7. Balkanising England

Recognising the danger that English nationalism represented to Labour’s domestic political hopes (and quite possibly to the EU’s wish to divide the UK into a series of regions), the Blair government attempted to create a political structure which would make an English Parliament next to impossible. Their method was to Balkanise the country through the creation of regional assemblies (the artificial regions chosen just happened to fit the regions into which the EU bureaucrats have decided England should be divided). But this plan fell over, at least for the foreseeable future, when a referendum to set up an assembly in the least artificial of the regions, the North-East, was humiliating by an overwhelming NO vote.

 8. The gradual demoralisation of the white working class

If laissez faire economics, immigration reaching a critical level and international treaties were the immediate reasons why the white  working-class has fallen so far from favour, the ground for their realisation was prepared during the thirty-five years which followed the Labour victory of 1945.

It is important not to be sentimental about the white working-class before their desertion by the British political class. Britain was far from being a peaceful society. Industrial relations were seriously fraught from the Eighteenth century onwards, long before nationalisation and the modern welfare state. Much crime went unreported because working class communities refused to report it. Vicious fights regularly took place in places such as the docks and the mines. There was considerable football hooliganism. Until the Irish Free State was founded, Irish nationalism was a constant  running sore. Violent criminal gangs controlled places such as the Elephant and Castle and Brighton.

British education until after the second world war (and the Butler Act’s implementation) was seriously flawed, with most children leaving school at 14 having received no more than a primary education – only those who committed themselves to staying until 16 received  secondary education. The general standard of education was not high,  although, unlike now, the members of the political elite were frequently well educated.

There was also a great deal of abject poverty right up to 1939 with many working people living from wage packet to wage packet, often  with the aid of a weekly trip to the local pawnbroker. There was only a rudimentary welfare state and to fall ill if you were poor was to place yourself at the mercy of the charity of others.

Despite these shortcomings, at the outbreak of the second world war working class society was much more coherent and secure than it is today. Most important was the fact that mainland Britain was racially and ethnically a very homogeneous society, even the ancestral  cultural divisions between the English, Scots and Welsh were largely shadings within a single cultural spectrum rather than violently competing ethnicities. Across the water Ireland was a problem, but even there the divisions were political and religious rather than matters of  profound ethnic difference. Such serious ethnic tension as there was resulted from the influx of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, but even there the persistent failure of Mosley’s Blackshirts to gain electoral support in the midst of the Depression tells its own story: vehement anti-semitism was not a widespread problem.

The homogeneity of Britain generated a sense of security because the mainland British at least did not have the distraction of chronic and serious ethnic strife. That sense of security was bolstered by the fact that each of the four home nations had their own territory which they dominated in terms of occupation of the land even if they did not formally control their territory. The white working-class generally did not feel threatened by people whom they felt had no place in Britain. Most felt, whatever their personal troubles, that at least they were secure in their own land.

Added to, and arguably arising from, this marvellous ethnic and territorial security were potent and well established social support mechanisms of the working class, viz:

1. Unions, including their large welfare role.

2. Co-Operative Societies – Harrods for the working class.

3. Friendly societies.

4. Homogeneous working-class communities which mutually  supported their members.

5. Large scale manual employment for the working class.

That was the position at the end of WW2, and for a considerable time after 1945 the condition of the white working-class actually improved as a full blown welfare state, rising wages and very low employment significantly increased their security and advantage.

The 1944 Butler Education Act gave all British children the chance to go to a grammar school and even those who did not gain a grammar school place got an extra year of schooling, schooling which went beyond the primary level. It was a far from perfect educational system but it was a considerable improvement on what had gone before. Most importantly, for the first time it gave large numbers of white  working-class children the chance of a first rate education and, for a significant minority, the chance to go to university.

Unions remained strong and both major political parties were committed to maintaining by protectionist measures the British economy, a fair slice of which was in any case nationalised. The white working-class were both the electoral bedrock of the Labour Party and courted by a Tory Party which realised it had to abide by the Attlee Government’s social reforms if it was to be elected (in the mid-fifties one of the proudest boasts of the Tory Government was that they had built 300,000 council houses in a year).

To this growing advantage was gradually added a de facto censorship of criticism of the white working-class. Throughout the period 1945 to 1975 there developed a pernicious habit amongst the British elite whereby public criticism of the white working-class became unacceptable in much the same way that over the past thirty years ethnic minorities have ceased to be publicly criticised.

Like any powerful class which is exempted from criticism the white  working-class abused their position, or perhaps more correctly, allowed their elected representatives whether in politics or unions, to lead them into abusive ways. The unions were all too ready to call strikes, strikes which when they affected the nationalised industries had the power to cripple British life.

The unions had become too powerful and it was their extreme propensity for “industrial action” – strikes, working-to-rule, demarcation disputes and violent picketing – which began to break down the public silence over white working-class abuses. Gradually it became acceptable for politicians and the media to criticise the white  working-class. They needed little prompting because politicians of all colours and mediafolk were more often than not were middleclass, and the middleclass had very little natural empathy with the white  working-class, just as today politicians and the media have no natural empathy with the ethnic minorities who are their current client class.

By 1970 the white working-class was outwardly as secure as a class as they had ever been and would be again. But even at the seeming height of their class advantage they were weaker than they once had been, naturally weaker than ever before in fact because sociological rats  had been gnawing away at their natural cohesion since 1945.

The mass post-war immigration began in the late 40s but it was not a major problem for the white working-class until the 1960s. More immediately damaging were the slum clearances which dominated the twenty five years after the War. These destroyed many working class communities by the simple expedient of dividing them up  between different housing estates. The working class were still living together but they were no longer the tightly knit coherent communities which had existed for generations. Instead it was strangers living together and living together not in housing which allowed an easy social life to develop, but more often than not in high rise buildings which destroyed social intimacy.

Ironically the new welfare state damaged the white working-class because it weakened the informal traditional social supports deriving from a well established community (help from friends and extended family) and led to the decline of formal supports such as friendly societies and the co-operative movement.

9. Education subverted

In the 1960s came the disaster of comprehensive schools and progressive educational theory. Comprehensivisation took away the ladder by which the bright white working-class child progressed, the grammar schools. The secondary modern -technical school- grammar school established by the Butler Act was far from perfect because it left large numbers of children labelled as educational failures, but that which replaced it was far worse a system. Most comprehensives simply did not have the resources or the will to provide a grammar school level education for their brightest pupils.

Progressive educational theory caused a general diminution in educational standards through a combination of its “discovery” method of learning, ie, do not actually teach them anything, and a self-denying ordinance which forbade any criticism of a child’s work. Stir in the lunacy of producing school exams to be taken by children of all ability (GCSE) and the incontinent expansion of higher education from the late 1980s onwards, season with the quasi-commercialisation  of schools and universities through money following the pupil or student, top with school examination boards becoming overtly commercial, and you have the recipe for the mess which is modern British education, where exam grades rise inexorably while performance moves just as remorselessly in the opposite direction.

The percentage of working-class children at university is actually lower in 2012 than it was forty years ago. Of course the numbers of children in higher education has expanded massively since the mid-sixties and in absolute numbers far more white working-class pupils go on to university in 2006 than 1966. But it counts for nothing. If more white working-class pupils may have GCSEs, A Levels and degrees now, the standard of the education they receive to gain such qualifications is so degraded from what it was forty years ago that the qualifications are next to worthless as guides to employers of a person’s ability and the education received while taking them fails to equip students for the world of work even at the basic level of literacy and numeracy.

Had the major sources of traditional white working-class employment not been largely destroyed in the 1980s and 1990s, comprehensive education would not be so dire in its consequences for the white working class, because they would still have been employed in secure jobs which do not require much education. Instead, millions  are trapped in unemployment (admitted unemployment or disguised as ill, retired early or attending worthless courses in higher education) or in insecure and ill-paid jobs, stranded without the education to find decent, well-paid work.

Any society also has to take into account the fact that any population contains many people who are naturally poorly equipped to do anything other than unskilled jobs. Ten per cent of the British population has an IQ of 80 or less. An IQ of 80 is the level at which psychologists generally agree someone begins to struggle to cope with the demands of an advanced society such as Britain. Such people require jobs they can do. Immigrants take those jobs and depress wages. The white working-class are being left with less and less.

With their traditional employments largely destroyed, subject to a state educational system which leaves them ill-equipped for any job other than the unskilled, beset by cheap immigrant labour competing  for unskilled jobs and crippled by the cost of housing, the white  working-class are ever more dependent on public provision. That provision is becoming increasingly uncertain as immigrant demand for social provision multiplies, public spending soars to dangerous heights and Blair’s mania for introducing private money and companies into public provision runs riot.

What were once the public utilities – gas, electricity, water, the railways – are becoming dearer and dearer despite providing an increasingly poor service through a lack of investment in maintenance and the shedding of jobs (the government cannot do anything to subsidise utility prices because of our membership of the EU). The poorer you are the larger part of your income is taken by these vital products and services.

Benefits and the state pension are linked to the Retail Price Index (RPI) but this understates inflation substantially, primarily because the cost of housing, i.e. what it costs to buy a property, is not included (only average mortgage repayment costs and rents are). This understatement of inflation means that benefits and the state pension are gradually losing their value in real terms.

There are also many people for whom the basket of goods and services is unrepresentative. For example, 14% of the index is devoted to motoring expenses which means that the RPI figure is barely relevant to non-car owners. RPI also excludes from its spending pattern such inconvenient people as OAPs surviving on the state pension because they are not “typical”. Generally, the poorer you are, the less representative of your spending RPI will be.

Wages are also affected by official inflation figures because they are used as a benchmark for both public service and private industry wage increases. I say inflation figures because more than one index is used. The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) is the index used these days to give the headline rate of inflation. This is even less accurate a guide to the true rate of inflation than RPI because it excludes housing costs altogether. Where this figure is used to guide wage increases the real value of the wage decreases even more rapidly in real terms than benefits and the state pension.

Then there is taxation. The poorest people in work in the population pay by far – in direct and indirect taxes combined – the highest proportion of their income in tax of any part of the population.

10. How could the present position be remedied?

Britain needs to do four things. (1) withdraw from the EU and  repudiate any other Treaty which prevents the country exercising her sovereignty over immigration and her economy. (2) Recognise that public provision is generally best supplied by the state directly providing it. (3) Substitute for the globalist ideology an unaggressive nationalist one which steers a middle course between protectionism and manic free trade and which clearly distinguishes between the status of  citizens and foreigners. (4) End mass immigration.

The first two are essentially acts of domestic political will. Withdrawing from the EU and treaties such as the UN Convention on Refugees would doubtless cause a great deal of political huffing and puffing but would be unlikely to produce any profound ill-effects because the EU would still wish to trade with Britain and the UN is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Public services – by which I mean genuine public services such as the NHS and prisons – are essentially a domestic matter and should concern no one outside this country.

The last two are more problematic. Adopting an unaggressive nationalism and clearly distinguishing between the status of citizens and foreigners would be no difficulty in practice because those are decisions which have little practical effect on other nations, but what of our trading treaty relationships, especially our membership of  the World Trade Organisation? If we remained within the WTO would that make a middle course between protectionism and free trade impossible?

The WTO in practice permits many protectionist measures – readers will recollect how the USA suddenly slapped tariffs on foreign steel a year or so back. There is a good deal of wriggle room which Britain could use to protect her domestic economy. For example, if another WTO member is doing something protectionist and getting away with it, and many are, then the WTO will scarcely be able to penalise Britain. If the worst comes to the worst and we had to leave the WTO, bilateral agreements with other countries could be made – Britain has too large an economy for other states en bloc to forgo the opportunity for trade.

11. The end of mass immigration

That leaves mass immigration which I shall deal with in some detail because it is the most dangerous threat to the welfare of both the white working-class and the native British population as a whole. The stopping of further mass immigration alone would do more for the white working-class than any other single action by government. It would tighten the labour market and improve their employment opportunities. That in turn would improve their status. The pressure on public services, transport and housing would be lessened making access to them cheaper and easier for the white working-class. More generally, the moral climate would change because the ending of mass immigration would signal that there is a clear distinction between the rights of British citizens and the rights of foreigners.

With control resumed over our borders through withdrawal from the EU and the repudiation of other treaties, there would be in principle no problem with stopping further mass immigration. But what about the economic effects? The liberal internationalists tell us that the woes of the world would come upon us should we do such a thing,  although, like Lear threatening retribution, (“I shall do such things ….I know not what they are”) they are strangely unable to quite  say what the woes will be.  If reality, there would simply be a manageable period of economic and social reconstruction.

The immediate economic effect would be  a redistribution of labour. Labour would move into those occupations which are essential and which cannot be provided at a distance, for  example  healthcare  and education. We would discover how  occupations rank in terms of utility. Wages would rise in those occupations which had most utility to attract staff from elsewhere.

Employers would respond to labour tightening by using labour more efficiently. Automation would increase and employers would  change their attitude to the older person and the disabled.

Both employers and government would take vocational training more seriously. Government would provide incentives to employers to train their staff and increase the training of public service  professionals such as doctors and dentists. Government would also be forced to tackle the mess which is our public education to ensure an adequately educated workforce.

Employers who could not find the labour to run their business in this country would have to accept they could not do so. No one has a right to engage in an enterprise regardless of the effects on the welfare of the community as a whole. Capital which cannot be used in this country can be invested abroad.

12. Would there be an unmanageable labour shortage?

The idea that Britain is short of labour for most purposes is demonstrably absurd. The official figure for those under the state retirement age who are economically inactive in the UK is 7 million. Clearly not all of those would be able or willing to work, but equally clearly a large proportion would be able and willing to work if the conditions were right, i.e., wages rose, employers became more accommodating and the benefits system was tightened as the number of opportunities for work rose.

The claim that the indigenous population will not do the jobs immigrants take is demonstrably false. In areas of the country with few immigrants native Britons do them willingly. In many instances where foreign workers are employed it is not because native Britons will not work. Take the case of the cockle-pickers who died in Morecombe Bay several years ago it was widely reported in the media that the Chinese cockle pickers clashed with British cockle pickers who resented them invading their territory. These Chinese were not filling jobs which were unfilled by the British but competing with the British for the work.

The experience of the cockle-pickers is found elsewhere, not least because employers, particularly  gangmasters,  are frequently immigrants. They generally prefer to employ people of their own ethnicity.  The consequence is that the British are not found in some occupations in some places because the  immigrant employers deliberately avoid recruiting them.

The other thing which prevents native Britons taking jobs in some parts of the country is the fact that the native Briton does not want to work for employers whose workforce is predominantly formed of immigrants or native-born ethnic minorities. Like every other people, native Britons do not wish to be forced to work in their own land in a employment where they are in the minority.

It is also important to remember that the menial jobs immigrants take are worth far more to them than a native Briton. If you earn as little as £250 a week net – many immigrants work cash in hand – and live in accommodation either supplied by an employer or in crowded accommodation for very little rent, you will probably still be able to save a a substantial amount, say, £2,000 pa.

If you come from China where wages even in the big cities are 50 pence an hour, you would earn œ1,000 pa for a 40 hour week. Working at a menial job in Britain allows you to save double the average Chinese big city annual wage in a year. That money remitted to China takes on the local purchasing power. The multiplier for Eastern Europeans is less but even there œ2,000 saved in a year would be a good professional salary in places such as Poland. Give native Britons the chance to save the equivalent of a British professional’s salary in a year doing a menial job and they will flock to the work and put up with basic living conditions. Of course, no such employments are on offer to Britons.

13. Conclusion

The crime of the post-war British elite of all political colours has been to destroy the social and economic structures which gave  security and viability to white working-class society without replacing them with something else. The elite mashed their communities through slum clearance, thrust mass immigration into the areas in which the white working-class lived, destroyed through “free trade” the great industries which traditionally employed them and hamstrung the unions by a mixture of legislation, cheap foreign labour both at home and abroad and the creation of a perpetual “reserve army of labour” from the native population. At the same time the white working-class were deprived of the means to create new lives and social structures through a decent education. Whatever the white working-class are now, they are the product of decisions made by the British political elite since 1945.

I am not a sentimentalist who imagines that the ideal world would be one in which the white working class continued unchanged as noble “sons of toil” or that ” working-class culture” should be preserved in aspic. Had every white working-class person in the country been converted into part of the middleclass by an unforced process of improved education and rising wages I would have seen that as part of a natural sociological change. But that of course did not happen, probably in principle could never have happened in a country the size of Britain. The white working-class have been disenfranchised. The British middle class have been at best complicit in the attack on the white working-class and at worst have taken an eager and active part in it. For decades they thought themselves personally safe from the consequences of immigration and, later, imagined that they were immune from the effects of globalisation. They find themselves unable to buy houses because of the absurd prices They are beginning to learn the hard facts of sociological life: mass immigration and globalisation eventually affects all but the truly rich, a poetic justice but one which harms the country.

Can things change? For the first time in half a century British politicians (and the liberal elite generally) are beginning to display realism over the effects of immigration. This realism is coming from both the major Parties. Here is the Tory MP Julian Brazier writing in a pamphlet for the Cornerstone group:

“Overcrowding is a key cause of many of the factors which are destroying quality of life: mortgage slavery, over-development, congested roads, water shortages, flooding and overstretched public services. We should do everything we can sensibly – and fairly – to reduce the level of immigration to well below the level of emigration.” (The Times August 01, 2006)

On the other side of the political fence is Labour MP Jon Cruddas, MP for the Essex seat of Dagenham. Writing a commentary on a Rowntree Trust study THE FAR RIGHT IN LONDON which deals with the recent success of the BNP in his constituency he comments:

“…it [the Blair Government] has tacitly used immigration to help forge the preferred flexible North American labour market. Especially in London, legal and illegal immigration has been central in replenishing the stock of cheap labour across the public and private services, construction and civil engineering…

“For many of my constituents the value of their social wage is in decline. House prices appear to rise inexorably upwards whilst thousands and thousands seek nonexistent, new social housing. Public service improvements fail to match localised population expansion let alone the long term legacy of underinvestment…

“At work their terms and conditions are under threat as they compete for work with cheap immigrant labour. In terms of access to housing  and public services and their position in the workplace many see immigration as a central determinant in their own relative impoverishment….

“Those communities that must accommodate the new immigrant communities are the ones least equipped to do so they themselves have the most limited opportunities for economic and social mobility…”

But realism from a few politicians acting as individuals is worthless if the major political parties do nothing or indeed, with our various treaty obligations, can do nothing legally while we are bound by them. The only way Britain could meaningfully regain control of immigration is to leave the EU and renounce all other treaties, such  as the UN Convention of Refugees, which prevents Britain from controlling her borders. There is absolutely no sign that any major party or even individual politician is willing to contemplate such a policy.

Immigration is only one part of the problem. There is still very little realism from even by individual MPs over the effects of laissez faire economics and freer trade, both of which severely undermine the condition of the white working-class (and increasingly, much of the middleclass).

The manic drive to privatise everything in sight, whether by outright privatisation or the introduction of private money into public services, shows no sign of abating. The immediate consequence of this is all too often reduced services at greater cost, while the long –term effect may be to reduced public provision generally, either because the costs simply go out of control or because the fact that a service is provided by a private contractor rather than by direct labour public provision makes it easier to reduce the service or stop providing it altogether..

On the education side so much damage has been done to our education system, from primary schools to universities, that it is difficult to see how things could be changed in less than a generation.

Perhaps the greatest problem is the current state of our political system which has become utterly unresponsive to the needs of the British people in general and the white working-class in particular.

The Labour MP John Cruddas wrote this recently in his commentary on a Joseph Rowntree Trust report “The rise of the Far right”. “The [Blair] government is not a coalition of traditions and interests who  initiate policy and debate; rather it is a power elite whose modus operandi is the retention of power.” The words could be as readily applied to the modern Tory Party.

Compare this with George Orwell’s words in 1984:” “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. …We are different from the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and Russian Communists came very close to us in our methods, but they never had the courage to recognise their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power  with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard arevolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” (O’Brien speaking to Winston Smith during his interrogation).

That is the political system we have now: a simple desire for power. The only thing which will change it is fear, fear in the political elite that things are running out of control, that they may be brought to account. Then they will shamelessly amend their ideology, what they said was black yesterday will become white tomorrow. Elites only have one settled principle – to do whatever is necessary to preserve their power and privilege.

“British identity is based on and anchored in its political and legal institutions and this enables it to take in new entrants more easily than it would be if being a member of a nation were to be defined by blood.

“But a democratic polity will only work if citizens’ identification is with the community as a whole, or at least with the shared process, which overrides their loyalty to a segment.” (Quoted in Birmingham Mail 18 11 2005)

The problem for people such as Ms Stuart is that Britishness was destroyed by devolution. There is no longer a comfortable overarching label of British under which everyone can be placed. All that is left for the people of Britain to cling to are emotional ethnicities.

The situation is most acute in England because that is where the majority of ethnic minorities in the UK live. There is hard evidence that ethnic minorities in England routinely do not think of themselves as English. In 2005, the CRE commissioned from the research firm Ethnos a poll designed to discover how Britons identify themselves (http://www.cre.gov.uk/downloads/what_is_britishness.pdf). A couple of passages are particularly telling:

“In England, white English participants identified themselves as English first and British second, while ethnic minority participants perceived themselves as British. None identified as English, which they saw as meaning exclusively white people.”

“Britishness was associated with great historical and political achievements, but only amongst white participants (whether from England, Scotland or Wales), not those from ethnic minority backgrounds”.

This tells us two things: ethnic minorities in England routinely reject the idea of Englishness and ethnic minorities everywhere in the UK have no identification with Britain’s past. So much for Britishness.

“Free markets and “free trade” = elite propaganda”

Note: I wrote this long eassay  in 2005. The financial crash and recession since provide added grist to my arguments as the rich get richer, most people get steadily poorer, public provision shrinks and the inequality between people swells.

The lessons of economic history tell this story: a strong domestic economy is necessary for sustained economic growth and stability. The freer the trade with foreign states, the less stable and secure the domestic economy.

Post-war economic experience illustrates this nicely. Britain experienced her strongest sustained growth in the period  1945-1972. This was a period of protectionism and much state intervention in the economy.  Problems arose in the 1970s, but these were largely due to the oil price spike  after 1973, a consequence of globalism.  However, even with the oil price spike, unemployment in Britain never went much above 1 million until Thatcher arrived and wilfully destroyed our heavy and extractive industries.

During the period 1945-1979, Britain did not suffer a serious sustained recession. From 1979 onwards, under the Thatcherite ideology we have had three serious recessions: in the early 1980s, the early 1990s and the present recession.

To our post-war experience I would add the fact that England  built her commerce then the first Industrial Revolution behind very restrictive protectionist measures such as the Navigation Acts.  RH

 

Robert Henderson 20 4 2012

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“Free markets and “free trade” =  elite propaganda”

Robert Henderson

1. Unquestioned ideas

2. The “Free Market” is a state regulated market

3. The “free market” as its proponents conceive it

4. How effective is anti-monopoly legislation?

5. Microsoft and Windows – a natural monopoly

6. The historical trend towards contraction of competition

7. “Free trade”

8. Has “free trade” ever been practised?

9. “Free trade” today

10. Does “free trade” deliver? The lessons of economic history

11. Is society materially enriched by “free markets” and “free trade?

12. What is meant by material enrichment?

13. How the market fails to provide what the customer wants

14. Relative poverty and wealth and happiness

15. Man does not live by bread alone

16. Geopolitics

17. The democratic deficit

18. Does “free trade” increase competition and choice in the long run?

19. The reality of our economic circumstances

20. Why elites are so keen on “free markets” and “free trade”

21. A sane alternative to globalism

22. Free trade as a religion

23. An elite ideology

 

1. Unquestioned ideas

Because they have the word free in them, the terms “Free markets” and “free trade” have seduced those of all political colours to treat them uncritically as ideas. They are considered good or bad but their intellectual coherence is rarely questioned.

Neo-liberals believe in a childlike quasi-religious fashion in the workings of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, which, moved by enlightened self-interest, supposedly creates the best of all possible material worlds through the operation of the market. Socialists see “free markets” and “free trade” as economic “state of natures” which must be ameliorated by the state before a civilised society can be realised. Conservatives in the traditional sense no longer exist as a recognisable political force in the West, but when they did exist they opposed “free markets” and “free trade” primarily on the grounds of national security and the general disruption to society that they caused. Nationalists of the fascistic kind have traditionally opposed the ideas because they see the nation as a single organism which can only be strong if it is master of its own destiny, something which can only be achieved (they believe) through state direction of both the internal  market and of external trade.

There are varying quantities of truth in all these ideological responses, but their utility is seriously tainted by the lack of any  objective or even properly defined and permanent prescriptive truth in the concepts of “free markets” or “free trade”. The reality of these ideas is that they are arbitrary chosen bundles of behaviours which  are excluded or included at the will of their proponents. Moreover, the bundles of behaviours are not static.

The widespread negligence in examining the coherence of these ideas is all the more remarkable because their incoherence as theories and the arbitrary and dishonest nature of their practical realisation is not only readily apparent but fundamentally undermining of the claims made for them by their champions.

2. The “Free Market” is a state regulated market

There is a splendid irony in the objection of the self-defined “free marketeers’” and “free traders” to state intervention for the natural end of a truly free market is monopoly – or at least greatly reduced competition resulting in oligopoly and the rule of cartels. All so-called “free market” societies recognise this by passing anti-monopoly laws. The “free market” is in fact a market controlled by the state in the most fundamental way, that is, to prevent its natural workings. It is one of the great propaganda triumphs of history that “free markets” have been successfully sold as being what happens naturally without state intervention. Call a spade a spade and substitute the truthful “state regulated non-monopolistic market” for “free market” and the psychological shape of the idea changes dramatically.  (Some casuistical “free marketeers”might argue that the “free” in free market applies to the workings of the market rather than the market as a natural phenomenon. That explanation falls because “free marketeers” invariably make the blanket claim that markets only work efficiently without government interference. Their honest position would be to state that they want state regulated markets to prevent monopoly. They will not do that because it would be an acknowledgement that state regulation of the market is legitimate and hence remove any general argument against regulation. That in turn would mean any form of state regulation would be potentially reasonable and consequently each form of regulation would have to be argued down individually on the merits of the case, rather than simply empty-headedly dismissed on the grounds of no regulation = good; regulation = bad.

The state regulated “Free Market” is not even a natural phenomenon made somewhat artificial by rules to exaggerate the natural phenomenon in the same way that we breed animals to exaggerate nature. Rather it is just about as far from being a natural phenomenon as anything can be for it goes against all Man’s inclinations, both individual and social.

Economic history is overwhelmingly a catalogue of market regulation, local and national, from guilds to governments. It would be surprising if it were not because human beings, like all other organisms, naturally behave to secure their own advantage or that of their group. Extended to the nation state, this natural behaviour has commonly resulted in domestic markets being protected against foreign competition. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is another matter – a question I shall deal with later – all I am concerned to do at this point is to nail down that the fact that protectionist behaviour is what is natural.

Historically, whether you were anything from a rich merchant to a poor day labourer  it was obviously not in your personal interest to allow others free access to your markets to offer the goods or services at a lower price or to work for lower wages. The merchant might be driven to bankruptcy by competition, the labourer from his job.  History also tells us that whatever their previous economic station, such people will probably not be able to find equivalent or better paid employment and often may not be able to find any employment at all where structural unemployment arises. What was historically true not only remains true today, but its effect is much magnified because the opportunities for competition are greatly increased by modern communications and the ease of travel and cargo transportation.

Of course, any individual or sectional advantage causes strains in a society and if the material privilege of any person or group becomes excessive, sooner or later there will be a successful revolt and the wealth in a society will either be shared more fairly through a change in the way the society is structured, for example, through the abolition of tolls, the ending of state monopolies or even through a removal of the rich as a class without any increase in the wealth of the majority.

But wherever wealth distribution through social change has occurred it has normally been done with the express intention of benefiting a particular group or even an individual in the case of monarchs. The odd thing about “free marketeers” is that what they ostensibly advocate is not to privilege any particular individual or group but to benefit society as a whole. Whether free markets do so is another matter, but that is their claim.

The “free marketeer” says to a population, do what I say and in time society will become richer. He does not say this person or that group will become richer or even all will become richer, but merely that the society as a whole will become richer. This is an extraordinary thing to ask people to trust in. It is also the most wonderful blank cheque ever written to a politician because not only does it absolve him or her of any need to take the responsibility for regulating the economy, it also means that he or she can never be held to account for dishonesty by any individual if that individual is personally worse off. All a “free marketeer” politician has ever claimed is that his economic way will make society richer. Provided society overall is richer, he has met his met his promise.

It is also telling for their intellectual credibility and honesty that “free marketeers” will oppose government interference in such matters as subsidies, quotas, embargoes, wage rates and working hours and grumble about tax rates and public expenditure, but are generally quite happy to see other gross distortions of the market deriving from government action. They not only tolerate patents, copyright and trademarks, but often defend them as property in themselves and as devices which actually improve economic performance because they encourage invention, investment and expansion. In addition, those who constantly bleat about Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” sorting out the business wheat from the chaff insist that limited liability is necessary. This of course is also a violent interference with the market because it means that the individual shareholder never takes full responsibility for their investment. (It is worth noting that the British industrial revolution – the one and only bootstrapped industrial revolution – took place before limited liability became legally possible (Limited Companies Act 1862) and at a time when patent rights were insecure and in practice limited to the domestic British market.)

It is true that none of these things are actually part of what the concept of a “free market” is and that they are inimical to such a market, but the fact that almost all modern “free marketeers” have tacitly incorporated them into their vision of what a “free market” is demonstrates their intellectual confusion (or dishonesty if you prefer).

3. The “free market” as its proponents conceive it

Let us put aside for the moment the fact that “free markets” are state regulated markets and ask the question what is a “free market” as it is conceived by “free marketeers”? A jolly good question. Even if market distortions which appear acceptable to “free marketeers” such as patents and limited liability did not exist, that would leave many other things which prevent unfettered domestic competition. In an advanced modern economy these include:

Taxes

Non tax fiscal measures, for example, control of interest rates

The state of the currency

Exchange controls

Overall Government expenditure

State Subsidies

Industry and trading standards, official and otherwise

Public sector employment

Transport costs

Public ownership

Defence

Direct and indirect Government intervention

Copyright, trademarks and patents

The moral and social climate, for example, a tradition of wWelfare or the feeling of the

people, for example, the national feeling of Japanese Practical cultural barriers

such as the difficulty of a language

Dumping

Transport costs

Working hours

Trading laws

Labour laws

Wage rates

Bureaucratic differences

Company laws – particularly the attitude towards foreign ownership

Banking laws

Banking system

Social policy – welfare, health and so on

Physical infrastructure

Honesty of public servants

Foreign policy

National strategic considerations

Education – The amount spent, school leaving age, curriculum,

Limited Liability

Environmental laws

Some of these things such as subsidies, patents, quotas and limited liability could be obviously and legitimately ruled out of order by a “free marketeer” because they are deliberate state interferences with competition, but what of items such as the provision by the state of education or the physical infrastructure of a country? They are undeniably distortions of competition at some level, but they are not deliberate attempts by the state to distort competition. A purist “free marketeer” could just about say such things were no business of the state and still be intellectually coherent because it is possible to conceive of a society without such state provision. But however purist they might be, sooner or later the “free marketeer” will run into features which undeniably restrict competition but which must exist simply because they are an inescapable part of society. The most obvious is tax.

Any modern state needs a large tax revenue to sustain itself, the only questions to determine being how large should be the revenue and what  it should be spent on? Some things such as defence and policing are inescapable expenditures for any state, although even there the amounts to be spent are debatable and elastic. Items such as education and welfare are more subject to variable expenditure. Nonetheless, substantial amounts are as a matter of contingent fact invariably spent on such items by all advanced states. Such countries also engage to a lesser or greater degree in all the forms of regulation listed above.

In theory, and even more in practice, the notion of a “free market” seems to rest on little more than anti-monopoly laws, wages and prices set by the market (although in practice this does not happen purely through the market because of welfare provision, tax regimes etc) and a lack (or at least a minimum) of state interference in such areas as health and safety, employment law and company law.

The inclusion of these narrow criteria are merely a subjective choice made from a much larger menu of man-made distortions of the market. Consequently, there is no objective coherence to the concept of the “free market” as it is conceived by the “free marketeers”. It is an arbitrary ideology based on subjective choice.

4. How effective is anti-monopoly legislation?

Anti-monopoly laws operate within the constraints of the type of social and economic circumstances described above. That alone means they are severely limited in what they can do. They must, for example, tolerate state granted monopolies in the form of patents and copyright.

Anti-monopoly legislation generally only effectively attacks the problem from one end. A company can be prevented from growing its market share by taking over other companies but there is normally no meaningful restriction on a company growing its market share simply by expanding the existing company. Microsoft and the domination of Windows is a classic example.

Where companies try to expand by takeover, experience shows that those charged with applying the legislation allow very large parts of a market – 25% or more – to be held by a single company. The consequence is that a market which would seem to be an obvious candidate for competition, for example, food and domestic supplies retailing, can easily come to be dominated by three or four major players (as is the case in Britain).

There are also those products which are either natural monopolies because of the physical location of their infrastructure – railways, roads, the utilities such as gas – or which are inevitably going to have few entrants in the field because of reasons of cost, for example, aerospace, motor cars, ship building.

Finally, there are those rare markets which are dominated by one company simply because of the nature of their business. The classic example of this is Microsoft and their Windows operating system.

5. Microsoft and Windows – a natural monopoly

In South Park: The Movie, there is a glorious scene where, under martial law, Bill Gates is executed for falsely promising that Windows 98 would be “faster, easier to use and more reliable”. Many long-suffering Windows users doubtless wish that life had imitated art in that instance. Yet despite widespread dissatisfaction Windows remains the overwhelming dominant operating system.

At first glance it might seem that operating systems should be just the type of product which is open to fierce competition because software is a market which potentially has low entry costs. It is true that most areas of programming are competitive – within the constraint of the dominant operating system (OS) – but operating systems are the odd man out. The reason is simple. Once a single OS gained dominance, the chances of any other system effectively competing were very small. This is because the weight of programs available to run under the dominant OS soon became much greater than those which could be run under any other OS. Thus, it becomes inefficient to choose any other OS. That in turn means most of the software is written in a way to make in “friendly” to the dominant OS systems’ users. This further excludes OS competitors and the software to run under them because users, especially employers, do not want to spend the time training their employees on completely new systems, converting data  and so on.

The consequence is that Microsoft still has a stranglehold on the pc market. Moreover, if anyone wants to write any other software, they are constrained by the practical need for it to run under the Microsoft OS if they wish to reach the mass computer user market.

The near monopoly has lasted a long time. It has done this despite considerable attempts by both rivals and the US government to diminish their market position. Windows’ dominance looks secure for the foreseeable future.

 6. The historical trend towards contraction of competition

As remarked previously, the logical end of a free market is monopoly. The reason is obvious: competition tends to reduce the number of competitors through the natural process of success and failure and the takeover of one firm by another. In some trades this does not create an obvious serious anti-competitive difficulty because the initial capital investment is small and entry to the trade within the reach of many. But entry to a considerable and growing number of areas of manufacturing and service provision is too expensive for all but a few.

In a significant minority of trades starting a business from scratch is practically impossible for any one individual or even a group of private investors. The car industry is a first rate example, the number of companies now being small (and becoming smaller) compared with the number of even 40 years ago. Moreover, many of the car companies which do still exist do so only because of state subsidy and protection.

7. “Free trade”

“Free trade” is frequently treated as synonymous with international trade. In principle it does not have to be restricted to international dealings because the concept may be applied to any market, whether that be within a global, regional, national or even a local context. The United States for example displays considerable differences in local tax rates between not only states but within localities within a state, and, indeed, the ultimate aim of the “free trader” is to create a single world market. However, there are considerable differences in practice between domestic markets and international markets, not least because the criteria which are deemed to fall within the concept of “free trade” are not identical with those which are said to be a necessary part of the concept of a “free market”, for example, laws to prevent monopoly are redundant when it comes to international trade because one country will either supply or not supply goods and services to other countries and a country with a monopoly of an important good or service can as a matter of fact only be persuaded to supply the good or service against its will by extra-legal action, ultimately force or the threat of force. Consequently, it is convenient to treat “free trade” as being economic intercourse between nation states and that is what I shall do.

What does and does not constitute “free” international trading? In times gone by, people would have pointed to those honest workhorses of restriction: embargoes, quotas and tariffs and navigation laws and not much else. But in the modern world things are much more complicated as we discover almost daily during the seemingly interminable EU squabbling and the GATT rounds.

Some things are obviously incompatible with “free trade” such as embargoes or state subsidies, but what of different tax regimes, welfare provision or labour regulations? Why should they be excluded from the things which should not be tolerated in a “free trade” regime? After all, a low company tax regime could be regarded as a form of state subsidy to business and all welfare provision could be regarded as a subsidy to wages.

But even such items are straightforward compared to others. What of national sentiment which gives a preference to home produced goods regardless of whether they represent the best value when judged purely by price and quality? Should a country be forced to take the cheapest of  any particular equivalent good or service, regardless of the wishes of the  people of that country, on the grounds that not to purchase that which  gave “best value” constituted “unfair competition”? A reductio ad absurdum? Well, consider the fact that public bodies within the EU (which for these purposes includes any organisation drawing part of their income from public funds) must allow any company within the EU to bid for any work put out to contract, and if the lowest bid is not accepted, the public body risks being fined for a breach of the Single Market rules.

Even more problematic are things which are simply effects of economic activity. Take true dumping, not the state subsidized export regimes which often pass for such, but a simple economic practice to maximise profit.

True dumping works like this. Imagine that a company can make 2,000 units a week. It covers its costs for all 2,000 units if each week it produces and sells 1,000 units at œ1 each. The company finds it can sell a maximum of 1,500 units in the home market at œ1. If it reduces the unit price to 75 pence it could sell all 2,000 but that would only produce the same amount of revenue as selling 1,500 at £1 each.

Consequently, it sells 1,500 in the domestic market at £1 each and the other 500 at 50 pence each (carriage paid by buyer) in foreign markets. Total sales are £1,750 instead of  £1,500.

That is a very simple model of dumping but something akin to it happens regularly with differential pricing from country to country (the European car market is a prime example of this). No state subsidy has been given, no state intervention of any sort has occurred. Why should it not be considered as reasonable a practice as the toleration of different national wage rates? In fact, why should it not be considered more reasonable because wage rates are directly linked to such hidden subsidies as those of welfare and low company taxation? (in fairness, the economic activity of the dumper would also be linked to wage and tax subsidies, but the connection would be more remote.)

Most contentious perhaps is the question of immigration. Does “free trade” require the movement of people as freely as goods and services? This is generally accepted as self-evident by purist “free traders”. Yet there is no logic to the claim. Economic forms are made for men not men for economic forms. We know as a matter of practical experience it is possible to have the exchange of goods and services without the mass movement of people. If a society decides that the benefit gained from the free movement of people is outweighed by the social disruption caused by such migration, it is a perfectly rational decision. A people may decide that they will have or not have free exchange or movement just as they may decide to have this or that level of taxation or welfare provision. It makes no more sense to say a society which restricts immigration – which all advanced states in practice do – is not a “free trader” than to say they are not a “free trader” because their income tax rate is higher or lower than that of their competitors.

The treatment of human labour as merely a factor of production (along with land and capital) is also incompatible with the liberal democratic tenets of the equal worth of each person and the rights and obligations of citizens. Allowing mass immigration to reduce wages or the exporting of jobs to cheaper labour overseas is treating human beings as being of no more account than inanimate objects. It is inhuman.

So what does “free trade” actually mean? Does it require merely that countries may trade with one another without any formal barriers such as tariffs and quotas? Or should it take into account all those items such as national tax regimes, non-tax fiscal measures, wage rates (where these are set by the state), standards of practice and manufacture (official and otherwise), and the size of the public sector. All of these are controllable either entirely or to some degree by men. In other words, they could be removed or altered.

If a definition of “free trade” is accepted which includes these and other non-traditional elements of market distortion, the ultimate logic of the definition is that “free trade” as a global concept cannot exist until all peoples and countries are reduced or elevated to the same general economic condition.

Those who run the European Union would say that is precisely what is required, at least within the EU. But the experience of trying to create unified trading conditions at a supranational level in the most advanced of supranational political and economic entities, demonstrates just how difficult it is to create a supranational market in which there is a broad uniformity in the trading conditions within its constituent national parts. Despite nearly half a century of trying through treaty after treaty and the covering of the EU members with an avalanche of EU directives, there is no meaningful economic uniformity within the EU, either in the circumstances of private enterprise competition or in the function of the state. The introduction of the Euro has painfully revealed exactly how disparate the economies of even the richer EU states still are with Germany needing low interest rates to re-inflate and Italy requiring high rates to control public spending and the European Central Bank paralysed by their inability to square such an economic circle.

The Holy Grail of “free traders” is comparative advantage. This is a first rate example of a neat and emotionally satisfying (to a certain type of mind) intellectual idea which bears little relation to reality. The idea is that every country concentrates on making what it is best at and the overall global product rises because of increased efficiency. Even in theory this is rather dubious because it ignores every other aspect of society than a narrow view of economic relationships and assumes tacitly that a comparative advantage will last. David Landes in his The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (Little, Brown and Co 1998) cites the instance of the Englishman John Borrow, who in 1840 urged the states of the German Zollverin to concentrate on growing wheat, and sell it to buy British manufactures and comments: “This was a sublime example of economic good sense: but Germany would have been the poorer for it. Today’s comparative advantage…may not be tomorrow’s.”

The truth is that any definition of “free trade” is as subjective as that of a “free market”. It has no natural boundaries because the implications of both ultimately embrace the whole of human material endeavour and there are no true natural variables on which to base a definition – even those which might at first glance appear to be objectively and naturally set, such as wages and prices, are determined by matters other than the market, for example tax regimes and welfare provision.

8. Has “free trade” ever been practised?

Between 1860 and 1914 Britain operated the best approximation to “free-trade” the world has seen. In the period 1840-1870 not only did she by degrees open her markets to all regardless of whether other countries reciprocated, but the size of the British state was so tiny that the distortions of government expenditure and taxation were minuscule compared with the present day. But achieving the best approximation to “free trade” was not difficult to achieve because no other country of any size has ever seriously attempted it for any length of time.

For a quarter or a century or so, Britain got away with the ill-effects of being a reckless “free trader” whilst other major countries remained protectionist to varying degrees. She escaped the consequences for three prime reasons: Britain’s industrial dominance, long distance transport of bulk goods remained cumbersome and expensive and the fact that America and Europe were strangely slow to follow Britain’s example and industrialise.

That all changed in the 1870s. Bulk transport was becoming much easier and cheaper. Railways – ironically more often than not built with British capital and technical expertise – had begun to have a considerable influence on the continent and in America and were beginning to snake across Australia and South America. Perhaps most importantly the age of the practical steamship and refrigeration arrived. Manufactured goods, food and raw materials could now move around the world in volumes which dwarfed anything which had gone before. British farmers were especially badly hit when the Americas and Australasia flooded the British market with food and wool.

To these developments, and arguably in part as a consequence of them, there was a widespread retreat into a deep protectionism in the 1870s, most notably by the USA and Germany. Britain failed to respond to these developments by guarding her own markets.

The period of 1870-1914 saw the predictable results of Britain’s quixotic refusal to guard her markets when all about her were assiduously doing so: she lost her general industrial predominance, well nigh destroyed her farmers and failed to dominate vital new industries, such as the chemical, which at one time she had led – Britain produced the first synthetic dye (Perkin 1856) and the first synthetic plastic (Parkes 1855). Two of the most enthusiastic protectionists, the USA and Germany, became the first to exceed Britain’s GDP.

Bismarck summed up what had happened in a speech in 1882 when he said: “I believe the whole theory of free trade to be wrong…England abolished protection after she had benefited from it to the fullest extent. That country used to have the strongest protective tariffs until it became so powerful under their protection that it could step out of those barriers like a gigantic athlete and challenge the world. Free trade is the weapon of the strongest nation, and England has become the strongest nation in the world owing to her capital, her iron, her coal, and her harbours and owing to her favourable geographical position. Nevertheless, she protected herself against foreign  competition with her exorbitant protective tariffs until her industries  became so powerful.”

But even the “free-trade” Britain practised was far from complete. Government contracts were generally given to British companies. Ditto municipal contracts. Moreover, there was a strong sense of patriotism in the country which, as with the present day Japanese, mitigated the effects of free-trade. Nor, of course, was there a WTO, EU or any other body to question and interfere with the internal economic workings of Britain such as taxation, interest rates or working conditions.

British “free trade” was further complicated by the existence of the Empire and a widespread imperial sentiment which created the opportunity and the desire to trade with members of the Empire rather than the rest of the world. It does not do to over-egg the effects of this because British trade with the world outside the Empire, especially the USA, always remained strong, but it undoubtedly significantly distorted British trade.

9. “Free trade” today

If “free trade” was a gigantic gamble for an industrially, commercially and politically dominant Britain in 1850, it is vastly riskier for any country now. Transport even after the arrival of railways and the steamship was still expensive, slow and cumbersome compared with now. The electric telegraph was the height of sophistication. Most parts of the world could not engage in international trade on their own terms because they were colonies, under the practical control of foreign powers or unindustrialised.

Today physical transport is fast and cheap. In place of the telegraph, we have the internet. Many countries have industrialised. The age of formal empires is over.

But there is more than political and technological change which makes a difference between our own time and the last outbreak of “free trade” mania. The “free trade” being advocated now is doctrinaire to the point of idiocy, namely the god of comparative advantage (the idea that each nation should concentrate on those products which are most profitable and forget the rest) is to be applied to everything, even (in the EU) to all public contracts, including those for weaponry. Childishly doctrinaire as they were as they played with their untried intellectual toy, even the most extreme “free traders” in the 1830s and 1840s saw that some parts of the economy could not be reasonably opened to competition for strategic reasons, military supplies being the prime case.

Let us suppose that we had a perfect “free trade” world now, a world in which there were no tariffs or quotas or embargoes or “standards” to meet; that all the artificial restraints on trade were removed; that no government subsidized productive employment in any way and all that remained to differentiate countries were market decided labour rates, carriage costs and the cost of nonproductive public works such as justice and the army. What then?

The consequences would be extremely dangerous for the West. Farmers in the First World would be on their knees and mass production of virtually anything in general demand would quickly become impossible because whatever a company’s efficiency, it simply would not be able to compete with labour which was a tenth or less of the cost of its own native workforce. All such countries could do is try to make high-value goods,

Even if the redundant working populations of the First World could find alternative employment, which is dubious, their countries would be left utterly at the mercy of those who now produced their food and most of the manufactured goods they consumed.

10. Does “free trade” deliver? The lessons of economic history

Free traders base their case primarily on the increase in prosperity which they believe will only come through increased global trade. The general answer to that claim is that Man does not live by bread alone. Moreover, even if there is a general rise in the global product at present, it does not necessarily follow that the same or better result could not be achieved by other means. The experience of all industrialised countries to date is that industrialisation is best achieved – perhaps can only be achieved by protecting the national economy. Indeed, there is a powerful logic in the idea that developing nations today require protection more than the early industrialising states because the early industrialising nations had little competition.

But even if it could be shown indubitably that the global product is increased more by “free trade” than by protection, it does not follow that it is in a particular country’s interest to adopt free trade. Consider the position in a national market which operates “free trade” within that market, but protects its trade and industry from foreign competition. Companies go bust if they do not compete. But successful companies take their place and continue to provide employment at broadly similar rates of pay. The logic of global “free trade” is that countries which cannot compete will go bust and not be replaced by others in the domestic market. There will be no replacement jobs within the bankrupt country because the successful competitor is abroad.

The most lethal ammunition to discharge at “free traders” is the fact that no country in the history of the world has industrialised successfully without very strong protectionist measures being in place. That includes the first industrial nation, Britain, which spent a couple of cosy centuries behind the Navigation Acts, the first of which was passed in 1651, before becoming a free trader. Not only that, but Britain only adopted “free trade” principles after she had become heavily industrialised and did so at a time when the country was still the dominant industrial power in the world by a long chalk and her exports were more or less guaranteed to sell in foreign markets.

Before Britain dropped her old colonial protectionist system in the mid 19th Century, she had industrialised in the modern sense from scratch and expanded her GDP massively. Perhaps most impressively she had managed to continue to largely feed herself without the price of corn going sky high, despite the fact that the UK population almost doubled between 1801 (the first Census) and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.

As described above, Britain’s experience during her most committed “free trading” period was one of declining market share and commercial and industrial dominance while rigid protectionists such as Germany and the USA experienced massive growth. Of course, Britain could not hope to remain so dominant but her decline was remarkably rapid. In 1870 Britain was the richest country by GDP in the world: by 1914 both Germany and the USA had larger GDPs. Moreover, by religiously adopting open markets, for capital as well as goods and services, Britain seriously distorted her economy. Vast capital exports resulted in underinvestment in Britain and foreigners manufacturers and traders took full advantage of Britain’s open doors. The result was that by the Great War in 1914 her farmers were on their knees and modern industries such as the chemical and pharmaceutical were sadly undeveloped because of foreign competition (this distortion of the economy was soon to be a great national embarrassment during wartime when many industries were found to be inadequate to replace imported goods).

Here is a German voice from 1913: “By its free trade policy England has been more useful to us than its numerous political machinations have been harmful to us. Where would our sugar industry – one of the first items to help us in our economical rise – have been today, or our textile and iron industries, had it not been for the free markets of England? Nowhere: we should have been entirely without our new German capital, our financial resources. On the back of free trade England we grasped at and secured our economical world-power….Industrial and political supremacy go together. Warships are machines, and the nation which succeeds in attracting the centre of capital is the nation that can afford to build most. The present rulers of England represent the fourth generation of dictators to the world. It will not be easy for them to give up the role of ‘primus inter pares’”. (Prof von Schulze-Gaevernitz quoted – p347 -in The fall of protection 1840-50 by Bernard Holland)

Britain limped on with “free trade” after the Great War until 1931 when the secular religion was abjured, at least temporarily, during the Great Depression. Although unemployment remained high by historical British standards until WW2, the British economy behind protectionist barriers recovered quickly compared with most of the rest of the world. Most interestingly, the newer high-tec industries such as the motor, chemical and electrical recovered and grew fastest following their protection.

From 1945 to the mid eighties of the last century at least, Britain continued in an essentially protectionist system, as did the rest of the world. The world economy grew strongly during the period despite the protection. Even within the EU the “free market” mania did not really get under way until the Single European Act of 1985.

It is true that since protectionist barriers have come down over the past 20 years economic growth has been strong in the First World, but then it has been strong behind protectionist barriers and, indeed, with state direction of the domestic market. Germany under Hitler in the 1930s recovered amazingly quickly, despite the fact that the Nazis pursued an economic course which was probably as close to autarky as it is possible for a major modern state to bear. Imports and exports were regulated according to what was perceived to be necessary to make Germany strong through self-sufficiency. What Hitler did not do was attempt to run industry directly. Instead, the Nazis allowed private enterprise to run commerce and industry whilst directing what was produced and supplied.

All that tells us three things: that “free trade” is not necessary for rapid economic growth, that state regulation of the domestic market and international trade is not a recipe for disaster and that being a “free trader” when the rest of the world is not reciprocating is a mug’s game.

11. Is society materially enriched by “free markets” and “free trade?

This is an impossible question to answer categorically because there is no way knowing what would have happened if protectionism had remained full blooded throughout the last century and a half. One can compare growth rates under stronger or looser protection regimes, but they really say little because the other determining factors such as public expenditure have varied so greatly. These variables also blur judgement about the comparative merits of controlled and “free” domestic markets.

The most certain thing one can say from the economic experience of the developed world is that governments running commercial industries such as coal and steel directly is generally a mistake. (Governments are the natural suppliers of universal services such as healthcare only because private provision of such things is never adequate.)

What is certain is the fact that the material effects of “free trade” are far from uniform. It is no consolation to those who suffer along the way that others may benefit from their disadvantage. The next generation or the generation after that may be richer but why should their benefit be brought at the cost of disadvantaging a prior generation? Certainly no politician or political party standing at an election would dare to do so on a platform of “we shall make many of you poorer to make future generations richer.” Those living at any point in time have their own moral context and needs.

The constant economic turmoil caused by “free trade” and its inevitable concomitant, the supranational corporation, undeniably leads to  circumstances which greatly disadvantage large swathes of the population in the First World through the removal of First World jobs to the rest of the world. At worst, these people become the perpetual victims of structural unemployment (try getting a job in an area where the main employer closes and you have no scarce or easily transferable skills or you are middle-aged or, indeed, try opening a new business or becoming self-employed in a depressed economy): at best they are driven into ill-paid and uncertain employment.

 12. What is meant by material enrichment? Britain as a case study

The assumption is that the material conditions for most have improved considerably over the past two hundred years. Any economics textbook will plot economic improvement in terms of rising real wages. But those supposedly rising real wages are based on measures which are often questionable, incomplete or derived from very narrow data such as corn prices. Even modern measures such as the Retail Price Index (RPI) are not static, their content and weighting being regularly revised. Nor do such measures fully represent the true costs of necessities, the most notable distortion in Britain being the failure of the Retail Price Index (and its successor index the Consumer Price Index) to reflect housing costs fully. Any comparison between different times based on such measures needs to be treated with caution.

Of course no one in their right sense would question whether there has been massive material advance in the past two centuries. A more  interesting question in our context is whether most people are materially better off now than they were in 1960s, by which time a fully fledged welfare state was bedded in, housing, both owned and rented, was reasonably priced, social housing was being built in massive quantities, university education was not merely free but students subsidized with grants, unemployment was tiny and inflation low.

Today the welfare state is constantly under attack by the British political elite and in some areas such as NHS dentistry already seriously inadequate, while the state pension is much reduced as a fraction of the average wage following two decades of increases linked to the cost-of-living pegging rather than increases linked to the average national wage.

Housing of all sorts in most parts of the country is presently absurdly costly and social housing is greatly reduced through Right-To-Buy and minimal new building since the 1980s.

The cost of university education is rocketing and grants are a distant memory.

Unemployment remains high today (2005) even by the official figures –  approximately 950,000 by the claimant count and around 1.5 million by  the most widely used international measure – figures which most  probably severely understate the real unemployment level because it ignores the considerable disguised unemployment within the 2 to 3  million people currently on long term sick benefit payments (the 1980  figure for such people was 600,000). The increase in those staying on at school after the age of 16 and going on to university has also reduced the present figures by taking hundreds of thousands out of the jobs  market for years. From 1945 to the late seventies unemployment never rose above a million on the official claimant count and for most of the time was considerably lower even with little disguised unemployment and far fewer people staying in education after the school-leaving age (which was only 15 until the mid sixties).

There are other fundamental social changes which bear upon the material state of the nation. Many more people today have to travel long distances to work than they did forty or fifty years ago. That is costly both in terms of fares and time. More generally, it is increasingly difficult for someone on the average wage to support a family on that wage. That often means both parents have to work not from choice but necessity.

Taxation bears much more heavily on the poorer part of the population now than it did in the past. Direct taxation – income tax, national insurance, inheritance duty – applies to many more people now than it did in 1960, primarily because a failure to maintain personal allowances and tax bands at a reasonable level. Direct taxation is also broader in scope, for example VAT compared to purchase tax. Such taxation takes proportionately more of the income of the poor than the rich.

It is a moot point whether overall people are generally materially better off than they in 1960. They may own more trinkets such as TVs and computers and some imported goods such as clothes may be at least much cheaper, but those are small advantages to set against the great increase in housing costs and commuting fares and the diminishment in social provision. Doubtless a section of society has benefited, but it would be a brave man who wanted to argue that the condition of the vast  majority has improved, especially the poorest third of the population.

Many will read this with astonishment, saying but we have so much more today, dazzled as they are by the many new products. It is important not to confuse technological advance with “free markets” and “free trade” or general material wellbeing. People are undoubtedly better off in 2005 in terms of being able to purchase such things as cars or electronic goods then they were in 1960. But people in 1975 were also better off in those respects than those who had lived fifteen years before. That improvement was long before “free markets” and “free trade” had become the elite ideology. It is worth adding that new products often result in additional expenditure regardless of whether the individual really wants the product – any product which becomes widely used is difficult to resist. Technological innovations are particularly prone to induce reluctant purchases.

13. How the market fails to provide what the customer wants

There is no better modern example of the market failing to provide what the customer both needs and wants than the computer industry. If it was driven by the customer, the computer industry would produce hardware and software which was easy to install, had continuity of use, was simple to use and was supported by adequate help lines and manuals. The industry signally fails to do any of these things.

Hardware and software are of course purchased in ever greater volume and computer services, including maintenance, continue to swell. But that is not an indication of customer satisfaction. Rather, it is simply a reflection of how computers have become an inescapable part of our lives, not only as obvious computers but also in the guise of so many of the other machines we use – everything from phones to intelligent clothes. Business and public administration have become so dependent on their use that they cannot do without them. That being so, whatever is on offer, however unsatisfactory, is bought out of sheer necessity. The computer companies have the modern world over a barrel.

It might be objected that although most people cannot completely escape computers at their work, they do not have to bring them into their private lives. Yet increasing numbers buy computers for private use.

Why do they do that if the machines are so unreliable and demanding? Simple: once a significant minority have private computers and business uses them very widely, it becomes very difficult for the rest to resist,  not least because businesses and government increasingly require those dealing with them to do so by computer. But there are other pressures as well.

We have long passed the point where a handwritten document is likely to be read by most people in business unless it is an order or payment. Now, except between social contacts, everything must be word-processed to be acceptable. A word processor or access to one has become a sine qua non for anyone who wishes to be taken seriously. Even amongst private individuals a letter is increasingly seen as unusual or even quaint.

With emails, we have not come to the stage that telephone ownership reached a quarter of a century ago when not to have a phone became considered eccentric, but we are rapidly moving towards it.

Employers increasingly wish to contact employees by email wherever they are and this means the choice is often between having a computer and email at home or not having a job.

Those with school age children, whatever they think of computers, find it next to impossible to deny their children not only a computer but access to the internet, both because the children want it to match their peers and because they have been brainwashed into believing that a computer is essential.

In short, people are increasingly being driven to become computer owners and users not because they actively want to, but because they feel isolated and excluded if they remain computerless. Again, as with the analogy between telephones and emails, within the foreseeable future, someone without a computer is in danger of becoming in the eyes of the majority as much as an oddity as someone without a TV is now considered.

14. Relative poverty, wealth and power

Even if most people or even all people were in absolute terms better off as a consequence “free trade”, that does not mean that their general situation has improved in power terms.

Wealth is not merely an advantage for what it can directly buy but also for the power it brings. The poor are doubly disadvantaged by their poverty by their restricted ability to purchase what they want and their subordination to those who can purchase anything they desire. Consequently, the ordinary man or woman may well be happier and freer in a society which is materially poorer overall but which is less oppressive through the absence of great differences in wealth. Charles Darwin in the Voyage of the Beagle describes a port in South America which suffered an earthquake while the Beagle was there in harbour. The town attached to the port was virtually destroyed and its inhabitants were reduced at least temporarily to the same material level. Darwin noted the happiness, almost gaiety, of the population after this happened.

The example of Britain is instructive when it comes to relative wealth. Until the 1970s inequalities in wealth were narrowing. Despite all the puffing of the “trickle down” of wealth which supposedly results from Thatcherite “free market” practices, wealth distribution has not changed dramatically over the past quarter century of “free market” policies by successive British governments.

A Royal Commission (1976-79) on the distribution of income and wealth found that in 1976 the top 1 per cent of the population owned 25% of all personal wealth, the top ten percent raked in 60% and the bottom eighty per cent had a measly 23% (Penguin Dictionary of Sociology p72). The Inland Revenue figures for wealth distribution in 2002 are show the top 1 per cent own 23% of national wealth and the bottom fifty per cent of the population have a staggeringly small 6% (Office of National Statistics (ONS) website – published 2004). Those figures, eye-opening as they are, conceal the fact that wealth inequality in 2002 would be much greater than 1976 were it not for the increase in home ownership and the rise in house prices.

Another ONS report (2005) entitled “The long shadow of childhood” (TLSOC) based on research by the London School of Economics concludes that there has been remarkably little change in social mobility in Britain over the past 30 years. The study was based on census records between 1971 and 2001.

TLSOC also demonstrated how the social and economic status of children is very much tied to that of the parents. For example, more than two thirds of those with parents in professional or managerial jobs managed to take a degree: of those with semi-skilled/unskilled parents, 14 per cent had a degree.

15. Man does not live by bread alone

Even if the “free traders’” claims of an overall increase in the wealth of a society were true, there would still be strong arguments against the policy because a society is more than its crude economic relationships.

Human beings do not like too much uncertainty. A certain amount of stress is good for them, but only so much. Like masochists and physical pain, human beings are comfortable with stress only in so far as they feel it is within their control. Manifestly, for many people the uncertainty they experience is utterly outside their control. This widespread insecurity leads not merely to individual suffering but damages the social fabric by generally diminishing confidence in the future and the ability to cope in the here and now.

A 2005 study (Molly Watson Western Mail 31 9 2005) by a Cardiff University Department of Psychology team led by Prof Aylward Mansel suggests that the general level of happiness in the Depression was greater than it is now (the team analysed data from surveys of assessing happiness and contentment from the past 70 years.) This conclusion might seem absurd to most people living today who, if they have any conception of the Depression, it is one of a dire time packed with the most horrendous stress. Yet the findings of the report have a certain plausibility because in the 1930s there was undoubtedly a greater sense of social solidarity, especially amongst the working class, than there is now and civil society was far stronger then – the working class not only lived in close-knit communities which offered support to those who fell on hard times, but they were woven into supportive institutions such as the co-operative movement and unions. They were anything but socially isolated whereas today people are often isolated. Social involvement, the Cardiff University study found, was the single most important cause of happiness or unhappiness.

One must be cautious with such studies because however scrupulous the researchers a degree of subjectivity is inevitable. Nonetheless the equation of isolation with unhappiness will, I think, strike a strong chord with most.

There is also the question of a people’s self-confidence. If a nation’s visible and everyday manufactures are predominantly foreign, it tends to produce a sense of dependence in the individual. A man looks around and can find next to nothing he can identify as produced either in his own country or made by companies owned by his countrymen. Not unnaturally he begins to lose confidence in the ability of his own country to stand alone. Peoples throughout history have allowed themselves to be conquered simply because they believed themselves to be generally inferior to those who confronted them and slaves have been routinely controlled by owners who deliberately attempted to reinforce their sense of inferiority.

16. Geopolitics

Free trade is postulated on an absurdity, namely that the world will no longer see wars which will significantly disrupt trade, or at least the trade of the First World. It is a fool’s paradise.

Those with memories greater than that of a goldfish may recall the help and support Britain received from her supposed EU “partners” in the Falklands. Remember how France supplied military equipment in the form of missiles to the Argentine during that war. Imagine what would have happened if Britain at the time had relied largely on equipment which was either wholly or partly produced abroad. Suppose, for example, her main fighter aircraft had been produced by an EU consortium (as it soon will be), what guarantee could Britain have had of fresh supplies of spare parts and weapons during the Falklands war?

The dependence on foreign suppliers affects even the greatest states. The New York Times (29 Sept 2005 – “More US weapons have foreign roots”) documents the reliance of the US military on foreign suppliers. This is still small as a percentage of the whole defence budget but it is growing and already encompasses important areas such as bio-chemical warfare protective suits.

17. The democratic deficit

“Free trade” emasculates democracy. It does this by confining politics within narrow limits. The present “free trade” agreements mean that no political party can easily stand on a platform of extending state intervention, whether by nationalisation, trade restrictions such as embargoes or the subsidy of its own industries. A party which wished to do any of these things could of course propose to withdraw from the treaties, but that would be in practice a very difficult course to follow, especially where the treaty obligations go beyond mere trade such as those involved in membership of the European Union.

Loss of democratic control is obviously to the disadvantage of the masses. However, it also has implications for competition. The prevention of the formation of monopolies and cartels can be done at the national level, but it is impossible when companies become supranational. You offend against America’s anti-trust laws? No problem, you remove your manufacturing abroad to countries which are happy to have you (or at least their clients are) regardless of what arrangements you may have made with competitors or the any monopoly position.

18. Does “free trade” increase competition and choice in the long run?

In the industrialised world at least, the experience of less restricted trade since 1945 is that competition has reduced not merely in the capital intensive industries and occupations but in those which are not obvious. The numbers of farmers has greatly contracted, but so have the number of storekeepers as chain stores and supermarkets have overwhelmed the individual proprietor. In fact, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to find a mature field of economic activity, that is ,  one which has not sprung up since 1945, which has not displayed reduced competition within the post-war period.

Some of this reduction in competition is simply due to the working of the domestic market towards monopoly, for example, the growth of chain stores, but much of it is directly related to the removal of protection for First World economies.

It is true that large parts of the world have industrialised and increased the number of international competitors, but the overall number of businesses in the developed world has been reduced. multinationals control much of the economic activity of the Third World and, in some industries, dominate the national markets of the First World.

The car industry is a wonderful example of the squeezing of competition. All over the world car companies are being taken over by the giants and many car companies which do exist rely on state aid and favours. The number of companies now being small (and becoming smaller) compared with the number even 40 years ago. Moreover, many of the car companies which do still exist do so only because of state subsidy and protection.

Other traditionally important industries where competition is greatly reduced are aerospace, aviation, shipbuilding, oil, chemicals, steel and farming.

19. The reality of our economic circumstances

What we have does not even fall within the arbitrary and narrow definitions of “free markets” and “free trade” which most of their adherents espouse. States still protect their economies with state subsidies, favourable tax regimes, quotas and tariffs. Nonetheless, protectionist barriers have been reduced sufficiently to severely damage first world industries through products from the developing world with their absence of labour laws and wages many times less than those of developed economies.

First World economies have also exported vast numbers of jobs to the developing world. These range from manufacturing to skilled white collar work such many IT functions. The old middle-class belief that they were immune from the effects of globalisation has received a rude buffeting.

At the same time as jobs and industries have been exported, the industrialised world has increasingly allowed the purchase of native companies by foreigners. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this has been the complete transfer of London merchant banks to foreign ownership.

The fourth strand in the modern “free trade” web is immigration. Since 1945, with the exception of Japan, the First World has allowed through a mixture of design and neglect of border controls, vast numbers of immigrants into their territories, most of whom have been unskilled or low-skilled.

The primary consequences of the slowly evolving post war international economic regime have been two. The first has been the gradual growth of dependence on the imports of vital goods and services by the developed world and a loss of governmental control of companies within their borders, not least because any large multi-national can hold the threat of upping sticks to another country if a government does not play ball.

The second consequence has been the degradation of the economic circumstances of those whose jobs were most at threat from the internationalisation of trade. Those affected are mainly the poorer and less qualified workers and their dependents. They have found their opportunities for work much reduced and the pay and conditions for the suitable work which remains eroded by extra competition from both native workers chasing fewer jobs and immigrants competing for the same jobs.

Those whose jobs opportunities have been degraded have suffered a form of theft. Had mass immigration and the export of jobs been prevented, the wages for the jobs taken by immigrants would have been higher than they are when subjected to the additional competition of immigrant labour and the exported jobs would not have been exported, which in itself would have tightened the labour market. In societies of rising aspiration, this could result in jobs considered menial being better rewarded than those which enjoy high status under “free trade” circumstances. It might be necessary to pay a sewage worker as much as a doctor. Doubtless many would throw their hands up at this. But there is no logic to such a response, because in a society with a large private enterprise component a wage is simply a response to the value the market puts on a job. Unskilled workers may not earn as much as the average doctor or lawyer at present, but skilled tradesmen such as plumbers and builders often do.

20. Why elites are so keen on “free markets” and “free trade”

“I just think that a lot of modern corporate capitalists — the managerial class basically — has no loyalty to any country anymore, or any particular values other than the bottom line.” (Pat Buchanan quoted by Daniel Brandt in his article “Class Warfare” in issue 13 of Namebase Newsline -http//www.namebase.org/news13.html).

Buchanan is grasping a demon which he only dimly apprehends. What is happening is vastly more significant. We are presently witnessing the creation of an international class of plutocrats who care for nothing but their own class. They have the potential to form a true international aristocracy. If that happens, the imperfect democratic control the masses have been able to exert over their elites in the past century will end. The prime tool for the creation of such an international aristocracy is “free trade”.

There are parts of Western elites which are more or less reluctant to embrace “free markets” and “free trade”, but the general economic trend is clear: the internationalist, globalist creed is the dominant philosophy when it comes to trade and increasingly the idea of “free markets” in the domestic sphere is being accepted in practice if not in overt political policy.

Why have these elites moved from their previous socially oriented nationalism to internationalism? The answer to this question reveals the nature both of elites generally and the particular philosophy they currently support.

In most circumstances throughout history the wishes of the mass of a population have been of little or no account in any formal sense. The masses made their presence felt through rioting and social disturbance or as pawns in the service of elite members who wished to rebel. An elite took note only when they were frightened enough – the creation of a form of national public assistance by the Poor Law of 1601 is a classic example of such behaviour.

Eventually, representative government evolved to the point where the masses began to have a direct say in the political process through the vote. The elite as a group did not welcome this but felt it could not be resisted. It was not democracy to be sure but elective oligarchy, which was buttressed by elite constructed devices to exclude new entrants into the political process such as first past the post voting, election deposits and a very strong party system. Nonetheless, once the franchise was broadened the masses were able to exercise a large degree of democratic control because politics was still national and a political party had to respond to the electors’ wishes. The elite resented this control over their behaviour as all elites do and looked around for a way to diminish democratic influence. They found the means to do it through internationalism.

In a sovereign country elected politicians cannot readily say this or that cannot be done if it is practical to do whatever it is. That is a considerable block on elite misbehaviour. So elites decided that the way round this unfortunate fact was to commit to treaties which would remove the opportunity for the electorate to exercise control. The most notable example is the Treaty of Rome and the subsequent treaties which have tied Britain into the EU.

Vast swathes of policy are no longer within the control of the British Parliament because of these treaties. Add in the treaties tying Britain to the UN and the WTO and the commitment of every mainstream British party to them, and democratic control has essentially gone.

But internationalism is not simply a bureaucratic elite device to weaken democratic control, it is a sociological event in itself. An elite thinks of itself as a separate group, a group which may in some circumstances extend beyond national boundaries and jurisdictions. The medieval aristocracies of Western Europe thought themselves part of a chivalric whole. When Charles I of Egland was executed in 1649 the monarchs of Europe were horrified because they thought it would set an example for other royal killings.

The ruling elites in the First World today have a class interest which binds them more closely to one another than to the people they rule. Indeed, there is arguably a greater sense of international elite solidarity than ever before. This is because modern communications allow people, goods and ideas to move with an unmatched ease. Because of this the international class can constantly revitalise and extend their group solidarity.

The advantage to the elites of this culturally based international solidarity underwritten by many personal elite relationships across national boundaries, is that it allows them to weaken even further their dependence upon their immediate (native) populations, because not only does a particular national elite have a ready made excuse for not doing something – our treaty obligations will not permit it – but the personal relationships and the growing sense of class solidarity increases the confidence and hence the willingness of the various national elites to act ever more in the international elite class interest.

Indeed, the more they are together and the more they act together, the more natural it will seem.

It is important to understand that elites are not engaged as a group in a conscious conspiracy against the masses. What happens is that the psychological and sociological forces which press upon us all lead the elite to adopt policies which always lead to their retention of power. It is not difficult to see how this happens.

All human beings have a powerful ability to write a narrative in their heads which will persuade them that they act not from self-serving or disreputable reasons but honourable and socially useful ones. The consequence of this is that while individual members of an elite will consciously comprehend the likely effect of their ideology, the majority will simply accept their ideology at face value. This helps to bolster and stabilise the elite’s position because no elite ideology ever overtly states that the masses will be disadvantaged if the ideology is followed, and in the case of formal democracies, the ideology positively claims to materially better society as a whole. This will emotionally reassure most elite members, who will bolster their acceptance of the ideology through inter-elite conversations – if most or all those in a group are positive about something, that is most powerful social reinforcer.

21. A sane alternative to globalism

Economic history suggests that the most effective general strategy to promote economic development in a country is to allow competition within the domestic market (where it does not create serious social discord) whilst regulating international trade through protectionist measures sufficient to maintain the general capacity of a country to point where it can maintain itself in an emergency such as war or blockade and be sovereign in most circumstances.This would require the judicious use of embargoes, tariffs and quotas to ensure that all the vital industries remain as a presence in Britain.

A few industries should be in principle wholly supplied from the British market. These are defence equipment and the various energy sources. The reasons for defence equipment provision being domestic are simple: any foreign supplier can cease to supply goods for political reasons or simply be unable to produce the goods when wanted at all or in sufficient quantities.

Energy supplies should be domestic because if they fail the whole of society is brought to a halt. Self-sufficiency in energy in any advanced country could be achieved in the medium term by nuclear power supplemented perhaps by new sources of energy such as wave and current power and bio-fuels.

A country should also build up a stockpile of essential materials such as metals and the minerals used in the chemical industry. Five years national supply should be a minimum.

A country should be able to feed its population from its own production at a pinch. In Britain this is possible with modern crop yields and animal husbandry. Crop yields are considerably greater than they were even in WW2 and the opportunities for increasing the volume of animal products have multiplied greatly over the past 60 years, for example, in the massive development of poultry farming since 1945.

75% of the market in every other vital industry should be reserved for the domestic market. What is a “vital industry”? Try these for starters: metal (especially steel), chemical, biotech, computers, robotics, motor vehicles, shipping, aerospace, clothing, building, machine tools.

I would also reserve to domestic production at least 25% of the market for goods that are useful but not vital to provide a base for an expanded home production in times of emergency. Trade in wholeheartedly nonessential goods – Christmas trees, pogo sticks and suchlike – could be “free”.

I am not arguing for autarky. What I am advocating are trading circumstances which allow a nation to defend its national interests, particularly in time of war or international crisis. The measures I propose would produce self-sufficiency in food where necessary, the maintenance of the ability to manufacture a complete range industrial goods and most importantly the maintenance of an arms industry which can produce a full range of weapons necessary for the defence of the country.

Such a system would provide the security the state requires and permit very substantial international trade even in essential goods.

Obviously such a regime could not be followed in its entirety by most states. However, all could exist within those parts of it suited to their circumstances, for example, Britain could manage the entire regime, many third world countries could be self-sufficient in food.

22. “Free markets” and “free trade” as a religion

Free marketeers fancy themselves to be rational, calculating beasts. In reality, their adoration of the market is essentially religious. They believe that it will solve all economic ills, if not immediately, then in the medium to long term. Armed with this supposed objective truth, they proselytize about the moral evils and inefficiencies of public service and the wondrous efficiency and ethical outcomes of private enterprise regardless of the practical effects of their policies or the frequent misbehaviour of those in command of large private companies. Their approach is essentially that of the religious believer.

Like the majority of religious believers, “free marketeers and traders” are none too certain of the theology of their religion. (I am always struck by how many of them lack a grasp of even basic economic theory and are almost invariably wholly ignorant of economic history). They recite their economic catechism sublime in the concrete of their ignorance.

The religion has its roots in the first half of the 18th century when there were occasional attempts to suggest tariff reform, but the idea only became a serious political policy in the 1780s with the advent of Pitt the Younger as Prime Minister in 1784 who long toyed with “economical reform”.

The 18th century also provided the religion with its holy book, The Wealth of Nations by the Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith. This strongly argued for “free markets” and “free trade”, but Smith also recognised the demands of national security, the need for government to engage in social provision such as road building and maintenance which would not otherwise be done and, must importantly, the nature of a society and its economy. Here is Smith on the Navigation Acts: “…the Act of Navigation by diminishing the number of buyers; and we are thus likely not only to buy foreign goods dearer, but to sell our own cheaper, than if there were a more perfect freedom of trade. As defence, however, is of much more importance than opulence, the Act of Navigation is, perhaps, the wisestof all the commercial regulations of England.” (Wealth of Nations Bk IV. ch ii)

But Smith and his book suffered the fate of all those who found religions, secular or otherwise. As the decades passed Smith’s cautious approach was redrawn in the minds of his disciples to become a surgically “clean” mechanical ideology in which all that mattered was the pursuit of profit and the growth of trade and industry through the application of the “holy edicts” of open markets and comparative dvantage. The disciples, like other religious believers, avidly quoted the passages from their holy book which suited their purposes and ignored those which did not. They also found a further holy text in homas Malthus’ Essay on Population of 1802, whose predictions, although unproven by events, could be used to demonstrate that economic expansion was vital if widespread starvation was not to occur.

The clinical, soulless and inhuman nature of the laissez faire idea as it evolved is exemplified by the English economist David Ricardo. Here is a flavour of his mindset: “Under a system of perfectly free commerce each country naturally devotes its capital and labour to such employments as are most beneficial to both. The pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the universal good of the whole. By stimulating industry, and by using most efficaciously the peculiar powers bestowed by nature, it distributes labour most economically, while increasing the general mass of the production it diffuses general benefits, and binds together by one common tie of interest and intercourse the universal society of nations”. (David Ricardo in The fall of protection p 174).

The Napoleonic wars largely foiled Pitt’s wish for broad reform and placed “free trade” in suspended animation as a serious political idea until the 1820s, when cautious attempts at tariff reform again were made. But underneath the political elite was a radical class who were very much enamoured of wholesale economical reform. With the Great Reform Act of 1832 they were given their opportunity to become part of the political elite. They took it with both hands, their most notable and extreme proponents being John Bright and Richard Cobden backed by the intellectual power of David Ricardo – all three became MPs.

Within a dozen years of the first election under the Great Reform Act’s passing, Parliament had been captured by the disciples of Adam Smith and the pass on protection had been sold by of all people a Tory prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, an action which kept the Tories from power for most of the next 40 years.

Such was their religious credulity that the “free traders” advocated not merely opening up Britain’s markets, both at home and in the colonies, to nations who would allow Britain equivalent access to their markets, they advocated opening up Britain’s markets regardless of how other nations acted. The consequence was, as we have seen, disastrous for Britain.

Disraeli in a speech on 1st February 1849 cruelly dissected this insanity:” There are some who say that foreigners will not give us their production for nothing, and that therefore we have no occasion to concern ourselves as to the means and modes of repayment. There is no doubt that foreigners will not give us their goods without exchange for them; but the question is what are the terms of exchange most beneficial for us to adopt. You may glut markets, but the only effect of your attempt to struggle against the hostile tariffs by opening your ports is that you exchange more of your own labour each year for a less quantity of foreign labour, that you render British labour less efficient, that you degrade British labour, diminish profits, and, therefor, must lower wages; while philosophical enquirers have shown that you will finally effect a change in the distribution of the precious metals that must be pernicious and may be fatal to this country. It is for these reasons that all practical men are impressed with a conviction that you should adopt reciprocity as the principle of your tariff – not merely from practical experience, but as an abstract truth. This was the principle of the commercial negations at Utrecht – which were followed by Mr Pitt in his commercial negotiations at Paris – and which were wisely adopted and applied by the Cabinet of Lord Liverpool, but which were deserted flagrantly and unwisely in 1846″. (The fall of Protection pp 337/8″).

Ironically, the “free traders” make the same general errors as Marxists. They believe that everything stems from economics. For the neo-liberal the market has the same pseudo-mystical significance that the dialectic has for the Mar ist. Just as the Marxist sees the dialectic working inexorably through history to an eventual state of communism (or a reversion to barbarism to be exact), so the neo-liberal believes that the market will solve any economic problem and most social ills. Neither ideology works because it ignores the realityof human nature and its sociological realisation.

The one track economic mentality of the early “free traders” is well represented by the father of J S Mill, James Mill:”The benefit which is derived from exchanging one commodity for another arises from the ncommodity received rather than the from the commodity given. When one country exchanges, or in other words, traffics with another, the whole of its advantage consists of the in the commodities imported. It benefits by the importation and by nothing else. A protecting duty which, if it acts at all, limits imports, must limit exports likewise, checking and restraining national industry, thus diminishing national wealth.” (The fall of protection p 174). And to Hell with any social or strategic consideration or changing economic circumstances.

After the Great War and the fall of “free trade” as public policy in 1931, the religion went underground for nearly fifty years. When it re-emerged as a political idea in the 1970s the politicians who fell under its spell were every bit as unquestioning and credulous as those of the 1840s. Tony Blair’ statement on Globalisation, ie, free trade, at the 2005 Labour Party Conference shows that it is alive and kicking today.

Scorning any attempt to discuss Globalisation, Blair said of those who wished to oppose it “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer”. (Daily Telegraph 1 10 2005.)

None of this would matter very much now if those who believe in “free markets” and “free trade” were without political power. Unfortunately, theirs is the elite ideology of the moment and the past 25 years. In Britain, the Tories may be more fanatical in their devotion to the market as panacea, but Blairite Labour have caught more than a mild dose of the disease. A good example of this is their response to house price hyperinflation where they desperately and futilely attempt remedies within the constraints of what they perceive to be “free market” disciplines rather than opting for the obvious state generated remedies such as restricting immigration, building a great deal of social housing and forcing developers to release land for building.

Both the traditional Left and Right have been duped by globalisation. The Left initially welcomed globalisation as a dissolver of national sovereignty, but they are discovering by the day just how restrictive international treaties and membership of supra national groups can be. As things stand, through our membership of the EU and the World Trade Organisation treaties, no British government could introduce new socialist measures because they cannot nationalise companies, protect their own commerce and industry or even ensure that taxpayers’ money is spent in Britain with British firms. A British government can have any economic system they like provided it is largely free trade, free enterprise.

The Right are suffering the same sickness with different symptoms. They find that they are no longer masters in their own house and cannot meaningfully appeal to traditional national interests because treaties make that impossible.

But there is a significant difference between the position of the two sides. The traditional Right have simply been usurped by neo-Liberals in blue clothes: the traditional Left have been betrayed by a confusion in their ideology which has allowed their main political vehicles to be surreptitiously by the likes of Blair.

The left have historically objected to “free-trade” on the grounds that it destroys jobs and reduces wages. But what they (and especially the British Left) have rarely if ever done is walk upon the other two necessary planks in the anti-”free trade” platform: the maintenance of (1) national sovereignty and (2) a sense of national cohesion. The consequence is that the Left has been and are still struggling with two competing and mutually exclusive ends: internationalism and the material improvement of the mass of the people.

23. An elite ideology

The best way of judging any political ideology is to ask cui bono? (who benefits?) The obvious answer in the case of “free markets” and “free trade” are those who believe (with good reason) that they nor their dependants will never be amongst those who will suffer the ill-effects of free trade. These people are and will continue to be overwhelmingly drawn from the middle and upper classes for the same reasons that such classes have always maintained their superiority, namely that such people will have inherited wealth, social connections and superior opportunities for education which are denied to the majority.

The new international elite is neither left nor right. Its ideology is simply designed to promote the interests of the elite. It has aspects of right and left, but they are merely the policies which allow the elite to both disguise their true intention and to give a pseudo-moral camouflage to their ends. They speak of the internationalist equivalent of “motherhood and apple pie” with exhortations to “end world poverty” and fund a “war on disease worldwide”. If I had to find a term to describe this elite I think I would settle for neo-Fascist because so much of what is proposed is reminiscent of fascism.

It is also telling that Western businessmen who ostensibly support the idea of the positive effects of competition arising from “free markets” and “free trade” never want it for themselves. They always happily grab a state subsidy or an embargo if it is to their advantage. None of the US airlines had any hesitation in grabbing billions of dollars from the Federal government after 911. Large companies publicly complain of government regulation while secretly welcoming it because they can bear the cost of it more easily than their smaller competitors. Multinationals shamelessly play one country off against another in their search for massive subsidies and other favours before they deign to operate in a country.

Countries play the same game, cheating wherever they can. And the more powerful the state the greater the cheating, both in terms of helping particular industries with direct state aid and in the formulation of the treaties governing world trade. Hence, the USA presents itself as the ultimate champion of free enterprise whilst being both now and throughout its history one of the greatest of protectionists and state subsidisers of its industries – that it is seen widely as an enterprise society is one of the great propaganda triumphs of history. Its behaviour after 911 is symptomatic of the unequal nature of modern “free trade”.

The US not only handed, as mentioned above, billions to its ailing private airlines, but put up protective tariffs to protect its steel produces.

It was ever thus. The two greatest names of the early Industrial Revolution, Josiah Wedgewood and Matthew Boulton, were happy to climb on the Enlightenment bandwagon with its beliefs in the universality of Mankind and advocate lesser tariffs and freer trade -until the proposed freeing threatened their own businesses.

What goes for businessmen goes for the individual worker. Who has ever met someone whose job was threatened by “free trade” speaking in favour of it?

Abe Lincoln’s used to put this question to pro-slavers who said slavery was a boon for the slave because they were provided for and were free of normal responsibilities: “What is this good thing that no one wants for himself?” An equivalent question should be put to the “free traders”.

The truth is simple: “free markets” and “free trade” are simply part of an elite ideology and like all elite ideologies they serve the purposes of the elite first, second and last. Those not of the elite who espouse it act merely as useful idiots to promote the interests of the elite.

Opposition to globalisation should not be a Left or Right issue. The socialist and the Conservative should both resist it because it removes the ability of the electorate to control those with power and the power of their political movements to realise their ends.

The Winter 2011 issue of the Quarterly Review is now available.

Editor Derek Turner: editor@quarterly-review.org
Deputy Editor Leslie Jones: lesliejones@quarterly-review.org

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CONTENTS

Editorial Derek Turner

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The state of the States Peter B. Gemma reviews Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower

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Canadian candour on race and culture Robert Henderson reviews the Fraser Institute’s Effects of Mass Immigration on Canadian Living Standards and Society

Poles apart Mark Wegierski on the recent Polish elections

The charge of the light brigade Sonya Jay Porter on energy-efficient lightbulbs

Now for the tyrants in our heads Horatio Morpurgo on Western views of Islam

A dictionary for the future Michelle Berriedale-Johnson reviews David Fleming’s Lean Logic

The problem with unlimited kindness Patrick Keeney reviews David Stove’s What’s Wrong with Benevolence

Downward mobility Edward Dutton reviews Richard Lynn’s Dysgenics

The endless cycle of war Frank Ellis reviews David Stevenson’s With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918

A J P Taylor: genius or fool? Geoffrey Partington on the famous historian

Uncollected Folk Roy Kerridge on British children’s songs

Taki’s Universe Taki on ethnic parades

Orpheus rising Stoddard Martin reviews Ann Wroe’s Orpheus: The Song of Life

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Cult of beauty, blasted Leslie Jones on the Vorticists

Second Reading Svein Sellanraa on Jeppe of the Hill

Replay Mark Wegierski on Excalibur

POETRY

On an erstwhile editor, feminist Catharine Savage Brosman

Famous horse J. K. Murphy

Anger Niels Hav

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Sample article

Canadian candour on race and culture Robert Henderson reviews the Fraser Institute’s Effects of Mass Immigration on Canadian Living Standards and Society

Edited by Herbert Grubel  - a compilation of essays by  12 authors

Published by the Fraser Institute of Canada  in 2009 ISBN 978-0-88975-246-7

Massive numbers of immigrants who are either unable or unwilling to integrate with the society into which they come; cities increasingly dominated by ethnic and racial ghettos;  laws which grant immigrants rights which make it next to impossible to stop them entering the country or to deport  them once they are there;  employers greedy for cheap labour;  immigrants depressing wages and forcing up native unemployment; immigrants taking more out of the communal national pot in benefits than they put in through taxes;  a political elite which is  sold on the idea that immigration is an unalloyed good at a naïve best and a source of new voters  for parties which support mass immigration at  a venal worst; a bureaucracy which religiously carries out the politically correct  dictates of  the elite embraced  multicultural ethos ; the development of  an “immigration industry” comprised of vested interests such as lawyers, pressure groups, charities; public servants  appointed to act as what are effectively political commissars for multiculturalism; a mainstream media which ceaselessly propagandises on behalf of the wonder of multiculturalism and value of immigration whilst censoring any opposition;  a rabid state-inspired  suppression of  dissidence at any level by a mixture of  laws banning honest discussion of immigration and its consequences  and the engendering of a public culture which puts  anyone who voices anti-immigration views, however cautiously, at risk of losing  their job or political position and to  ostracism from their social circle  if they are judged to have committed a “crime” against multiculturalism.

Welcome to the Canadian experience of the joy of mass immigration. Sounds familiar? It certainly will to British ears, but the same could broadly  be said of any First World country for the globalist ideology has become the creed of elites throughout the First World.   This makes the book generally valuable as a primer on the dangers of mass immigration.  This utility is enhanced  by significant reference being made to immigration as it affects  the  USA, Britain and France.

There are of course differences of detail  between the Canadian and British experience.  Canadians   traditionally have seen themselves as a nation of immigrants whereas the British  have not and do not.  This means that  Canadians have, like Americans,  at least the residue of the sentimental  idea that immigration should be the natural order of things and  that it is somehow wrong to deny  to others what they or their ancestors enjoyed. The Canadian elite have taken this to extremes  according to   Stephen Gallagher of the Canadian International Council because “….more than any other country  Canada has bought into the  cosmopolitan logic that there can exist a ‘civic nationalism in the absence of any ethnic or cultural majority, shared roots or social coherence” (p188). His claim is borne out by the objective evidence of modern Canadian immigration policy and its consequences.

The problem with the “civic nationalism” mentality is it is one thing to have immigration consisting overwhelmingly of people who are broadly  similar in race and culture into the receiving society  - as happened throughout most of Canada’s history  -who  can  assimilate rapidly; quite another to import immigrants in large numbers  who are radically different in race and culture and either cannot or will not assimilate.  That is what has happened to Canada in recent decades.

Over the past quarter of a century  immigrants to Canada have come  overwhelmingly from Asia. The result is that at the last Canadian census  5 million  (16 per cent) out of the Canadian population of 16 million  were  “visible minorities” (p5).   The size of the overall population also counts hugely:  16 per cent of 33 million is considerably more concerning than 16 per cent of, say, Britain’s currently  estimated 62 million.

It might be thought that the geographical vastness of  Canada   would mean there is  not the same sense that the country is being  physically swamped as there is in a geographically small country such as Britain, but  Canada  is a very urbanised country with   25 million Canadians  living in towns or cities and most  immigrants  are concentrated  in a few places.   60 per cent of the  5 million “visible minorities”  live in the Metropolitan areas of Toronto and Vancouver (p5).  In Toronto  in 2001  those classified as  “English (Anglos ) “only  formed a majority in  in a quarter of metropolitan “census tracts” (p180).  The sense of conquest by stealth is as apparent in those particular places as it would be in London or Birmingham.

Reckless Canadian immigration  took off in the  1990s. In 1990 the annual limit was raised to 250,000 by  a Progressive Conservative government with the  Minister responsible, Barbara McDougal, arguing that this would help the party with the ethnic  minority vote, the clear implication being that a large portion of the additional immigrants would be black or Asian (p4). Since then  immigration has averaged nearly 1 per cent  of the population (p4. )Things worsened after the 2001 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act was passed.  This  set selection criteria for immigrants without putting any limit on the numbers who could come in. As there were vastly more people who could meet the criteria than  Canada  could readily accommodate and there was no flexibility to adjust to changes in economic conditions generally or to  the Canadian labour market in particular, the system soon ran into trouble. A backlog of would-be immigrants waiting to be processed formed which is estimated to reach 1.5 million by 2012 (p7) to which did not include refugees who number is considerable.  Canadian asylum policy became so lax in the 1980s that over the past 25 years more than  700,000 asylum seekers were admitted (p14).  Canada has taken steps to amend the  Immigration Act,, but even if those are effective the existing backlog of 1.5 million will be processed under the old rules (p5).

All but one the most sacred cows of the pro-immigration, pro-multicultural lobby are precisely dissected before being put out of their misery.  Overall, immigrants  do not add to Canada’s per capita wealth (p104), not least because less than 20% of immigrants come in based on their work skills or training (p3);  cultural diversity does not equal an enhanced  society  but a divided one with an ever weakening national identity and  bringing in huge numbers of  young immigrants will not solve the problem of an ageing Canadian population – Robert Bannerjee and William Robson (chapter 7)  estimate that to even stabilise the  Old Age Dependency ratio – the ratio between those of working age  to those over retirement age – and those   from what it is at  present would take decades of annual  immigration amounting each year to 3% of the Canadian population (p142). The effect of that would be to effectively end any concept of a Canadian nation as it has been and still largely is.  It would be a classic case of  the transformation of quantity into quality.  A place called Canada might still exist but  he  existing Canadian nation would be no more.

The sacred cow which remains standing if more than a little nervous,  is the question of the incompatibility of races.  Nonetheless ,  some of the contributors (especially those in chapters 9-12)  come close to venturing onto this currently forbidden territory, for example :-

“..the analysis of Sammuel Huntingdon (2004), who argues that a nation is the function of the identity of its majority population  and in the United States this identity is rooted  in the original founding Anglo-Protestant  culture and a value system described as the American Creed.” (Stephen Gallagher P188).

“What guarantee do we have that diversity in itself is a desirable objective? At what point does diversity mutate into a form of colonisation? (James Bissett p6).

The book is also good at flagging up consequences which are not immediately obvious. For example, Marcel Merette  makes the important point that as higher skilled immigrants increase the differential in wages between the skilled and the unskilled shrinks  (p159). This discourages  Canadians from taking the trouble to acquire skills because the advantage of doing so would be lessened.

Nor is any change in the type of immigrants without ill consequences. For example, if immigrants are restricted to the young (which might be thought a god thing in an ageing society) that  disadvantages the native young because it means they face greater competition for jobs from the immigrants in their age group.

There is also the effect on the one long-standing substantial Canadian minority, the French-speaking  Quebeccers . They are increasingly finding their language and culture undermined both by the presence of immigrants who will not integrate and by  having to compete for attention and privileges from the majority population with the new minority groups.

Rather touchingly, Gordon Gibson (chapter 11)  imagines that the position is much healthier in Britain because there is at least growing public discussion here and  an organisation such as MigrationWatch UK  to ostensibly provide a  focus of concern about immigration (the  final  essay in the book is by the head of MigrationWatch UK  Sir Andrew Green).   But public debate can be not merely useless but positively harmful if it is controlled.

It is true that there is vastly more  public discussion in Britain now than there was under  the Blair Government when any many of immigration and its consequences brought squeals of “racism” from politicians, the left-liberal dominated media and any pressure group or individual  able to climb onto the “anti-racist” bandwagon.   But public discussion does not equal action and  despite Cameron’s  Coalition  Government’s rhetoric about cutting net immigration to Britain “from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands a year” , the  numbers remain much the same as under the Blair and Brown governments.

The extent of  the growing disquiet amongst Canadians is indicated by the very existence of the book.  The editor has brought together a  wide-ranging group of contributors:  economists, political scientists, think tank members and retired ambassadors. These are not the class of people who would  commonly be found  publicly expressing  concern  about immigration,  for they are by background part of the broad elite which has embraced the multiculturalist  ideal.  That they are willing to write pretty forthrightly about the dangers speaks volumes in itself.  The message it sends is that they are so worried by the observable effects of mass migration that they are willing to put their heads above the parapet  and risk, at the least, social, political and academic ostracisation.

The failure to address the question of race as a social separator is frustrating but understandable in the present politically correct circumstances, but it cannot be ignored forever. Those who say physical differences in race are unimportant and  that race is merely a social construct should reflect upon the fact that if there was no natural mechanism to stop humans of different physical types breeding as  freely together  as those of a similar physical type then there would be no broad physical groups which we call races . These group separations cannot be ascribed to humans evolving in separation from one another  because  throughout history there has been an immense amount of movement of peoples  with every  opportunity for inter-breeding. We see the same thing happening today in places such as London where,  despite the open invitation to inter-racial breeding and the incessant multi-culturist propaganda over several generations, a surprisingly  small percentage of the population does interbreed.

I can unreservedly recommend this book because it provides almost all the ammunition needed to  refute the multiculturalist propaganda . It is not the easiest of reads  because most of the contributors take an  academic approach, which means a fair number of  charts and tables plus a decent dollop of jargon. But the book is  not very heavy going and its message is  the most important which can be given to the developed world at present: guard your own societies against this surreptitious form of conquest or  they will die.

The credit crunch: an effect not a cause

Robert Henderson

 How did we get  into this economic hole?

What we are experiencing is a direct consequence of the dominant economic ideology of the age, laissez faire, an ideology which underpins the general political ideology of political elites in the West, the form of liberal internationalism we call globalism.

This neo-Liberal mentality has brought us to the brink of what is probably the most dangerous economic crisis since the Depression. Perhaps it may turn out to be even more disastrous because countries throughout the world (including Britain) are now so much less self-sufficient than they were in the 1930s, while the scope and speed of communications are beyond anything in existence during the Depression.

Most problematic are the immense and entirely novel opportunities permitted by digital technology, a technological development particularly pertinent to the money markets which are at the root of the credit crunch. No one remotely understands the medium-term let alone the long-term implications for the money markets of the creation of a universal market for every form of financial instrument, which is what the Internet potentially provides, or its potential for destabilising currencies. All that can be done at present is to guess, and guessing when the lives and prosperity of entire populations are at stake is a criminally reckless gamble.

 The consequences  of Thatcherism 

There have been outbreaks of  free market and free trade ideological  dominance in Britain from  the 1840s onwards,  but  since  Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 the worship of the laissez faire god has become more devout than ever.

Thatcher introduced something quite new. For the first time in history, a British prime minister and government actively welcomed the wholesale destruction of strategically important industries on the grounds that they could not compete. The doctrine of comparative advantage was pursued by the government in an advanced economy to a degree never previously seen. At the same time she emasculated the unions and began

recklessly selling the family silver with  her introduction of  the idea of privatisation which rapidly placed  almost all of the important nationalised industries in private hands.

Mrs Thatcher was also responsible for one great political act of folly in the name of laissez faire when she successfully fought for the Single European Market. The consequence of this was to rob Britain of its ability to favour its own industry economically (beyond what was already being done) and gave any citizen of another EU country the same rights as a British citizen to be employed in Britain or for any foreign corporation to bid for any public sector contract offered in Britain.

Her ultimate triumph was not only to drive the anti-laissez faire strain from her own party, ( a strain which had survived during previous bouts of  laissez faire dominance) but to eventually force the rest of the British political mainstream to follow suit. The upshot today is that the three major political parties in Britain have as articles of faith both a commitment to free trade and the belief that private enterprise is preferable to public provision in virtually every area or life.

The latter belief has created a novel situation in Britain. Great swathes of economic activity which were once controlled by the state – everything from the great nationalised industries to prisons – have been either sold off or contracted out to private companies.  Once privatised, these erstwhile public operations have become prey to foreigners. Because of post-1979 British governments’ commitment to laissez faire, anyone is allowed to purchase any British company, no matter its strategic importance, and most public contracts are given to the highest bidder regardless of their provenance. Nor in most instances (because of Britain’s membership of the EU) can the privatised industries be subsidised by the taxpayer, a particularly telling restriction in the case of the old public utilities when energy prices are rocketing.

Today, British utilities such as gas, electricity and water are largely in foreign hands, our major airports are owned by Spaniards, we no longer have serious mining or shipbuilding industries, and our largest native owned car manufacturer is the company which produces the Reliant Robin. In addition, many of the iconic names of British business – Bentley, Roll-Royce cars, Tetley Tea, ICI, Cunard, British Steel – have fallen to foreign buyers, while the supposed flagship of the British economy – the City of London – has seen the wholesale transfer of British merchant banks to foreign ownership. The present government has even stood sanguinely by while the London Stock Exchange has come under persistent foreign take-over attempts.

What the credit crunch  is not about

It is not about levels of government spending, although that is probably the next great economic shock which will hit Britain as the economy slows, tax revenues stagnate, the  Public Sector Borrowing Requirement grows and the Enron-style ‘off the books accounting’ involved in the Public Private Partnership (PPP) and Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes becomes impossible to hide.

What this crisis is about is the virtually unrestrained working of private enterprise, which has created a titanic pile of indebtedness ranging from dangerously generous mortgages to unsecured debt, much of it promiscuously and casually granted with a significant proportion going to people providing false information.

At the heart of the crisis lies the bundling of risky loans (especially mortgages in the United States – the so-called sub-prime mortgages) into financial packages. These have  been sold on and treated not as toxic debt but much better quality debt, debt which could be used by the banks as collateral against which to borrow. Eventually the game was up as people (especially in the United States) began defaulting on payments and banks stopped lending freely to one another because much of the debt they held was seen for what it was, toxic. Banks had to write off bewilderingly large amounts in bad debts and their store of useable collateral to set against future loans was much reduced.

This crisis is a peculiarly difficult thing for free marketers to explain. They cannot rationally blame it on too much government interference, because British financial institutions have been allowed to run their affairs largely unchecked by government for the better part of a quarter of a century, a process begun by the Thatcher governments when they threw away credit controls, permitted the de-mutualisation of building societies and their transformation into banks (which placed them under less rigorous rules regarding what they could borrow and lend) and generally slackened financial controls and state oversight.

These practices have been assiduously followed by successor British governments, who have failed to control the development of exotic financial instruments such as derivatives and by relinquishing the power to set Bank Rate (Bank Rate being, in theory at least, set by a body independent of the government, the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Bank of England) and by embracing fiscal restraints imposed by the EU, such as restrictions on state aid to industry and restrictions on the setting of VAT rates.

The upshot is that the present government is left with only two very general means of controlling the economy, the variation of taxation and of government borrowing and spending. These are hopelessly inadequate instruments to deal efficiently with the multifarious financial problems which arise in an advanced economy. For example, if  credit is growing too fast, raising taxes to take money out of the economy may actually fuel further borrowing, at least in the short term, as people try to service the debts they have and to maintain their standard of living, while the additional taxation will have the unwanted extra effect of depressing the economy.

Alternatively, cutting taxes could conceivably reduce borrowing, although human nature being what it is people might actually feel more confident about the future and hence even more willing to borrow. However, even if such action reduces borrowing it will tend to worsen inflation because the amount of money put into the economy will probably be larger than any reduction in borrowing.

The setting of Bank Rate by the MPC is arguably a third weapon in the government’s armoury, because the MPC works to a narrow government set remit of controlling inflation within certain limits and the government has a considerable say, both directly and indirectly, in the appointments to the MPC. The behaviour of the MPC in crisis conditions suggests that they will do what they think politicians want rather than sticking to their remit. For example, they have dropped interest rates in the past eight months when inflation is rising. However, even if the setting of Bank Rate is a third weapon in the hands of the British government, it suffers from the same deficiency as the other two, namely, that it is too broad a measure to deal with many economic difficulties. Worse, since the credit crunch began, the interest rates charged by the banks and other lenders (especially on mortgages) have not shadowed the reductions in Bank Rate as history suggests they should do, but have stayed stubbornly and significantly above Bank Rate.

Of course, all economic interventions by governments have consequences which go beyond the narrow desired ends of the intervention, but the more economic weapons in a government’s hands, the greater the likelihood that they will be able to find one which is best suited to solve a particular problem with the minimum of unwonted side effects. For example, if the multiplier of salary for mortgages had remained by law no more than two times salary throughout the past quarter century, the housing market would have been pegged back by what most people could afford to borrow.

The money supply

There is a vital technical reason why government should control credit: it increases the money supply. To understand why this is of fundamental  importance, it is necessary to comprehend  what constitutes money, a concept which is far from straightforward in the modern world and growing more complex by the day.

A currency based on precious metals formed into coins is a relatively simple thing, because it is to a large degree self-regulating. The practices of debasing the quality of the metal or of clipping the edges of coins to remove some of the metal may be common, but such things can be tested objectively by anyone with the requisite knowledge, for example, by weighing the coin.  Moreover, the amount of physical money is limited by the availability of the precious metal(s) used in the currency.

Once a country moves from a physical currency based entirely on a precious metal to one which remains, in theory at least, fully convertible to the precious metal but which uses paper money alongside coins made of the precious metal, government’s role is expanded in importance because it is ultimately the guarantor of the currency’s integrity.

The final stage of physical money is when the link between a precious metal and the currency is broken and the entire currency rests upon trust. At that point a currency is entirely at the mercy of governments because there is no natural restraint on how much money is printed or coined in base metals.

Describing physical money is the easy bit. The concept of money becomes complicated the first time someone makes a loan. That has the same effect as someone depositing money with a bank: where one person had the money before, now two have it. Once a society develops a banking system, government needs to intervene both because of potential fraud and an expansion of the money supply. That applies in principle even in a supposedly 100% precious metal based currency, because even then there are primitive financial instruments such as bills of exchange which effectively act as money.

The more advanced a society is, the less important physical cash becomes as the instruments by which the money supply is multiplied increases. To see what a confused state we are in today we need only reflect on some of the various measures of the money supply which have been used in modern times in attempts to quantify the money supply:

1        M0 is the total of coins and notes in circulation plus banks’ deposits at the Bank of England.

2        M1 is M0 plus current account deposits

3        M3 is M1 plus all other types of bank accounts (deposit accounts, foreign currency accounts, public sector accounts)

But there are many other financial products which none of these measures catches that

arguably have aspects of money. Anything which can be readily traded for money can in effect be used as money in certain circumstances: shares, the vast array of derivatives, debt itself. For example, if I wish to buy a house in theory I could do so by swapping shares I own for the house.

The Northern Rock Debacle

September 2007 saw the first run on a British bank since the 19^th Century with people literally queuing round the block to get their money out. A converted building society, Northern Rock, had been operating a reckless business plan whereby their core business of mortgages was predominantly funded not by deposits but by borrowing on the money markets. When the credit market tightened, Northern Rock were left stranded and were forced to go to the Bank of England (BoE) as the lender of the last resort, which made a loan of 25 billion to them.

Once that news became public, the panic began and the government was forced to guarantee all Northern Rock deposits which committed the taxpayer to a further £25 billion, a total of £50 billion including the loan. The Government then left the bank in limbo until February 2008 as it desperately tried to find a private buyer for the bank. Eventually, it had to admit defeat and nationalised the bank, exposing the taxpayer to another £50 billion of risk as it took over responsibility for the bank’s mortgage book. The taxpayer is now in for a potential liability of £100 billion. To put the scale of the risk in context, the  Treasury  Red Book forecast  for total government expenditure in 2008/9 is £617 billion, so the Northern Rock risk amounts to around 18% of total Government expenditure for this financial year.

All this is worrying enough but just imagine what will happen if a few more banks go belly-up. It is as reckless an act by a chancellor as you can find in British history, for not only are massive liabilities being put around the neck of the entire population, a precedent has been set. If other banks (and quite possibly much larger banks) get into the same position, it is difficult to see how the government could underwrite another Northern Rock let alone one of the clearing banks, especially in the light of the extensive borrowing facilities the BoE has extended to the banks generally. Of course, we are constantly told by the government that the taxpayer is not really at risk as the assets of Northern Rock are solid and that the loans extended to banks generally are held against sound collateral and will cost the banks a pretty penny in a premium on the interest rate they pay. Frankly, why should we believe them when the government cannot even give a guarantee of when the Northern Rock liabilities will be cleared.

Yet it is difficult to see what else the chancellor could have done. If Northern Rock had folded, the rest of the banking sector would have been placed in real danger. The position was not helped by the drawn-out attempt to find a private buyer for Northern Rock (a symptom of the laissez faire mindset of the Government), but that was merely a detail, not the heart of the problem. Had the government nationalised the bank immediately the problem was known, the liabilities would still be on the taxpayer. The scandal is that the lax credit situation was allowed to arise, something which could have been prevented by proper government behaviour over the past quarter of a century.

The developing crisis

Not only have governments been forced in practice to abandon laissez faire, there have been few if any calls for the central banks to stand back and do nothing. Even in the case of Northern Rock the supporters of the “invisible hand” have been loath to let it go to the wall.

Faced with the dangerous mess they created, the banks and big business asked the government to rescue them. The consequence is that the ordinary person gets the worst of all worlds, for they not only have to suffer a contracting of the credit market, but they also have to fund the rescue of financial institutions, either directly in the case of Northern Rock by nationalisation or indirectly through the extension of credit by the Bank of England (as lender of the last resort) to introduce money into the market for the financial institutions to borrow. The ordinary citizen also has to pay in terms of lost jobs, lower pay, poorer conditions and higher prices.

Commercial banks throughout the developed world have run squealing for help to governments, while the major Western central banks have reacted with behaviour ranging from the dramatic to the reluctant. The Federal Reserve has led the way, slashing interest rates dramatically and making tens of billions of dollars in loans to the banks available to the money markets, much of it on distinctly questionable collateral. The European Central Bank (ECB) has been more cautious on interest rates but has also made vast sums in loans available to banks.

Britain has somewhat tardily followed suit, reducing Bank Rate by three quarters of a per cent since September and belatedly providing billions in loans to the banks on collateral of ever decreasing value. The disquieting thing is that no matter what action has been taken, the flow of credit remains stubbornly locked and governments, including Britain’s, are reduced to throwing more and more money at the banks with less and less assurance that the money the taxpayer is risking will ever be repaid.

On 19 April it was reported (for example, The Daily Telegraph) that not only will the Bank of England inject a further £50 billion into the market with the banks using some of the sub-prime mortgage products they invested as collateral, but that the British government will also underwrite credit card debts held by the banks – all this on top of the eye-watering Northern Rock liabilities.

The most frightening thing about the crisis

The truly frightening thing about this crisis is that the people who are supposed best to understand the financial markets, the central bankers, are completely at sea. The Bank of England (BoE) has admitted that its understanding of the money markets is inadequate. Amid accusations that it failed to respond quickly enough to the crisis at Northern Rock, the Bank has admitted that it is struggling to determine the impact of the credit meltdown on the economy.  Charles Bean, chief economist, said assessing conditions in the economy is “subject to considerable uncertainty”. Writing in the Bank’s quarterly bulletin, Mr Bean also stated “One important step in analysing monetary demand and supply shocks involves improving the Bank’s information about credit conditions”.

The Bank’s admission that it needs to improve its understanding of the credit markets comes as John McFall, chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, voiced his frustration following the appearance of Bank of England staff before the Parliamentary watchdog. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr McFall said: “The responses that people gave were unconvincing as a whole. I’m looking at the system and asking the question: Is it working? And it’s not working” (The Daily Telegraph, “We don’t understand the markets, BoE admits”, by Jonathan Sibun, 24 September 2007).

A failure of oversight by central banks both here and abroad has been compounded by the long period of very low interest rates led by the central bank rates of the leading currencies, most notably by the Federal Reserve (“the Fed”) in the USA, which kept money too cheap for a long time, thus encouraging people to borrow. The prime author of this cheap money was Alan Greenspan, who was treated with quasi-religious awe by politicians and so-called financial experts alike while he was running the Fed. Come the credit crunch and the knives came out for him, vide the famous American monetarist Professor Anna Schwartz: “It is clear that monetary policy was too accommodative. Rates of one per cent were bound to encourage all kinds of risky behaviour…..the Fed failed to confront something that was evident. It can’t be blamed on global events” (Daily Telegraph, 13 January 2008).

The inability of everyone from bankers to governments to provide a solution or even understand what is happening is palpable. In April, Gordon Brown ordered a “summit” with bankers to discuss a way out of the mess and his chancellor Alistair Darling railed against the irresponsibility of the banks for reckless lending, carefully overlooking government’s irresponsibility in this area. Massive amounts of public money have been ploughed in ever more desperately, without the squeeze on lending loosening – “The Bank confirmed it would swap treasury bills for premium asset backed debt owned by the banks. Banks have six months to use the facility. The swap is for 12 months and banks can ask for two year-long extensions, making a total of three years….. The Bank has put no ceiling on the scheme” (Daily Telegraph, 22 April 2008, “Banks hail £50bn boost to liquidity”). That it has had no effect is unsurprising, because the banks have used the money to shore up the holes in their balance sheets.

The effects of the credit crisis

The entire economy is rudely affected by a sudden shortage of credit. Apart from hyperinflation, there is no more toxic disease which can affect a modern economy, especially one dependent on consumer spending. The reduced availability of credit at any price causes an economic slowdown. More expensive credit causes people and organisations to draw in their borrowing horns. The reduction in the amount of money available to spend reduces demand. Reduced demand and more expensive credit drives down profits at best and puts companies out of business at worst. Wages are depressed and jobs are lost. This reduces demand even further.

People habituated to debt find they cannot service what they owe, and default. That is especially important in an economy like modern Britain’s where a large number of people have built their lives on a continuous stream of credit. Things which are heavily dependent on credit, most notably property, lose value. People either cannot pay their mortgage or find them selves unable to sell at all or that the price they could get would be much less than they owe on the property. Even those who are do not end up in a position of negative equity find they have great difficulty in selling both because prospective buyers cannot get a mortgage or because other people are unwilling to sell. Those wishing to move, especially if they wish to trade up, find they cannot easily get a new and larger mortgage.

Britain is more exposed to recession than most because her economy is built primarily on consumer spending, much of which is on non-necessities. Such an economy is inherently more fragile than one which is primarily rooted in the production and consumption of necessities because it is very responsive to changes in economic circumstances. In the language of economists, demand for much of what is purchased in Britain is very elastic.

The economic fragility of most people’s lives

Ever since Harold MacMillan famously declared in 1959 that “We’ve never had it so good”, British politicians have been religiously telling Britons that they are getting wealthier. To support this claim they point to such things as the growth in owner-occupation, the myriad of electronic consumer goods, holidays taken abroad and cost of living indices such as the Retail Price Index (RPI) and the CPI.

Most people have tended to take this at face value until fairly recently. They have ignored the fact if it takes two incomes to maintain a family where one was sufficient before, that is not wealthier. That if most people cannot afford to get on the housing ladder when once they could, that is not wealthier. That if the price of most essentials is rocketing that is not wealthier. And that if the Government uses bogus cost of living indices which ignore housing costs and council tax that is not a true measure of purchasing power.

Data released by the Office of National Statistics showed that household incomes fell last year in real terms, and have risen by only £2.25 a year on average since 2001. The reality is worse because these figures are based on the bogus CPI measure, which excludes housing  costs and council tax . In addition, a majority of the British population do not have savings which would allow them to survive for two months if they lost their jobs, and a large segment of the population lives on incomes well below the average wage, which is still below £30,000. A true recession will consequently hit millions of people very hard indeed.

How do we escape this mess?

The honest answer is there is no certain escape. Nor is a ‘soft’ economic landing likely. Circumstances are forcing more prudent lending behaviour onto private financial institutions, with substantial deposits being required before mortgages are granted, the feckless multipliers of six or seven times salary for mortgages vanishing, credit card limits being reduced, cards withdrawn and new card applications being refused. Unsecured personal loans are being subjected to the same type of scrutiny. The problem is that this is all happening in a rush which creates a tremendous shock to the economic system rather than a controlled decline of credit.

All this will probably cause a sharp contraction in the economy.  This creates a dilemma for the BoE. Its remit is to keep inflation close to 2% as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Inflation is significantly above that and showing every sign of rising. According to its remit, the Bank should be raising rates not lowering them. Yet the BoE has cut Bank Rate by three quarters of one percent already and is being urged universally by private business and many politicians to cut further and quickly. The likely outcome of such a policy would be our old friend stagflation. Indicatively, the growth in UK output was down to a miserly 0.4% in the first quarter of 2008.

The great problem is the dependence of housing to drive the economy. There is consequently no painless way out of our present predicament. If house prices are kept high by low levels of house building and continuing mass immigration an entire generation will find them selves stranded in a no man’s land where they cannot find good rented accommodation at a reasonable price.

Contrariwise, if there is a correction which brings housing within the reach of first-time buyers we shall have a massive problem of negative equity which will mean existing home owners cannot move and if their homes are re-possessed, being burdened with ongoing debts as their homes are sold for less than they owe. That is the bind governments over the past quarter century have got us into.

What can be done to make a safer future?

There needs to be a sea-change in the mentality of politicians. They need to recognise that government has a vital role in controlling the economy, not via the heavy hand of nationalisation or hideously complicated regulatory regimes, but by simple and effective measures such as restrictions on credit and the use of exotic financial instruments and the protection of strategic industries such as farming and energy supply.

Back to the future is the answer. We need to create a different moral climate. As little as 30 years ago, people still tended to look upon debt as something to be avoided. For the most part people saved up for things they wanted. Part of that caution was enforced because credit was nowhere as readily available as it is now although we were already into the age of the credit card. But much of the frugality was simply cultural; people had been brought up to feel debt was something loathsome and bankruptcy next door to theft. This was a Britain where the morally vital mechanism of shame still had its place.

The credit which was on offer almost always came with some strong strings attached. If you wanted a mortgage you had to save with a building society for quite some time to establish your credentials. When a mortgage was eventually granted, the amount you could borrow was restricted both absolutely (there was an upper ceiling of £13,000 in the 1970s) and by sensible multipliers of household income (commonly twice income and often the mortgage multiplier was applied only to the main wage earner’s pay). 100% mortgages or anything approaching them were not to be found. A deposit of 10% of the property’s price would have been the minimum required and in many cases more would have been asked. Bank loans required a similar establishment of creditworthiness over a decent period and credit card limits were modest. If anything was bought on hire purchase, a substantial deposit was required. The consequence of such a regime was that far fewer people got into serious financial trouble than today.

1        Here accordingly are a few examples of what might be done. Mortgages – the multiplier of salary used to calculate mortgages should be a maximum of three and a minimum deposit of ten per cent required. The re-mortgaging of owner-occupied property to release capital and buy-to-let mortgages should be outlawed.

2        Hire purchase – a minimum of 20% deposit with the monthly repayment no more than ten per cent of the monthly net pay (net pay to be that left after deduction tax, National Insurance and the repayment of any existing debts).

3        Personal loans other than mortgages – a maximum of 10% of net income.

There is also a need to tighten up checks on creditworthiness. Lenders have been incredibly lax about the information that prospective borrowers supply to them. That is a particular problem with credit card issuers who tend to accept whatever the lender says, but it is also a significant problem with mortgages with people allowed to self-certificate their earnings in some cases. The laxity has its roots in the belief by the lenders that they can reliably calculate the percentage of borrowers who are poor credit risks who will default and in the case of loans secured against property, that house prices will continue to rise rapidly, thus increasing the equity the borrower has in the property. The events of the past year have shown that lenders cannot reliably make calculations of defaulters nor rely on house price inflation to increase equity.

What now?

Is there a chance that the laissez-faire mentality of the elite will change and that common sense will prevail? Or will we stagger on in this ideological straightjacket until a true catastrophe strikes?

On the level of common humanity the hope must be that the crisis is contained reasonably quickly, although I think that unlikely. (I am writing this article in May 2008. By the time it is published the danger of a full blown depression may have been averted, although that is improbable because after more than eight months of increasingly desperate governmental pump priming around the developed world there is no sign that the credit crunch is lessening, let alone coming to an end. )

But there is danger in a rapid resolution for if it happens the underlying reasons for this economic trauma may not be addressed by those responsible for the operation of the economy and things will go on as before until the next crisis occurs. The credit crunch is simply the latest in a line of dangerous economic crises stretching back a century an a half which were brought about by the same fundamental problem, the abdication of government responsibility for the economy.

The English origins and value of the USA’s Second Amendment

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” (American Constitution Second Amendment)

American liberals have a problem. They wish to remove the constitutional right to bear arms from the American people.  Their problem is the Second Amendment. To honestly achieve their aim they would have to amend the Constitution. But such amendments are difficult going on impossible.

To initiate amendments, either two thirds of both houses of Congress must vote for them or two thirds of the State legislatures must call for a convention for proposing amendments. That is just the proposal process. This is followed by acceptance by the individual States. In the former case, three quarters of the States must ratify the amendment individually: in the latter three quarters of the convention must vote for the amendment.

Those are stringent terms to meet in any political system, but particularly so in a state as vast and diverse as the USA and with such a strong tradition of regional government. Add to those structural difficulties the existence of widespread gun ownership and powerful lobbies such as the National Rifle Association and the mountain becomes practically  insurmountable by honest means. So what does the liberal do? What he always does when he wants to ban something which is permitted by the Constitution: he pretends that the Constitution does not mean what it manifestly says.

In the case of the Second Amendment the attack takes the form of pretending that the Amendment was merely meant to provide for a militia rather than affirming and protecting the right of people to arm themselves individually. Happily, there is plenty of ammunition with which to shoot down this claim: in the Constitution itself, in the historical circumstances in which the Constitution and Amendment were drafted, in the very logic of a militia.

The claim that the amendment is simply to safeguard the right of America’s military forces to keep and bear arms is self-evidently absurd. If true all the amendment would mean is that the federal government could not disarm the militia soldiers who represented the majority of its armed forces. It would be practically a redundant clause.

The fact that the Amendment states that the right is not merely to bear but to keep arms might be thought by most honest folk to be a pretty clear indication that the private
ownership of weapons was what the framers of the Amendment had in mind. Moreover, what would be the point of the Amendment if it was not to confer such a right to the
individual? Any other permission to keep and bear arms must of necessity be dependent upon permission from those with political power and authority. It would thus again be a futile and redundant clause. It is noteworthy that nowhere in the Constitution, amended or otherwise, is any instruction on the exercise of such state power given or hinted at.

When judging the intent of the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (which contains the Second Amendment) it is necessary to know the general social and intellectual backcloth against which they worked. They were heir to the English tradition of liberty and government by consent rather than pure tyranny. The Americans who rose against the England of King George 111 did so because they considered themselves part of the tradition of English liberty. In seeking independence, they were not repudiating that tradition but in their own minds returning to what they imagined was the true path of English liberty which had become corrupted in England. It is against this ancient English tradition that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights must be set.

What does the unamended Constitution of 1787 say about the protection of the newly formed United States? Section 8 of Article 1 grants to Congress the right:

To raise and support Armies, but no appropriation of Money for that Use shall be for a longer term than two years.

“To provide and maintain a Navy.

“To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.

“To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.

“To provide for organising, arming and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.

The first point to note is that the Army and the militias are clearly distinguished as separate entities. The second is the time limit on the power to raise money for armies. This is highly significant. There was a very long tradition in England of professional standing armies being heartily mistrusted as the tool of despots. It was the attempt to
institute a standing army of thirty thousand men which was one of the main reasons why King James 11 was overthrown in 1688. Armies were raised for wars, but in peacetime militias were the order of the day. Indeed, until the first world war England never had a great standing army. (The English tradition is also echoed in the absence of any time restriction placed on the funding of a navy by the Founding Fathers. The English never feared a strong navy as such because it could not be used against them).

With this English mistrust of standing armies and reliance on militias went a tradition of not merely allowing weapons to be generally held, but of such a practice being  positively encouraged to ensure the defence of the country. Feudal military obligation was in fact built on the private provision not merely of men but of arms and equipment. In late medieval times statutes were enacted to encourage long bow practice. The Spanish Armada which attempted to invade England in 1588 was repulsed by a mixed English fleet of private and Royal ships.

Perhaps the strongest single circumstantial reason for dismissing the liberal’s interpretation of the Second Amendment are the well attested motives for those promoting
the Bill of Rights. Those who pushed for the first ten Amendments did so because they believed that the rights and liberties of the individual were not guarded explicitly
enough by the original Constitution. Thus ,if we are to believe the liberal, we must accept the truly fantastic explanation that in the case of the Second Amendment the
protection of individual liberty was utterly cast aside without reason, public acknowledgement or, most compellingly, any contemporary comment, adverse or otherwise.

There is also a question of simple practicality. When the Amendment was passed (December 1791), the infant federal government simply did not have the means to finance the arming of militias. Thus, they can only have envisaged private arms being put to the service of the state, a tradition which as previously mentioned had a long history in
both England and the Thirteen Colonies. Moreover, subsequent history bore this out, for the greater number of troops employed by the American Union in its wars against Britain and Mexico in the first half of the 19th century came from militias. In an age of minimal government, the Second Amendment underpinned the whole scheme of national defence.

Does the Second Amendment allow for any government abridgement of the right to keep and bear arms? It might just be possible to sustain an argument that a register of guns would not breach the Second Amendment provided there was no restriction on the right to own and bear weapons, that is no person could be denied the right either to appear on the register or bear arms. But even here it could be argued with some force that the registration of weapons – particularly if it required complicated bureaucratic procedures – was an interference with the general right to bear arms. Moreover, if a right is general and absolute, it is by no means clear how any procedure initiated by and insisted upon by the state could be legitimate because by definition there can be no legitimate restriction of the right.

Americans produce a multitude of reasons for retaining their guns. They argue on the grounds of personal liberty. They argue on the grounds of deterring crime. They argue on the grounds of personal protection. They argue on a dozen and one grounds. This to my mind is a mistake. Good causes do not need to be bolstered by a battery of  arguments. Good causes need but one argument. The only necessary argument for private gun ownership is in the Second Amendment: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed.” The key words here are “a free state”. That phrase cannot mean solely to maintain the state in its independence from other states, because that could as well apply to a dictatorship as well as a democracy. In the context of the reasons for the American War of Independence ”a free state” must also mean the maintenance of the freedom of the citizens from the oppressive power of the state. That after all was what the whole breach with England was about. Moreover, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are written in a manner which actively extols the individual over the state, viz: “We the people of the United States in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” (preamble to the Constitution).

The general motivation for demanding gun control is not the saving of lives. (Its only effect in England has been to leave guns predominately in the hands of criminals and the state). Liberals wish to remove the general right of gun ownership in America for the same reason that they wish to interfere with peoples’ lives generally: they are natural authoritarians. They know that their philosophy (such as it is) conflicts utterly with human nature and are thus driven to suppress any resistance or dissent through the intimidation of political correctness and the practical control of public life. The disarming of the American people is part of this oppressive strategy.

The desire to restrict the holding of arms has always come from those who wished to not only monopolise power but to do so on their own terms. When the crossbow was invented, the medieval nobility attempted to ban it because it reduced the effectiveness of the armoured and mounted knight. Failing in that, they attempted to restrict, with some success, its ownership to people they could control. The Samurai in Japan enforced ruthlessly their rule that only Samurai should carry swords. When the demobbed conscripts of British Army returned to Britain after the First World War, the British government passed the first serious laws regulating gun ownership not because they feared that the British would begin to murder one another in great numbers but because they feared Red revolution.

If Americans wish to retain what is left of their freedom, they will do well to keep the Second Amendment intact. This means not merely retaining the status quo, but the mounting of legal challenges to every restriction on the holding and bearing of arms in the United States. The plain and hideously inescapable fact is that every attempt to restrict both gun ownership (or indeed any other weapon) and the bearing of arms made since the inauguration of the United States has been illegal. That applies whether or not the interference with the Constitutional right was undertaken at the federal or the state level. I suggest that legal action should consist not merely of Constitutional challenges, but civil actions for damages against the federal and appropriate state governments by those actively and personally denied the right to bear arms.



The Autumn issue of the Quarterly Review is out

 

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CARTOON BY MITCH DAVIES

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CONTENTS

Editorial Derek Turner Please click here

A conservative maverick in the Antipodes – Edwin Dyga interviews Senator Cory Bernardi

9/11 – the rage, the pride and the disastrous policies Mark G. Brennan on the scars of 11 September 2001 Please click here

The “Universal Class” and unintended consequences Geoffrey Partington on Hegel’s legacy

The Lords Spiritual, Temporal – and invaluable Merlin Sudeley on the hereditary peers in Parliament

Immigration – the reserve army of capital Alain de Benoist on big business and immigration

Socialist sociology Robert Henderson reviews Matthew Goodwin’s New British Fascism

The Churchill Memorandum – gift of the Gabb Edward Dutton reviews Sean Gabb’s The Churchill Memorandum

Correspondence – Ewa M. Thompson, David Ashton, Luise Hemmer Pihl

Taki’s Universe Taki on Jackie Kennedy

L’affaire Dreyfus – fraternité deferred Leslie Jones reviews Ruth Harris’s The Man on Devil’s Island

Jean Améry and multiple identities Stoddard Martin reviews Irène Heidelberger-Leonard’s The Philosopher of Auschwitz

The writes of Stravinsky Stuart Millson reviews Keller and Cosman’s Stravinsky – The Music-Maker

The Symbolist – Jean Moréas’ life and legacy Nick Louras

Replay – Soylent Green Mark Wegierski

Flight Announcement Peter Stark

——————————————————————————————————————————————–

Sample article

New British Fascism

Rise of the British National Party

Matthew J Goodwin

Routledge

New British Fascism comes in the guise of an objective academic study, replete with tables and charts and a fair dollop of dry analysis.  But that is camouflage  for  the  author’s  liberal-left  prejudices, although it is probable that Goodwin, as with so many of the left,  is self-deluding enough to be unaware of his bias.

Goodwin   gives the ideological game away in the book’s title  by attaching  the arch pejorative “fascist”  to the BNP  without making any attempt to explain  what he means by this complex  word (hint: “far right extremist” does not equal fascist)  and  follows this up in the introduction  with “This book follows  political scientist Elizabeth Carter in considering  right-wing extremism as a particular form of political ideology  that is defined by two anti-constitutional and anti-democratic elements: first, right-wing extremists are extremist because they reject or undermine the values, procedures and institutions of the democratic state; and second, they are right wing because they reject the principle of fundamental human equality” (p6).

The author’s acceptance of Carter’s  definition taints the book. If you do not adopt  the liberal internationalist’s view that human beings are just one big happy indistinguishable and interchangeable family you are a right-wing extremist.  When Carter  writes of undermining the “values, procedures and institutions of the democratic state”,  she does not mean  that right wing parties refuse to play by the democratic rules as they are commonly understood – free elections, universal suffrage, parliaments  and governments being  accountable to the  law. Rather,  for her being democratic means that any person regardless of origin – in  principle the seven  billion people currently alive – must be treated equally  because to do otherwise would constitute the rejection of “ the principle of fundamental human equality “.  That means  any election which produced a decision that failed to accord  with the idea that all human beings everywhere should be treated equally, for example,   a government in favour of an end to all further mass immigration and the expulsion of all those without citizenship, would be classed as undemocratic .

Then there is the label of “extremist”.  By assiduous propaganda over decades, politicians of all the major mainstream British parties have assiduously been  placing in the public arena the idea that to  support  or advocate any political views which diverge seriously from those of liberal internationalism  is to be extreme . The erasing of the  traditional political vocabulary from mainstream British politics means that  any group or individuals outside the narrow ideological  confines of  what the British political class  now represent as being the only  legitimate democratic politics may be described as  extremists and hence dismissed as  of no account or dangerous and in need of suppression through laws such as the Race Relations Act.

It is also a very strange thing to define parties and individuals  as being right-wing  simply on the grounds of being opposed to immigration, which is what Goodwin effectively  does . The idea that being resistant to immigration is inherently right-wing is historically false. Not only is it a natural human response to territory being invaded,  political parties of the left and trade unions have until quite recently been opposed to mass immigration.   Unions in particular have a long history of opposing immigration primarily  on the ground that  it increases competition in the labour market  and reduces both wages and conditions.    The Labour Party   for most of its existence qualifies  as extreme right wing under Carter’s definition, because not only did it in practice stand against mass immigration because of union hostility towards it,  but it  also believed in the nation state. It is worth remembering  that  the Labour government of Harold Wilson passed an immigration Act in 1968 which considerably tightened immigration rules for  those from the new (non-white) Commonwealth after the Tories had done very little in 13 years to stem immigration.  It is also telling  that Goodwin himself mentions that only four out of ten BNP voters think of themselves as right wing (p107).

Goodwin acknowledges that  the BNP  has gone far beyond simply relating issues to immigration and have under Griffin developed a fully- fledged political agenda.  Indeed, much of its recent manifestoes could sit comfortably within the those of the mainstream political parties and even more in the manifestoes of twenty or thirty years ago.  He also spends considerable time examining how the  BNP have  in the past decade or so  greatly softened their rhetoric about race and immigration, more or less dropped  anti-Semitism, produced a broad political platform which deals with all the major areas of political debate and adopted the strategy of  building the party from local roots in much the same way that the LibDems have done.  Indeed, to look at the official literature of the BNP is to see a party which in many ways is aping the  political antics of the major British parties. But for Goodwin this is not a sincere  change of heart merely the BNP attempting to “rally Britons by downplaying its toxic brand”.  It is difficult to see how the BNP could ever, in Goodwin’s mind, escape from the locked cell of Carter’s definition because whatever they did or said Goodwin would still say they should be classified as  “extreme right-wingers” because the change was not genuine.

As for the BNP’s success or failure, Goodwin acknowledges that they  have done considerably better  than any other party he brackets with them, for example, the National Front,  but less well than similar European parties. This fact has little force because  the comparative BNP  failure  is readily  attributable to the widespread  use of electoral systems  on the continent  which contain some element of proportional representation while Britain retains first-past-the-post for Westminster elections.

There is a frequent  failure to query the overt message of statistics. For example Goodwin  looks at  Britons’ response to  poll questions about  who is British (chapters 3/ 5)  which show that a majority  say that race is immaterial in determining the question.  What he fails to do is consider whether the  polling results may significantly under-estimate  concern about racial and ethnic difference  because of the prevailing atmosphere of fear generated by the ever tightening grip of political correctness.   This type of omission is all the more visible  because  Goodwin is more than happy to speculate elsewhere in the book, so such a failure is not the result of some self-denying academic ordinance.

The same lack of imagination shows when Goodwin considers the social shape  of BNP voters. He compares them  with those who vote for the major political parties and UKIP (p102).  According to his statistics,  there are fewer BNP voters  in the professional AB category than those of  the other parties, but there are still 11 per cent of BNP voters who fall into that category as opposed to 18 per cent for Labour and UKIP.   Moreover, the general shape  of the entire voting population of BNP voters is not wildly  different from that of Labour which draws 57% of its voters from the  two lowest  social groups as against 70% for the BNP according to the figures Goodwin  cites.  Hence, there is nothing unreservedly abnormal about the BNP vote.

Goodwin also looks at the ages and sex structure of BNP Membership (p102). This shows most BNP members to be in the 34+ age group with a strong preponderance (69%) of male.  Goodwin  represents this as a sign of a failing party. The problem with this argument is that his own figures show that the major parties have a similar age profile.  The age profile of the BNP  is surely just a consequence  of the ageing British population and the much greater   propensity of older voters to vote.

Goodwin  argues  from  the age profile of the BNP  that  racial hostility is a phenomenon  of the older generations because  younger people have grown up with an ethnically mixed society.   This is contradicted by the  race riots in northern England  in the early years of the century and emergence of the English Defence League,   but Goodwin dismisses such behaviour  as a residual phenomenon  of the young who have elders with “far-right” beliefs or who live in places  with a “right wing tradition (p104)

As to motivation for supporting the BNP,  Goodwin  suggests that  the BNP client base is essentially that of the “angry  white male” who has had his security threatened by immigration and its ongoing consequences. . While this  has an element of truth because it is the white working class man who has suffered most from  competition from immigration,  you could argue the same of the Labour Party vote.

The  only stark difference between the BNP and the major parties is in sex.  But there is probably nothing  remarkable in that. To support the BNP requires a  personality which can handle conflict. Men are almost certainly better able to do that.  The fact that UKIP has only 40 per cent of female  voters  supports this interpretation .

Goodwin seems genuinely puzzled by the  “extreme right’s” concentration on Muslims.  The answer is that this is plausibly all part of the  re-branding  exercise such as that conducted by the BNP under Nick Griffin. Because of the  intense grip that political correctness has on western societies,   parties which wish to resist immigration and its consequences have been forced to play within the rules of political correctness. This means they take up causes such “Islamification”  because that avoids directly engaging in the question of race.

The marvel of Goodwin is that he cannot see his own bias even though he accepts the massive constraints placed on any minor party under the British political system and describes well the intimidatory  actions of  both  the political elite through laws such as the Race Relations Act (RRA)which prevents  free debate on pain of criminal sanction and the all too ready willingness of  politicians, public service organisations, unions, big business  and the mainstream media to harass and penalise those who express their political  views outside the permitted parameters of political correctness:

“The disadvantages of joining an extremist party might include official punishments, threats from rival movements and group reprisals for participating’ . In fact, those who have join have been shown to experience abuse, jeopardise employment prospects and damage relationships with friends and family. “ (p138)

Goodwin  also happily describes  the persistent harassment of the BNP by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission  (EHRC) over its membership qualifications (p122); admits  freely that the  British electoral system is heavily weighted against parties without an established  Westminster presence (p)  and draws attention to the limited ability of national governments to  govern because of their entanglement in international treaties and supra-national bodies such as the EU.

One might imagine that someone who understands the undemocratic restraints placed on unestablished parties in general and  the additional undemocratic  blocks placed before parties such as the BNP,  would conclude that they are placed in a position in which  they cannot meaningfully engage in the democratic process.  Not Goodwin.  He sees no discord between insisting that a party can only be considered democratic  if it plays by the democratic rules ,whilst showing absolutely no discomfort  when he acknowledges that  those who set the rules of the political game do so  in such a way as to preclude meaningful participation in the democratic process.

What Goodwin is saying can be  reduced to this:  any  party  (or person) standing  for something which the vast majority of human beings at all times and places  would consider normal and desirable, namely, defending the tribe, clan or nation against invasion by main force or stealth,  is, in Goodwin’s eyes, part of the far right  – he coyly implies (p178) that the BNP and UKIP are not a million miles apart on the political spectrum.

Can I recommend New British Fascism?  I can but not for the reason the author would want.  Read this book not to understand the BNP but that most curious of things  the modern liberal mind.

 

 

That NuLabour “mistake” over mass immigration wasn’t a mistake non-shock

Since they lost the 2010 election, the Labour Party have been religiously spinning the line that the massive immigration they presided over during their 13 years in office was a mistake. A favourite ploy is to try to concentrate all the admission of failure on the decision to allow the better part of a million migrants from Eastern Europe into Britain when new entrants were admitted to the EU. Labour’s new leader Ed Miliband was at it in September 2011. Asked by Nick Robinson of the BBC whether Labour had lied about immigration, Miliband said “I don’t think we lied but I do think we got it wrong in a number of respects. I think that first of all we clearly underestimated the number of people coming in from Poland and that had more of an effect therefore than we would otherwise have thought. And secondly, I think there’s this really important issue about people coming into the country and the pressures on people’s wages. People aren’t prejudiced but people say to me look I’m worried about the pressure on my wages of people coming into this country, I’m worried about what it does to housing supply – all those issues. Now some of that is real and some of it isn’t but I think you have to address not just tough immigration policy but underlying issues as well.”  (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson/2011/04/ed_miliband_we.html).

The claim that the immigration was a mistake takes some swallowing.  To begin with there is the sheer volume of it.  Although there are disputes about the figures,  millions arrived  while far fewer left. The think tank Migration Watch UK estimates that from 1997-2010 the official arrivals totalled 3.2 million, while  941,000 Britons left. Approximately 80% of immigrants came from outside the EU.  The old white dominions – Australia, Canada and New Zealand – received more migrants from Britain than Britain received from them.   The greatest source of immigrants from outside the EU was the Sub-Continent.  Consequently, it   is reasonable to assume that the majority of immigrants were Asian or black. (http://migrationwatchuk.com/pdfs/MWK001-Migration-UK-report_Print.pdf).  To those official figures must be added an unknown number of illegal immigrants. Migration Watch estimates these at another one million under the Blair and Brown governments.  That may be on the conservative side, but taking it as a reasonable figure would mean that a net immigration figure of 3 million during the 13 years of Labour rule.  It is difficult to see how that vast increase in immigration – in 1997 net migration was  around 40,000 – could have happened by accident.   Just how could a Government not see what was happening for 13 years and do nothing “by accident”?

But it is not necessary to rest the case for mass immigration being a deliberate policy on the numbers and nature of the immigration. Labour in power left a number of smoking guns to show that it was indeed a deliberate policy. In 2003 the Home Secretary David Blunkett said that there was “No obvious limit” to the  immigration of skilled labour,  adding incredibly  that he did not believe there was  was a maximum population for the UK  (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3265219.stm).  This was at a time when immigration had already ballooned to around 170,000 per annum.

Tony Blair  said very little about immigration beyond  while in office beyond uttering the usual pc sanctioned platitudes about how valuable immigrants were to Britain . He did say asylum applications and illegal immigration were too high, but this was done whilst allowing legal immigration to get out of hand (Blair managed to reduce asylum applications, but did nothing about illegals.  The asylum drop probably meant only that illegal immigrants chose other ways to enter Britain than  asylum).  In his autobiography Blair  mentions  immigration on precisely six pages out of 691 (pp 204/5; 523/4; 630; 678).  Here  he concentrates almost entirely on the reduction of asylum; the use of immigration as a prime lever to justify his desire for ID cards and  his wish that the EU controlled immigration. Blair does ( p 524) let the cynical cat out of the bag by boasting that he shut the immigration debate down by putting ” ID cards at the centre of the argument”  and winning “Because our position was sophisticated enough - a sort of confess and avoid’, as the lawyers say…” In short, say things have gone awry under Labour  but avoid blame by switching attention to what is to be done in the future.

Blair broke his reticence about  immigration on  29 October 2011 in an interview with the ethnic British newspaper Eastern Eye. Here he not only spoke warmly of mass and mixed immigration but claimed it was a necessity for Britain:

‘It’s been a very positive thing and there is no way for a country like Britain to succeed in the future unless it is open to people of different colours, faiths and cultures.’ ‘

He went on to say:

“That is not to say you don’t have problems at certain points, but those problems are to be overcome without losing the essence of what has actually allowed this country’s people to get on and do well.’

… I think the majority of people in Britain today are not prejudiced and can understand the benefits of migration.

‘I think what people worry about is where they feel there is no control over who comes in and there are no rules governing who comes in or not, and that is a different issue altogether.

‘It would be very unfortunate if by putting those rules into place, we view that immigration was a somehow bad thing for the country, because it is not.’  ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2054903/Tony-Blair-defends-opening-door-mass-migration.html#ixzz1cCP3YCrZ).

Blair’s comments give credence to the claims in 2009 of  a special advisor Andrew Neather during the Blair government years.  He maintained  that  not only was mass immigration a deliberate policy of  the Government,  it was specifically designed to create an ever more diverse society:

” I [Neather] wrote the landmark speech given by then immigration minister Barbara Roche in September 2000, calling for a loosening of controls. It marked a major shift from the policy of previous governments: from 1971 onwards, only foreigners joining relatives already in the UK had been permitted to settle here.

“That speech was based largely on a report by the Performance and Innovation Unit, Tony Blair‘s Cabinet Office think-tank.

“The PIU’s reports were legendarily tedious within Whitehall but their big immigration report was surrounded by an unusual air of both anticipation and secrecy.

“Drafts were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was a paranoia about it reaching the media.

“Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled “RDS Occasional Paper no. 67″, “Migration: an economic and social analysis” focused heavily on the labour market case.

“But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

“I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.

“Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche’s keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour‘s core white working-class vote.

“This shone through even in the published report: the “social outcomes” it talks about are solely those for immigrants.

“And this first-term immigration policy got no mention among the platitudes on the subject in Labour’s 1997 manifesto, headed Faster, Firmer, Fairer.

“The results were dramatic. In 1995, 55,000 foreigners were granted the right to settle in the UK. By 2005 that had risen to 179,000; last year, with immigration falling thanks to the recession, it was 148,000.

“In addition, hundreds of thousands of migrants have come from the new EU member states since 2004, most requiring neither visas nor permission to work or settle. The UK welcomed an estimated net 1.5 million immigrants in the decade to 2008.

“Part by accident, part by design, the Government had created its longed-for immigration boom.” (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23760073-dont-listen-to-the-whingers—london-needs-immigrants.do).

After the 2010 election a Labour peer Lord Glasman leant further support to the idea that  New Labour’s immigration policy was deliberately dishonest in an interview with the Labour journal Progress: :

“….immigration and multiculturalism … has become ‘the big monster that we don’t like to talk about’, claims Glasman. Mass immigration under Labour, he believes, served to ‘act as an unofficial wages policy’. The party’s position, Glasman contends, occupied a ‘weird space where we thought that a real assault on the wage levels of English workers was a positive good’. More seriously, he charges the last government with having acted in a ‘very supercilious, high-handed way: there was no public discussion of immigration and its benefits. There was no election that was fought on that basis. In fact there was a very, very hard rhetoric combined with a very loose policy going on. Labour lied to people about the extent of immigration and the extent of illegal immigration and there’s been a massive rupture of trust.’

“Perhaps most controversially, Glasman calls on progressives to recognise their ‘responsibility for the generation of far-right populism’, currently manifested in the growth of the English Defence League. ‘You consider yourself … so opposed that you don’t want to talk to them, you don’t want to engage with them, you don’t want anybody with views like that anywhere near the party.’ This, he believes, is to ignore ‘a massive hate and rage against us’ from working-class people ‘who have always been true to Labour’. The solution, he says, is ‘to build a party that brokers a common good, that involves those people who support the EDL within our party. Not dominant in the party, not setting the tone of the party, but just a reconnection with those people that we can represent a better life for them, because that’s what they want.’

That process begins, argues Glasman, by understanding that ‘working-class men can’t really speak at Labour party meetings about what causes them grief, concerns about their family, concerns about immigration, love of country, without being falsely stereotyped as sexist, racist, nationalist’.”  (http://www.progressonline.org.uk/2011/04/19/labour-isnt-working/).

In true Maoist fashion Glasman soon confessed his “fault” (daring to speak honestly about race and immigration) –   http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/07/blue-labour-immigration-2.

In virtually any time and place other than the developed world in the modern era  the deliberate injection of  vast numbers of people into a society, many of them incapable of assimilation because of   racial difference or ethnic stubbornness, would have been considered unconscionable. It is the betrayal of the tribe, the most fundamental form of treason because once the interlopers are present in large numbers they have effectively conquered part of the receiving land’s territory.    Had Blair and Brown pursued a policy of  mass immigration because they saw it as part of their worship of market economics that would have been bad enough, a crime worthy of death in a sane world.   But it is clear from their own words that they had a more obnoxious and fundamental motive.  Blair and Brown and their political associates actively hate their own society and sought to change it utterly whilst at the same time repressing any native dissent about the changes wrought. That is not merely treason but a form of psychopathy.

But it is not only the followers of New Labour who contain the poison. The entire British political elite pay at least lip service to the same internationalist “anti-racist”  ideology.   When the Neather article appeared there was no outrage from the Tory and Lib Dem leadership. When the Blair Government’s estimate of 13,000 migrants from the new east European entrants  to the EU turned out to be  monstrously wrong as hundreds of thousands poured in, the Tories and Lib Dems said little or nothing. Nor has the Tory/LibDem Coalition Government done anything to reduce immigration since they took office.  Most tellingly, no mainstream British political party has challenged freedom of movement within the EU, without an end to which no meaningful  immigration controls can be operated.

The terrible reality is this: Britain  has a political elite to whom treason is second nature; men and women who make the profoundest of mistake of  imagining  that human beings are  interchangeable regardless of race or culture and that consequently societies  can be socially engineered without danger.   Hayek saw their nihilistic qualities  70 years ago:

“The  Left intelligentsia…have so long  worshipped   foreign  gods that they seem to have become  almost  incapable of seeing any good in the  characteristic  English institutions and traditions. That the moral   values  on which most of them pride themselves  are   largely  the products of the institutions they  are out to destroy, these socialists cannot, of course,   admit.  And  this  attitude  is  unfortunately  not confined to avowed socialists. Though one must hope that  it  is not true of the less  vocal  but  more  numerous  cultivated  Englishman,  if one  were  to  judge by the ideas which find expression in current  political discussion and propaganda the  Englishman who not only  “the language speak that  Shakespeare  spake”,  but also “the faith and morals  hold  that   Milton  held”  seems to have almost vanished.  [The Road to Serfdom p222 Chapter Material Conditions and Ideal Ends]  

Some would object that none of British political elite counts as  Leftist  today. That is true in the sense that the classic economic aims of socialism - the public ownership of the means of production - were dumped by  Blair’s transmogrification of Labour to New Labour.  But that is all which as been dropped. The Fabian desire to interfere with and control people’s lives through social engineering has become even stronger and the form of internationalism  (very much a left project) we call globalism has captured  the major British political parties.  All mainstream British politicians now pay lip service at least to the  attendant ideology which has been developed to both  justify  the desire  to control people’s lives and promote globalism, namely, political correctness.  The politicians who subscribe to it are the heirs of  the “Left intelligentsia” Hayek found in Britain.

Politically incorrect film reviews – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier … Spy

Directed by Tomas Alfredson
Running time 127 minutes

Cast

Gary Oldman as George Smiley

Colin Firth as Bill Haydon

Tom Hardy as Ricki Tarr

Mark Strong as Jim Prideaux

Ciarán Hinds as Roy Bland

Benedict Cumberbatch as Peter Guillam

David Dencik as Toby Esterhase

Stephen Graham as Jerry Westerby

Simon McBurney as Oliver Lacon

Toby Jones as Percy Alleline

John Hurt as Control

Svetlana Khodchenkova as Irina

Kathy Burke as Connie Sachs

Roger Lloyd-Pack as Mendel

Christian McKay as Mackelvore

Konstantin Khabenskiy as Polyakov

This one of those rare films which should be an hour longer rather than an hour shorter.  Why? Because the  subject matter of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier ….Spy  is so intricate  that without considerable scene setting and back stories, which were absent in the film,  I doubt whether anyone would be able to readily follow the plot let alone  get full value from the film if they were not familiar with the Smiley novels , whether that be from the books, previous films, television adaptations or the recent excellent BBC Radio 4  production of all the eight  books in which Smiley appears either as a central character or on the periphery of the tale.

No one new to the stories would have  understood Smiley’s  relationship with his  adulterous  and glamorous wife Lady Ann or his intense  psychological bond withKarla, the Soviet spymaster . No one new to Smiley would have a clue from the film what position  Peter Guillam held  (in charge of the unit which did the dirty work including assassinations, blackmail and robbery known as scalphunters)  or been aware that Bill Hayden is supposed to be a talented painter who perhaps  secretly wishes he had made painting rather than espionage his life. No one new to Smiley’s world  would understand the moral struggles he has within himself  as the Soviet enemy becomes ever less sharply  focused  and British power and influence ebbs away.

The  confusion caused by the lack of scene setting  and back story telling  is added to by the large ensemble cast and the frequent switches of characters and locations.

The plot is briefly this.  The head of  the Circus (MI6) Control  suspects there is a  Soviet mole in a high position within the Circus (MI6). He sends Jim Prideaux  on an unauthorised mission to Czechoslovakia to meet a Soviet General who claims  he knows the mole’s name.  Prideaux is betrayed and shot, although not killed and returns to England  where he is secretly  put out to grass teaching in a private school.

This highly embarrassing failure results in Control being forced  into retirement along with his right-hand man Smiley.   However, the suspicion about a mole  is re-ignited when a Circus agent Rikki Tarr discovers during  a love affair with a Moscow agent  evidence that there is indeed a highly placed mole in the Circus, but before she tells him who it is, the Soviet agent  is kidnapped and taken back to the Soviet Bloc where she is killed.

Oliver Lacon, the senior civil servant  responsible for the Intelligence Services,  becomes  aware of this new evidence  and  brings Smiley surreptitiously  back into service   to investigate whether  there is a Russian mole  in the upper reaches of the Circus.   Tarr works for Peter Guillam  and he is brought  into the picture as Smiley’s aide.   Control’s successor Alleline and his deputies   Bill Haydon, Roy Bland, and Toby Esterhase are the prime suspects and  have the code names Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Poor man.   They have no knowledge of what Smiley et are up to. The film consists of Smiley, with the help of Guillam and a retired special branch officer Mendel,   tracking down the traitor.

Oldman is a good but not great Smiley. Alec Guinness  (in the TV series) and Simon Russell Beale (in the Radio 4 plays) were better. That is partly due to  the rushed and cramped nature of the film which did not allow the character of Smiley to develop and expand as TV and Radio could and did (the TV version of Tinker was spread over seven episodes; the most recent Radio adaptation over 3 hours) ) , not least because Smiley’s sufferings over  and longings for  his  wife Ann are barely touched upon (she had an affair with Bill Hayden);  partly because  the camera too often focuses overlong  on a poker faced Oldman to convey Smiley’s  generally undemonstrative  and  private nature and partly because Oldman representation of  Smiley  is not quite posh enough. The last is a subtle thing but telling. Oldman’s Smiley seemed to be concentrating  just a little too hard on his RP accent, like a man speaking a foreign language in which he has made himself  so fluent that he almost but not quite passes for a native.  Nonetheless,  Oldman comes into his own as the film progresses and he becomes ever more actively involved with the search for the  mole. Then you see the publicly withdrawn, self –contained personality suddenly swept up in the thrill of the chase and from that energy become incisive and decisive to the point of cruelty.

Firth as Hayden is unreservedly good. The part is made for him with his fading  matinee idol looks, acerbic tongue and vast charm . Unlike Oldman he merely seemed to be playing himself. Toby Jones as the ultra ous but limited Scotsman Percy Alleline fitted the bill  exactly, as did Kathy Burke as Connie Sachs,  the terminally nostalgic, dipsomaniac  ex-Circus researcher with the incredible memory.  John Hurt as Control  simply  plays himself.

David Dencik as the ex-patriot Hungarian Toby Esterhase  is decent enough,  but he did not quite capture the character’s  desperate and never to be satisfied desire to be unreservedly accepted as one of the MI6 club. The recent Radio adaptation gave Esterhase one of those bogus posh English accents which fails from being a little too precise, a little too dated in its vocabulary and phrasing and  with the slightest remnants of a foreign accent.  That admirably conveyed both  Esterhase’s valiant attempt to gain an unqualified acceptance within the Circus and his  failure to achieve that end.  Dencik’s  Esterhase  was simply a nervous uncertain foreigner,  his biggest fear being that he would be sent back to (Communist) Hungary.

Of the other characters Tom Hardy as Ricki Tarr is not quite cockney enough, Jim Prideaux not posh enough; Mendel  has much too little screen time; Roy Bland is utterly peripheral to the story as it unfolds  and  Lacon has just the right superior  and supercilious manner.

In all respects but one,  this is wonderfully  politically incorrect film. Set in 1970s Britain there is not a single black, brown or yellow face to be seen and,  apart from the Scotsman Alleline and the Hungarian Esterhase,   the major characters are  all English, most  of them drawn from the upper-reaches of English society . To add to the horror  for white liberals, women are peripheral and subordinate to the men and everyone smokes like chimneys.

The only consolation for  the politically correct is the turning  of the heterosexual Peter Guillam into a homosexual. This not  only adds nothing to the plot,  but positively diminishes  the character. Guillam is a heavy, a public school educated heavy, but a heavy nonetheless.  He acts as Smiley’s  minder and dishes out the rough stuff on Smiley’s behalf  when someone needs to be made a little more cooperative.  Being gay and a heavy is not I would suggest an obvious combination in the eyes of the public.  To the mistaken and utterly gratuitous change of sexual inclination,  is added the performance  of Cumberbatch as Guillam  in which he  projects  all the physical menace of  a wet sponge whilst sporting the most ridiculous haircut seen in the cinema since Javier Bardem in No country for old men.

This  is not a bad film; rather, it is a film which could have been much better and most  importantly, vastly  more comprehensible to those unfamiliar with the Smiley novels. It was perhaps an impossible task to fit such a complex novel  which not only has an intricate plot but relies very heavily on character depiction  into two hours.  But for all its flaws it is much superior  production to the vast majority of the traffic which hits film screens.   If you are English  it  also has the inestimable plus of being  England as it used to be. Go and see it even if you cannot fully understand the plot.

The 2011 British riots and the white liberal’s great lie

Robert Henderson

“These riots were not about race: the perpetrators and the victims were white, black and Asian.

“These riots were not about government cuts: they were directed at high street stores, not Parliament.

“And these riots were not about poverty: that insults the millions of people who, whatever the hardship, would never dream of making others suffer like this.

“No, this was about behaviour…

“…people showing indifference to right and wrong…

“…people with a twisted moral code…

“…people with a complete absence of self-restraint….

“We must fight back against the attitudes and assumptions that have brought parts of our society to this shocking state.

“We know what’s gone wrong: the question is, do we have the determination to put it right?

Do we have the determination to confront the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations?

“Irresponsibility.  Selfishness.  Behaving as if your choices have no consequences.

“Children without fathers.  Schools without discipline.  Reward without effort.

“ Crime without punishment.  Rights without responsibilities.  Communities without control…..

“Some of the worst aspects of human nature tolerated, indulged – sometimes even incentivised – by a state and its agencies that in parts have become literally de-moralised….

“So yes, the broken society is back at the top of my agenda.”   David Cameron on  15 August 2011 (http://conservativehome.blogs.com/thetorydiary/2011/08/cameron-post-riots-speech-in-full.html)

Cameron’s words  epitomise one half of  the British elite’s  reaction to the  recent riots which began in Tottenham north  London, then spread  to other parts of London and its environs and other  English cities:  Birmingham, Wolverhampton, West Bromwich Bristol, Gloucester,  Liverpool and Manchester.   This side of the elite argument  attributed the  riots to a racially undifferentiated, morally bereft underclass who did not know right from wrong.

The  obvious question to ask Cameron is this: if there was no racial element to the  riots why  did you feel  the need to say it did not exist? The answer is wonderfully simple:  Cameron  was desperate to avoid addressing the subject which most terrifies British politicians, namely, the disproportionately frequent  anti-social behaviour of  blacks,  and sought refuge in the  “All races are  in this together” lie to obviate the need to acknowledge that the riots were not the consequence of an underclass but of a particular racial group.

The problem with this explanation is that it was all too clear to the general public, from the voluminous mainstream media coverage and private videos posted on  media hosting  sites, that the overwhelming majority of rioters were black.  In addition, people could not  help noticing that  all the riots took place in areas with a large black population or in areas close to a large black population. Consequently, no significant disturbances took place outside of English cities and towns  because the overwhelming majority of blacks in the UK live in England. The SNP leader  and Scottish First Minister Alec Salmond  inadvertently drew attention to this fact  by  complaining that  “ it was unfair of broadcasters to describe the lawlessness as “UK riots” because it was an English phenomenon and Scotland has “no history of this sort of disorder”. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/scottish-politics/8693806/UK-riots-Alex-Salmond-accused-of-gloating-over-English-violence.html).  Unsurprising as  Scotland has  few blacks.

The other half of the British elite’s reaction (from the unreconstructed  liberal left)  was to ascribe the riots  to material and social deprivation.  Some like the one-time London mayor Ken  Livingstone were nakedly  political with their  claims that  the  riots were a consequence of  the Coalition Government’s  public spending cuts (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8687484/Ken-Livingstone-blames-Tottenham-riot-on-spending-cuts.html). Others, like the  leader of the Labour Party Ed Milliband , wanted to have their  cake and eat it by condemning the riots as inexcusable , then weasel wording  their  way to the environment explanation  by  implying that social circumstances were behind the riots as in Miliband’s  “Of course these are acts of individual criminality. But we have a duty to ask ourselves why there are people who feel they have nothing to lose, and everything to gain, from wanton vandalism and looting.” (http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2011/08/11/ed-miliband-riot-statement-in-full).  The supposedly political neutral  heir to the throne,  Prince Charles, even managed to interpret the riots as “a cry for help” (http://news.sky.com/home/article/16051601).

The restriction of the riots to areas with or near to large black populations and the visible evidence of the massive black involvement  amongst the rioters and looters  make both Cameron’s argument (that this was criminality which was race-blind) and the left liberal argument (that it was down to social deprivation)  ridiculous. If  there was no racial context why were blacks (who only  form two or three per cent of the UK’s population) so prominent and whites (who  comprise over 90 per cent of the population) so sparse on the ground?  Why did areas without any substantial black population in them or nearby  not suffer riots? Why did poor white areas not riot?  Clearly, being poor was not a sufficient reason  for rioting and looting,   while being black in an area with a large number of blacks was the most obvious and reliable indicator of who would riot and where  riots would occur.

How black were the riots?

The Ministry of Justice has produced a detailed analysis by age, sex and criminal record of the rioters brought before the courts by 12 September but no analysis by race or ethnicity.  They promise a further report in October which will “ cover wider socio-economic and demographic  characteristics, including ethnicity .”   (http://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/publications/statistics-and-data/mojstats/august-public-disorder-stats-bulletin.pdf).   Whether this will deal honestly with the racial and ethnic make up of the rioters  is questionable because British officialdom have a very poor record of supplying crime statistics by race where to do so would raise awkward questions about the greater ethnic minority  propensity to engage in crime, especially violent crime.  Several years ago I put in a Freedom of Information request requesting a breakdown by race of murders,
manslaughter,  serious physical assaults and rapes in the UK. Despite the obsessive collection of race and ethnicity  by modern British Governments,  I was told that no national statistics were kept of the race of such offenders and all they could supply were incomplete statistics from a few areas in England and Wales.

Judging from the video and still photo evidence available online, the vast majority of those rioting were black.  Those breaking into shops were startlingly monochrome. Despite viewing over  several dozen  videos,   I cannot find a single recording of any mass assault on a building to cause an initial break in which is anything other than either entirely or  almost entirely
black.   Here are a few  samples of riot scenes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm8r8I7ApDQ Tottenham London

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aneS6S5UZw&feature=related Peckham London

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuqLLrXYfLY&feature=related Woolwich London

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GxUnVYqp1c&feature=related Hackney London

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ1NLhlNdyM  Croydon

I made an analysis of  the names  of 282  rioters in the first batch of those brought before the courts.  These were very suggestive of an  overwhelming black involvement in the riots, both by the names themselves and  in the context of the rioters being  (1) overwhelmingly black as anyone can see from the TV coverage and (2) the riots taking place in areas which either have a large black population, for example,  Tottenham, or are close to an area with a large black population, for example,  Enfield.  The context is  important because, for example, a Biblical name like Samuel or  Aaron might be possessed by someone  black or white in the population at large , but would be likely to be owned by a black  in an area with a large black population. The analysis can be found at http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/the-racial-and-ethnic-make-up-of-the-august-2011-uk-rioters-by-group/

The small minority of whites who appear in the still photo and  video coverage  seem to be  “walk by looters”, that is they loot only after coming on the scene following the breaching of  shops by black mobs.   This perception is supported by those whites who have come before the courts so far, the overwhelming majority having been charged with theft rather than burglary on criminal damage.  Interestingly, many of the  most prominent white defendants have been people who have not taken part in the riots. Instead they are charged with  putting  messages on social media inciting riots or those who have received goods stolen in the riots.  The most dramatic example of heavy penalties for whites not involved in rioting or looting was the jailing for four years of Jordan Blackshaw  and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan for unsuccessfully attempting to incite a riot in Northwich, Cheshire (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/8705212/Facebook-riot-inciters-among-those-to-get-toughest-jail-terms-yet.html).  Also, many of the whites seen in videos of the riots appear to be no more than bystanders who take no part in the rioting and looting but either look on or are simply caught up in a sudden outbreak of rioting or looting.

Why did any whites join in? There will be an element of criminals seeing an opportunity. There is also the old Adam in man.   If white children and young adults see blacks getting away with behaving badly they will be tempted to do it themselves. But although whites may be sucked in when living in areas with black rioters, their numbers are tny in comparison with blacks, a fact made all the more impressive when the proportion of the population who are white (over 80%) is taken into account.

Whether the eventual toll of convictions will be an accurate representation of the rioters  is debatable because it will be difficult to identify those wearing hoods, balaclavas or other things which mask their faces and CCTV, especially when the light in failing or night has fallen, is often of little use in identification.  There must also be doubts about whether the police will go after the hardest targets such as large black gangs or blacks who are known as being very violent with the same enthusiasm as they would a white  “pass-by” looter acting own their own or  whites who have posted inciting messages on Facebook or received stolen goods.  That brings me to the question of the British police and their attitude to policing ethnic minorities in general and blacks in particular.

Why the policing of the riots was supine 

The riots began in a part of London (Tottenham) which has both a large black population and a history of black rioting  from the 1980s when a white  policeman PC Keith Blakelock was most brutally murdered by  being almost decapitated with a machete by one or more  blacks. The recent Tottenham  riot  was also comprised overwhelmingly of black rioters.   The police failed to meaningfully police the 2011  riot  by standing off  while rioters  smashed, looted and burned.  Media reports,  especially the TV coverage, made it clear that rioters could proceed unmolested by the police.  That encouraged other people  in different places, to riot,   something made easy by modern technology which permitted “flash mob” tactics to be used to assemble rioters at short notice anywhere.   The police continued to stand off  in these places,  a particularly glaring example occurred in Croydon, giving yet more encouragement to others to riot.

Why did the police stand off? The official  explanation to begin with was that there were too few police officers available  trained in riot control to make active intervention practical at the time of the Tottenham riot.  This line became increasingly difficult to take seriously as massive numbers of police were drafted into London and the rioters still went largely unmolested  and riots in other cities and towns also showed signs of  reluctance on the part of the police to intervene. Other official excuses were made along the lines that the police were containing the trouble by fencing off areas and driving rioters out of areas in which they were rioting rather than intervening because this was the most effective way of dealing with serious public disorder.  I rather suspect that those who had their homes and businesses destroyed will have a different view.  It is also more than a little absurd to say that arson on the scale witnessed in places such as Croydon was  worth tolerating for fear of worse because those were crimes which potentially could have killed many.

The police also played  heavily on their ability to bring to justice the rioters using CCTV and other video evidence.  The flaws in this argument  are obvious. Much CCTV material is of poor quality.  The rioting tended to be in evening making CCTV visibility even more of a problem. Anyone masking their face  almost certainly avoids detection unless there is some other pointer to who they are such as being part of a gang known to the police which loots and some of the  gang members  not cover their faces .

The real reason for the failure of the police to act was the fact that the rioters and looters  were overwhelmingly black.  Over the past 30 years the modern British police and especially those in London,  have been reduced to a state of near inertia  when dealing with blacks breaking the law, especially when confronted with large groups of blacks doing so.

The  process  of police emasculation  began with  the Scarman Report which was commissioned after the  1981 Brixton riots. This argued for police engagement  (community policing) with black populations in heavily settled black areas and, where riots occurred, for the police to contain the violence within an area rather than actively seeking to end it by physical action against the rioters.    So started  the long march towards the present situation  whereby the police are rigid with political correctness  and terrified of acting against ethnic minorities for fear of being accused of racism.

How far things have changed can be seen from the difference between the Scarman and Macpherson reports.  The Scarman Report  had no difficulty in making a severe  judgement of  blacks:  “Without close parental support, with no job to go to, and with few recreational facilities available the young Black person makes his life the streets and the seedy, commercially-run clubs of Brixton. There he meets criminals, who appear to have no difficulty obtaining the benefits of a materialist society.” (Beckford, Robert (2006). Jesus dub: theology, music and social change. Routledge. pp. 46–47. ISBN 9780415310192).

The Macpherson  Report (1999) into the killing of a young Nigerian  boy Damilola Taylor  drove the single biggest wedge between the effective policing of  ethnic minorities  and what the police were prepared to do. Macpherson called the Metropolitan Police “institutionally racist”  and made a series of recommendations  which severely  hamstrung the police (http://www.archive.official-documents.co.uk/document/cm42/4262/sli-47.htm.)   These   included this astonishing definition of what constituted a racially motivated crime: “A racist
incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”.   The eventual upshot was the acceptance of the  accusation “institutionally racist” by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and the adoption of Macpherson’s recommendations  by the Met  with  other police forces in Britain clambering on the politically correct bandwagon  afterwards.

The consequence of 25 years of the police increasingly  treating blacks with kid gloves is  the creation of a mentality amongst  blacks that if they act in numbers it is highly unlikely that the police will intervene.  The extent to which the police have become paralysed was coincidentally  graphically shown in a photograph taken at the Notting Hill Carnival in West London which took place not long after the recent riots. A black man stabbed someone then ran away with the knife in his hand   while two white policemen,  who were within touching distance as he passed,  made no attempt to arrest him (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8730016/Knife-wielding-man-pictured-running-from-scene-of-Notting-Hill-Carnival-stabbing.html).

The myth of a racially undifferentiated underclass  

Ironically, Cameron unwittingly put his finger on the cause f the  riots with his impolitic comments about an amoral and uncontrolled  group  wich has no sense of a general social responsibility. What he failed to to was identify  the  personnel of that group, namely,  the part of the black population which is responsible for so much violent criminal mayhem in England and the circumstances of the wider  black population from which the criminals  come. Although not all blacks are criminally inclined, the active black  criminal’s  behaviour is a toxic distillation of  the predominant  black mentality of suspicion and grievance which drives them to constantly look for “discrimination” and “racism” from whites and provides an excuse in black  minds for misbehaviour.

Criminally inclined blacks  are not an underclass in the sense of being a social class, but people who see themselves as separate from British society,  a society which they view as  oppressive of them.  The sense of separateness is widely shared by  blacks generally. The natural sense of  victimhood and paranoia which is evident in any minority group to some degree  has been fed voraciously by white liberals who have told them that slavery and colonialism has left them with a justified grievance against British society despite the fact that  the generations living now  are five or six generations from slavery and two from the Empire (the British abolished  the slave trade in 1807 and slavery within the Empire in 1834 while British decolonisation effectively ended by 1970).    The black rioters have doubtless  readily seized upon the idea that they are consequently  entitled to riot and loot and that their “prizes” are somehow  reparations for  historical white sins.

This masochistic pandering by white liberals  to black victimhood  has persuaded many  blacks  in Britain that they do not owe any moral obligation to wider society and as a consequence they  believe they may  behave as they choose within their own group and with complete amorality to those outside the group.  That is the social problem which needs to be addressed, not the +reformation of a mythical racially undifferentiated underclass.

Blacks and violent crimes go together

One person in the media who did raise the question of race in connection with  the riots was a mixed race teacher Katharine Birbalsingh  who had the shocking bad taste (from the white liberal point of view) of pointing out  that the media were ignoring the very obvious racial context of the riots (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/katharinebirbalsingh/100099830/these-riots-were-about-race-why-ignore-the-fact/). In the same piece she also dealt with the reality of black  violence in London:

“At school I remember watching a presentation given to the kids by Trident, the Metropolitan Police Service unit set up to investigate and inform communities of gun crime in London’s black community. I didn’t know what Trident was then, and it struck me that all of the photos of people shot (the idea was to scare the kids) were black. So at the end, I approached one of the policemen and asked him what percentage of those involved in gun crime were black. I kid you not, but my question made this thirty-something white man who was, after all, trained to deal with the black community and its issues, turn pink.

“He explained that about 80 per cent of gun crime took place in the black community. I smiled uncomfortably. But no, he said, it was worse than that. Then he told me that 80 per cent was black on black gun crime, and that of the remaining 20 per cent about 75 per cent involved at least one black person: black shooting white, or white shooting black. I pushed to know more.  While he kept saying his stats were crude and he didn’t have scientific numbers, on the whole the whites who were involved in these shootings tended to be from Eastern Europe.”

There should be no surprise  at that anecdote nor the fact  that the riots were black led and inspired.  Not only do blacks have a history of rioting in England, they  have a much greater general propensity for crime, and especially violent crime,  than the general population.  According to the report Equality and Human Rights Commission’s 2010 report  How Fair  Is Britain?  “On average, five times more Black people [related to their proportion of the UK population]  than  White people are imprisoned in England and  Wales, where 1 in 4 people in prison is from an  ethnic minority background” and “ Ethnic minorities were the victims of around a  quarter of homicides recorded in England and Wales between 2006/07 and 2008/09: just over  half of these ethnic minority victims were Black. ” (http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/uploaded_files/triennial_review/tr_execsumm.pdf). It is scarcely to be wondered at that so many blacks are victims of killings because black-on-black murders  are so frequent in  London that the Metropolitan Police  has a squad named Operation Trident  specifically devoted to black-on-black guncrime.  (http://www.met.police.uk/scd/specialist_units/trident_trafalgar.htm).

Muggings and rapes (especially gang rapes) are also black favourites , viz:

“A study published yesterday by the Home Office shows that up to 87 per cent of victims in Lambeth, South London, told the police that their attackers were black. Nearly 80 per cent of  he victims were white. Black people account for 31 per cent of the population in these areas. “(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article810556.ece)

And

“One of the few police forces to have begun recording the figures of reported gang rape is the Metropolitan Police. In 2008 alone, they received reports of 85 gang rapes. Using the Met’s definition of gang rape – those involving three or more perpetrators – we began to look at the number of convictions. We tracked down 29 cases, from January 2006 to March 2009, in which a total of 92 young people were convicted of involvement in gang rape.

“One fact stood out. Of those convicted, 66 were black or mixed race, 13 were white and the remainder were from other countries including Afghanistan, Iraq and  Libya.”  (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/gang-rape-is-it-a-race-issue-1711381.html).

People who have  on  average a much greater propensity for violent criminality are much more likely to engage in acts such as rioting and looting because they have already broken the taboos of  being violent and breaking the law.  It is also true that when someone has a criminal record they have less to lose if they add to it.  Blacks, and young black males in particular,  are much more likely to have a criminal record than those of either whites or Asians.  For that reason alone blacks will  be more prone to joining in violent disorder and theft.   In that context it is interesting to consider the previous criminal records of those brought before the courts  by early September:

“- 68 per cent of adult males who have been brought before the courts for the disorder had at least one previous conviction compared to 28 per cent of  males aged 18-52 in the population as a whole who have at least one  previous conviction  – 40 per cent of males aged 10-17 brought before the courts for the disorder  had at least one previous conviction. This compares with 2 per cent of the 10- 17 year old male population who have at least one previous conviction.” (p5 http://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/publications/statistics-and-data/mojstats/august-public-disorder-stats-bulletin.pdf).

This has to be treated with some caution because  most were arrested  from video evidence after  the event and that will inevitably lead to those already known to the police being charged in greater numbers than those without a criminal record. Nonetheless, the large difference   suggests that there was a much  greater propensity for criminality amongst the rioters than within the UK population.  It is also true the objection of disproportionate arresting  of  those with convictions applies to the public at large,  because police commonly solve crimes by targeting those  already known to them.  As blacks are much more likely to have criminal records than the population as a whole and the riots took place in areas with substantial black populations, it is reasonable to assume that they would figure disproportionately amongst the rioters.

The white liberal’s hatred of his own people

Alongside the British elite’s gross  misrepresentation of what was happening   ran the deep undercurrent of fear, hatred and contempt  within the British elite for the white working class , a mentality which has  developed over the past 40 years (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/04/26/the-white-working-class-and-the-british-elite/).   This could be neatly fitted into the idea  that the riots were the consequence of an underclass.   The one-time Tory MP turned journalist Matthew Parris provided a good example of the hatred which included the wish-fantasy that the white working class is  vanishing:

“What distinguishes (if anything really does) this week’s rioting from the classic and time-honoured English riot is that our underclass is now so small.

“The white working class is disappearing; a black middle class is growing; and the residue – if human beings should ever be called a residue – cannot amount to more than about 1 per cent of our population. They are concentrated in cheerless and decaying pockets, they have no prospects, no education, nothing to lose, and many are socially dysfunctional and barely employable .” ( “After a sunny spring, where did Britain get it so wrong?” – Matthew Parris Times 11 August 2011).

The most interesting thing about that passage is that Parris makes no attempt to talk about a racially neutral underclass, merely a white one.  Then there is his bizarre idea that that the white working-class is reduced to “1 per cent of our population”. If  Parris sincerely believes this  he is in need of psychiatric help.  A Guardian survey in 2007 found that not only a majority of the UK population describe themselves as working-class , but the young are  more likely to describe themselves as working-class than those who were older . Hence, far from dying out the white working-class is strengthening, viz:

“…the younger the respondent, the less likely they are to consider themselves middle class. Half of all 55- to 64-year-olds claim to be middle class, with just less than half – 48% – identifying as working class. With each drop in age, however, the middle class shrinks, while the working class steadily grows. When you get down to 25- to 34-year-olds – the generation that wears Birkenstocks, drinks lattes and cooks fresh linguini - only just over a third consider themselves middle class, compared with 56% claiming to be working class. For all New Labour’s rhetoric about aspiration and social mobility, and the brisk high-street trade in chandeliers, it is the postwar babyboomers – not the Blair generation – who have realised the middle-class dream.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/oct/20/britishidentity.socialexclusion1). With social mobility shrinking in Britain, the working class is likely to grow further as more and more people become poor.

The elites’  hatred was also seen in the difference in the elite attitude towards ethnic minorities who formed vigilante groups to defend their areas against rioters and white Britons who did the same.  The ethnic minority groups were praised uncritically:

“In London at the height of the riots, we saw another clear expression of faith when more than 700 Sikhs lined up to defend their temples from potential arsonists in the suburb of Southall to the west of the capital. The Sikhs have a proud tradition of valuing each human being, male and female, as equal in God’s eyes. Theirs is a religion in which family is paramount.”  (A N Wilson  -http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2025393/UK-riots-Haroon-Jahan-death-Legacy-society-believes-nothing.html#ixzz1V00FB4DC)

“Some of the most inspiring moments have come when ordinary citizens came out against the thugs. We recall the Turkish and Greek shopkeepers of Dalston and Stoke Newington, who defied police warnings and decided to protect their property with their own fists. “Why should I be a sitting duck? If they come in here, I will bash them,” warned Stella Kallis, the formidable 53-year-old owner of a hardware shop. Ironically, they came to Britain because back in their native Cyprus, Greeks and Turks fought a civil war half a century ago.” (Daniel Johnson – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8695561/The-riots-have-brought-examples-of-real-heroism.html)

But the white groups were treated as  beyond the Pale not only by the media,  but at the highest political level:

“Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab): For the past two nights in my constituency, I have had a very heavy police presence, owing to right-wing extremist groups focusing on Eltham and trying to create unrest and bad feeling between different racial groups. Although we want to support people who are public-spirited and come out to defend their communities, as some of my constituents have done, will the Prime Minister join me in asking those people not to be diverted from their efforts by those extremists who seek to exploit the situation?

“The Prime Minister: The hon. Gentleman speaks not only for his constituents, but, frankly, for the whole House in deprecating the English Defence League and all it stands for. On its attempt to say that it will somehow help to restore order, I have described some parts of our society as sick, and there is none sicker than the EDL.” (Column 1086 Hansard 11 August 2011 (http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm110811/debtext/110811-0001.htm#1108117000001).

The British media’s  idea of balance in reporting the English Defence League (EDL) is nicely shown in a piece by Damian Thompson   He begins by  describing a YouTube video  “which “anti-fascist” campaigners against the English Defence League don’t want you to see. It features a couple of young middle-class supporters of Unite Against Fascism sniggering as one of them describes a “horrible tattooed woman” at a demo being punched in the face “before someone kicks her up the arse”. In the words of Telegraph blogger Brendan O’Neill, these well-bred kids admit that it’s not normally OK to hit women, “but you can make an exception when it comes to female EDL supporters because they aren’t women – they’re dogs”.

All well and good you may think,  but Johnson goes on:

‘You might think there’s nothing new in this. The street battles between the Anti-Nazi League and the National Front in the 1970s pitted white middle-class students against white working-class thugs: in both cases there was a sense that the ethnic minorities they were fighting over were almost irrelevant. Actually, the similarities are misleading. The EDL isn’t the
National Front or even the British National Party. It’s not a fascist party, more of an angry white rentamob. And the racism is different, too: not so much about colour, more about  culture.’ http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100105484/is-the-edl-the-new-voice-of-the-white-working-class/

So there you have it, the EDL are not Fascist,  but they are racist and in Thompson’s eyes best described as “an angry white rentamob.  The man is completely oblivious to the fact that the EDL is an entirely natural response by those whose territory has been invaded by the incontinent mass immigration of the post-war period.  He also misses the fact that the EDL work
within the confines of politically correctness by emphasising their non-racial membership.

Perhaps the most ingenious attempt to square the “all races are in it together”  lie  with the fact of large scale black rioting came from the historian David Starkey.  He claimed on BBC2’s  Newsnight  that the riots were multiracial events  but  monocultural  because the white rioters had become  culturally “black” . Speaking to   fellow guest Owen Jones, who wrote Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Classes, Starkey said: “What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs that you wrote about have become black…What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs that you wrote about have become black.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/13/david-starkey-claims-whites-black).

Unfortunately for Starkey he had begun his explanation by referring to Enoch Powell in terms which fell short of the unreserved condemnation required by the liberal intelligentsia. This put him on the back foot from the start, but it did not really make that much of a difference in the end because his argument was confused and questionable in terms of factual accuracy.

The confusion in his argument is his claim  that the black culture adopted by whites is a particular type of  black culture:  lawless, amoral and violent. The problem is he did not describe what other types of black culture in Britain there  might be.  Worse, when  pressed on what he meant during the Newsnight programme,  Starkey cited the case of the black Labour MP David Lammy as an example of a more desirable black because if you heard his voice without knowing he was black you would not know  Lammy is  black because he sounded English.  Starkey was implying that only by thoroughly assimilating would blacks become other than the feral variety which he had described.

As for factual accuracy, I have  long been puzzled by the claim that large numbers of  white children have adopted black mores including speaking in a mock-Jamaican patois. It is true that if you put  a child in social circumstances where they are in the ethnic  or racial  minority  they will naturally tend to adopt the manners  and speech of the majority, at least when they are with members of the dominant group.  Against that I have lived and worked in parts of  London with large black populations for over forty years  and it is not a common affectation in my experience.  Where it exists I suspect  that it is no more real than the fictional posturings of Ali G or those of the real-life white , very middle class, son-of-a-bishop DJ  Tim Westwood(Ali G is by far the more believable creation).

It also worth noting Starkey’s contempt for his own people. He  has no hesitation is speaking of a white  underclass and accepting the highly abusive term chav. He also omits Asians and immigrant whites from the rioting picture.

Some white  media commentators  such as Leo Mckinstry  did stand against the general liberal consensus “when it comes to criminality they[left liberals]  indulge in the most grotesque double-standards, refusing to demand the same standards of conduct from ethnic minorities that they expect from white people.”  (http://www.express.co.uk/ourcomments/view/263582),  but they were few and far between.

The disconnected British Elite

The behaviour of the British elite – politicians, the mass media and social commentators – has been both sinister and absurd.  Everyone who is not blind will have seen the TV coverage showing the dominant role played by blacks; everyone who lives in the cities and towns  involved  will know that the areas affected are heavily populated by blacks. Yet the British elite in a manner evoking 1984 call black white and insist that what people see, read and hear is not reality and that reality is the liberal multiculturalist fantasy they retail incessantly. This  fantasy
in theory allows no distinction to be made on grounds of race or ethnicity, but in practice it is only applied where  it is to the benefit of ethnic minorities.

The desire to avoid acknowledging that race lay at the heart of the riots was the prime reason for the lie, but  the disconnection of the British elite from British society in general also played its part. The  Work and Pensions Secretary  Iain Duncan Smith  bleakly demonstrated the divide:

“Writing in the Times newspaper, Mr Duncan Smith said: ‘Too many people have remained unaware of the true nature of life on some of our estates.

“This was because we had ghettoised many of these problems, keeping them out of sight of the middle-class majority. ‘Mr Duncan Smith added that the estates on which the riots took place were blighted by a ‘welfare dependency ‘‘Occasionally some terrible event would make it on to our front pages, but because they were small in number people were able to turn away from the problem.

“‘But last month the inner city finally came to call, and the country was shocked by what it saw.’

“He said it was not possible to ‘arrest our way out of the riots’ and a social response was needed.”
(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2037574/Iain-Duncan-Smith-The-riots-gave-middle-class-taste-real-world.html#ixzz1YFVv4UDd).

Those words could have been spoken in the 19^th Century as the haves discussed the problem of the poor as though they were a different species.   It is both contemptuous and contemptible.

If these had been largely white riots have no doubt that the British elite’s narrative would have  been very different.  There would still have been the contemptible talk  of a lumpen  underclass and feral young men, but it would not have been represented as a racially neutral event. It would have been the “white lumpens underclass” and feral white boys”.   The  narrative the elite offered was simply an attempt to avoid addressing  the fact that these were black riots and by extension the general problem of black misbehaviour.

The immediate  ill consequences of the great  white liberal  lie that there was no racial aspect to the riots are twofold: the white working class and the poor in general will be demonised further and  nothing will be done to address the real cause of the riots which is the existence of a large numbers of blacks who have been led to believe that the white British elite will tolerate and excuse black misbehaviour because they are burdened both with the liberal’s self-indulgent white guilt  and an ideology (political correctness)  which has as its central tenet  “anti-racism”,   an idea which in practice means looking for discrimination against blacks and Asians  by whites or “white society”.

But there is a greater general ill embodied in the lie.  The British have been asked  by the Government, politicians of all mainstream parties and the vast majority of the mass media to believe that which is obviously untrue.  Whether or not the general public believe the lie is largely immaterial,  because the public narrative is controlled by the British elite, both through laws and newly engineered social conventions which ensure that no one who tells the truth can hope to be elected  to Westminster and by the willingness of the mainstream media to censor views which fall outside the limits permitted by political correctness.  (Even where  an individual or group manages to breach the censorship  they do so by trying,  like both the BNP and EDL,  to place themselves within the shackles of  political correctness by,  for example,  trying to represent themselves as “non-racist”.) Because the British  elite can control the public narrative, the logic  of the lie can be followed to produce public policy which is completely at odds with reality  because there is no contrary voice or power holder allowed into the decision making.   It is the type of situation envisaged in 1984 and  which was realised in states such as the Soviet Union where those with power tell obvious lies and the people are helpless to prevent either their telling or the policies which flow from them.

If the real problem was acknowledged  – that of a black population with many disaffected and morally disconnected people – what could be done to resolve it? It is doubtful that much could be done in terms of changing  black behaviour fundamentally. It is a stark fact that black populations  throughout the world, whether  they be in the majority or minority, display similar anti-social behaviours:  strong tendencies to violence,  rape, male desertion of  children and   women bringing up children by multiple fathers on their own.  These behaviours alone are guaranteed to produce widespread   criminality and social dysfunction.

If it is difficult to see how such behaviours could be changed, there is also  the straightjacket of victimhood – something particularly strong  in Britain –  to deal with.   You cannot persuade people to change  deeply embedded behaviours when they have it in their minds that in some way not responsible for their behaviour or, worse, that they are entitled to behave badly as a form of reparation for ancestral wrongs.

The fact that widespread  serious anti-social black  behaviour is found in so  many different societies suggests that there may be a genetic component  to it.  Blacks have consistently  scored poorly at IQ tests compared with other racial groups.  They also have on average higher testosterone levels compared with whites and Asians.   The British psychologist and  the Finnish economist Tatu Vanhanen  have calculated that the average IQ of black Africans is 69 (see their IQ and the Wealth of Nations) and Americans blacks (who unlike Africans  have a large admixture of white genes) score around 85.   Most psychologists working in the area of intelligence testing  think that an IQ of 75-80 is the point at which an individual struggles to live an independent life in an advanced modern society. It could be that what is seen as  black misbehaviour  is either a response to the stress of living in a society which they cannot cope with or is simply behaviour which would be sustainable in a tribal society but is incompatible with more complex societies.  I address this question more extensively at  http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/blacks-the-odd-man-out/.

But if there is an innate tendency for  anti-social behaviour  and/or an ingrained culture of accepting it as normal or at least tolerable within black populations,  that does not mean nothing can be done to control such misbehaviour.  Properly enforcing the law against blacks would be a start.  Politicians ceasing to pander to ethnic minorities would change the social climate and make it clear to blacks and Asians  that they will be  judged by the same standards as white Britons.  Repealing all the legislation  which places ethnic minorities in a de facto privileged position such the Race Relations Act and the Race Relations (Amendment Act) 2000  would underline that message.  Removing all public funding for the promotion or provision of ethnically based ideas or services would signal that the multicultural gravy boat is over.  Most  powerfully, those with power could end further mass immigration.

Is there any chance of such things happening? Not in our present circumstances, but politics can move very rapidly. Elites have only one settled principle, to do whatever is necessary to maintain  their power and privilege. Let public disorder created  by ethnic minorities get the point where it frightens those with power and they  will change their ideology without blinking.