Anniversary of a Calamity

Empire Windrush

On June 22, 1948, an aging rust bucket of a ship called the Empire Windrush crawled into Tilbury Docks of London at the end of a 5,000 mile voyage from Kingston, Jamaica. On board were 492 Jamaicans in search of work in England. No-one foresaw on that day that within half a century British children would become a minority in the schools of our capital city. Yet so it has come to pass.

The Windrush’s cargo was not exactly welcomed ashore. One Labour minister expressed the belief and indeed the fervent hope that Jamaicans would not be able to stand an English winter. They proved him wrong. Characteristically, the British people grumbled, their rulers expressed private reservations, but no-one actually did anything. Throughout the 1950s, hundreds of thousands of Afro-Caribbeans flooded into England in the steps of Windrush’s advance party. Despite serious rioting in Notting Hill brought on by racial tensions, the establishment looked the other way and did nothing.

In 1956 Lord Salisbury, continuing the Cecil family’s tradition of public service, warned in cabinet of the danger of continuing mass immigration, but Prime Minister Harold MacMillan refused to incur the hostility of the liberals inside and outside the Tory party by checking the flood. On the contrary, he and his successors acquiesced throughout the 1960s in a huge influx of Asians, who differ both from us and from one another not only ethnically, but also in religion, so ensuring that the tripartite sub-continental civil war between Hindu, Sikh and Muslim would one day be fought out on the streets of British towns and cities.

The 1970s saw more Asians move here after they had been expelled from East Africa. These newcomers had been in Kenya and Uganda for a century. Multiracial societies are less irreversible than liberals think! During that time they kept themselves apart (to coin a phrase) from the Africans, refusing to integrate into societies which they came to dominate economically, while feeling no loyalty to them, instead retaining traditional family, religious and communal links to India. India incidentally was very willing to take these long lost children back. The truly despicable Ted Heath took a day off from his main work of selling our national independence to Brussels, to betray the British identity of Leicester, by virtually insisting that the Ugandan Asians should go there instead of returning to their country of ethnic origin. Oddly enough, Heath now chooses to live in the idyllic surroundings of Salisbury Cathedral Close, instead of one of the little Asias that he created in his anxiety to show off his “anti-racist” credentials.

After Margaret Thatcher famously expressed her “understanding” of people’s fears of being swamped by coloured immigrants, some expected a change for the better. They were wrong. Her time in office was marked by very high levels of immigration. Whole new groups such as Vietnamese, Ghanians and Nigerians settled here in great numbers, adding to the marvelous diversity of our society, so well illustrated in 1981 and 1985 by the Brixton, Handsworth, Toxeth and Broadwater Farm riots. John Major’s wretched premiership saw Somalis streaming in, taking advantage of our absurd asylum laws, to be followed by ghastly “new Labour’s” special contribution, hordes of Czech gypsies, unwanted in their own country, but welcomed to Dover by our Tony.

Economic migrants posing as refugees are even now entering the country at an officially acknowledged rate of over 60,000 a year. The true figure is probably over 100,000.

The results of such collective stacking of our nation’s funeral pyre are now becoming apparent even to the most dim witted and willfully blind of our compatriots. A London Research Centre study reveals that English children are now in a minority in London schools. One child in three in London schools does not speak English as a first language. Many important provincial cities are in even worse case than the capital, particularly in the Midlands, but also in parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire.

Politically correct Labour councils discriminate against the indigenous population in jobs and housing. Elderly, poor, frightened white people who have the misfortune to live in richly diverse multicultural areas cower behind bolts and bars in their decaying blocks of rent-subsidized council flats, too afraid to go out after dark for fear of falling prey to marauding packs of “youths.” Oppressive laws designed to stifle debate cow the indigenous population into silence (isn’t it wonderful to live in a free country?). Gangs of Bangladeshis carry out vicious assaults in broad daylight on white youths in Regent’s Park. They know that they have little to fear from a police force whose commissioner is uninterested in racist attacks if the victim is white.

Where do we go from here? The first step is to recognise that the blame for what has happened does not rest with the immigrant and immigrant-descended communities, who have come to Great Britain in the misguided pursuit of a better life than they imagine that their own countries can offer them. At the beginning, they were encouraged to do so by employers of labour anxious to keep down wages. Later, politicians in both main parties gave them a false picture of their likely reception, so betraying both the indigenous population and the immigrants. Our own leaders have failed and betrayed the British people, and continue to do so. William Hague’s cavortings at last year’s Notting Hill carnival (he called it “Britain’s greatest cultural event”) help to explain why life-long Conservatives are now abandoning their party in droves.

The next step is to consider what can realistically be done to improve matters. A good beginning would be to enforce the law as it stands. Hundreds of thousands of Africans, Asians and even Latin Americans are present in this country illegally. The Home Office, the immigration service and the police should prioritise the apprehension, detention and expulsion of illegals. The disgusting individuals, many of British origin, who traffic in illegal immigrants and bogus marriages, should be prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law and severely punished. Naming and shaming such creatures would be very salutary.

Many illegals work in the aptly named black economy for unscrupulous employers, who welcome cheap labour, whatever the source. Slum landlords house these people, knowing or suspecting that they ought not be in our country. The Swiss have made it a crime to employ or house illegal immigrants. So should we. A few prosecutions of tacky company directors who knowingly employ illegal immigrants on social security to flip hamburgers in their disgusting “restaurants” and Rachmanite landlords who fill up fire trap tenements with sweated labour would work wonders in discouraging those who put their own interests before those of the nation.

Next, the asylum laws must go. Asylum seekers should be permitted to remain in the country only at the Home Secretary’s discretion, for which he must be politically answerable to Parliament, and in the last resort, the British people, who would have ample opportunity every five years to express a view on his stewardship. Obviously we would welcome any Solzhenitsyns who happen to arrive on these shores, but Hutus who have murdered their Tutsi betters and Somalis whose clan warfare has reduced their own country to a waste land need not apply. No more do we need or want Islamic fanatics who hate Western society, yet use the national territory of the United Kingdom as a base for their terrorist activities against friendly foreign states and important economic partners such as Saudi Arabia, Algeria and indeed France, whose governments justly resent our refusal to curb the criminal activities of dangerous terrorists posing as refugees.

Were these relatively modest measures to be applied, the non-European population of the United Kingdom could be significantly reduced, probably by about a million, which of itself would represent a big improvement on the present state of affairs. What of the longer established millions who would yet remain?

Contrary to optimistic liberal predictions from the 1960s, these communities are not integrating. Young Afro-Caribbeans are much more alienated from our society than their elders, brought up to look to England (however mistakenly) as their mother country. Adapting Lord Tebbit’s perceptive “cricket test,” how many “Black British” flew Jamaican flags to show support for the Reggae Boyz’ valiant efforts against much better paid opposition during the World Cup, but felt not a shred of interest in the progress of the English side? How many young Asians are rediscovering their ancestral religious and cultural heritage, rejecting multicultural deracination in favor of communal and religious identities deeply rooted in the Indian sub-continent but, shall we say, not entirely relevant to Wolverhampton? Second and third generation Afro-Caribbeans and Asians are less and not more British than their parents and grandparents, who often identified with the Queen and the flag, feeling an unrequited love for all things British, for which their children care not at all, preferring the red, yellow and green Rastafarian colours, the saffron banner of Hindu militancy, and the green flag of fundamentalist Islam to the Union flag.

It is likely that a policy of encouraging resettlement by financial subsidies would be very popular both with the indigenous and the immigrant and immigrant-descended populations. Asian religious leaders have suggested that “return to the house of Islam” is the only option for devout Muslims unwilling to see their children lose their religious and cultural identity in an alien land. Radical and innovative thinkers in the black community are openly debating the possibility of return to the Caribbean or even Africa as the only alternative to the demeaning underclass existence of social security, hamburger flipping “jobs” and criminality, which is all that white liberal society offers them in the deep but unacknowledged latent racism and snobbery that underlies its phony, patronizing condescension to all those, black and white, not born in Hampstead with silver spoons in their mouths. Many in the Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities retain strong links with relatives and friends in their countries of origin, would easily integrate into their social structures, and are by no means reluctant to consider the option of return.

Fifty years on, the time has come to face up to the problems of our disintegrating, swamped, violent, hopeless and utterly failed multi-racial society, lest England should one day become a new Rwanda, Sri Lanka, or Bosnia, running with rivers of blood.

No-one chooses to be born into a particular group, so we should have hatred for none, except perhaps our own political class, who have so shamefully betrayed their own people. We should also have no illusions. Except that we take action to reverse the disastrous policies of the last fifty years, all history shows that Britain will have no better a fate than Kosovo.