I have to say, participating in this forum can be terribly disappointing.

Yesterday, I put my finger on the key factors limiting social mobility in Britain; namely, crap schools and non-standard elocution. And what happened? Did anyone say “exactly,” or “well done”?

Absolutely not. No one mentioned social mobility again. They just totally went off topic and talked about the bloody election.

But, really, who cares whether it’ll be Clog or Tony Blair’s sleazy Number One, or even that pleasant young fellow from Eatons. Whichever it may be, or God help you, if it’s a coalition of all three it’s unlikely to slow Britain’s transformation into the first post-civilized nation (cf. Jacques Attali: “A short history of the future”).

But for those who may wish to slow the descent into chaos, let me reiterate: social mobility is impossible without education, and teaching kids how to put on a condom or how to hate a homophobe is not education it is indoctrination.

If you want to know what education is, here’s a reasonable explanation by Harold MacMillan: “At Oxford I worked very hard for three years and at the end of it I knew when a man was talking nonsense.”

Today, of course, it is more difficult because you need to know, also, when a woman is talking nonsense, which is not always when her lips are moving.

As for elocution, Harold MacMillan had some problem of his own, but if you think it will help a kid grow up to become Prime Minister if he talks Jamaican gangster slang or native Oik, then I hope you enjoy post-civilized Britain.

But today’s topic is more about the bloody election, so don’t let me get in anyone’s way.

This is an excellent commentary on our present condition. It raises many questions.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/20/tony-judt-manifesto-for-a-new-politics

If Cameron believed that he was right in not interfering with the freedom of Conservative MEPs to vote as they saw fit, he should have maintained that position. I wasn’t impressed by his wobbling, presumably because of PC considerations.

“Yesterday, I put my finger on the key factors limiting social mobility in Britain; namely, crap schools and non-standard elocution. And what happened? Did anyone say “exactly,” or “well done”?”

Welcome to the hothouse Alfred. Never mind. Chin up, your time will come.

Cameroon is about as useful as the proverbial chocolate teapot. He has been exposed as a hollow sham.

PS When clicking on to About on Alfred’s website (Canadian Spectator) a site clicks in that tries to scan your computer??

Mary,

Thank you for the info about my “About” page.

I don’t see what you are seeing, and I cannot see any alien script on the page, but I have disabled it and will get my hosting service to take a look. If you have any details, e.g., what browser you are using, I’d be grateful if you will email me.

Alfred

Yesterday, I put my finger on the key factors limiting social mobility in Britain; namely, crap schools and non-standard elocution. And what happened? Did anyone say “exactly,” or “well done”?

With all due respect Alfred maybe it’s just that nobody agreed with you-and if that was the case consider yourslef fortunate you didnt receive invective..

It can get quite aurreal in here,but you’ve probably noticed that already i’m sure..:)

regards

PS to Mary,

Yes a good article that you mention by Tony Judt. But I think there is something fundamental that he misses.

Although he is certainly correct to say that “The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition,” I doubt if it has a lot to do with the privatization of public services, bad thing though that may be.

I grew up in the 50′s and since then Britain seems to have lost a measure of decency that cannot be accounted for by changes in income distribution or the extent of public services. In those days most people were dirt poor. And dirty. Ninety percent of houses had no bathroom. We lived on a farm with no indoor plumbing. What a joy for a five-year old ?” never had to wash. Well, occasionally one was scrubbed in a tin tub, but most villagers I swear never washed, ever.

Then, the murder conviction rate was 60 per year, now it is well over a thousand. Then children were safe just about anywhere. At the age if six I was put on a slam-door train (no corridor) with my sisters (ten and twelve) to visit with relatives in London. We shared the compartment with a bunch of soldiers. No problem feared or experienced. Homosexuality may have been illegal but it was not something that people obsessed about. If a couple of fellows lived together, what of it? Were Holmes and Watson, queer? Obviously not. But if they were, who cared what they did in the privacy of their own home?

My conclusion is that it is the culture that has rotted, and I would say that the media, including books, films and TV, enabled by liberalization of laws about pornography and ideas about public decency the portrayal of violence, etc. are primarily responsible.

And Jives,

Let the invective flow. I probably have enough Scotch blood to give as good as I get.

I’ve just read through Amnesty’s report on the issue and saw something not mentioned elsewhere.

It got me thinking.

The law mentions polygamy.

So why aren’t Amnesty complaining about the anti-polygamous aspect to the law?

Or the fact that polygamy is banned all over Europe.

Isn’t that discrimination?

I’m a polygamist stuck in a monogamous marriage.

It is difficult for me to express my sexuality here by marrying additional women because of prison.

If the law has no right to dictate who people share their bedrooms with

why can the law dictate the amount of women I share mine with?

Arsalan,

the law doesn’t – you just can’t marry them all. Fair enough, I reckon.

“I’m a polygamist stuck in a monogamous marriage”

We all are mate.

Arsalan,

I am famous for it. Bed as many as possible, marry as few as possible. You know it makes sense.

The Liberal utopia for which we are all headed: fornication unlimited, plus shopping, of course.

What about polyandry? Why am I discriminated against? I’m sure children would benefit from having several fathers around, especially if one was deficient.

Dreoilin

You really don’t understand men very well do you?

http://kuchikuchi.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/polygamy_2.jpg

Harr! That’s me. One husband, two sons, and not one of them ever did what they were told.

I once lived for several months in a polyandrous Buddhist village in the himalayas.

I was once beaten up by a pacifist called Pauly Andraus for making fun of his name.

Nahh just joking,

I thought bloody hell that was clever, just before I shouted, bloody hell that was painfull.

Arsalan has been at the beer. Or the fish.

“I once lived for several months in a polyandrous Buddhist village in the himalayas.”

Are you serious, MJ? What was it like?

Alfred: I like what I’ve read by you. I imagine a lot of people do this – they mentally nod and move on. If you’d said something to which I had disagreed, and felt my observation worth placing, I would have done so. Likewise, if there was something interesting that I might have added to complement your point. Or maybe just if I’d had the time.

Terminal news/info junkies do this… whip through their sites of interest and whip even faster through the comments. Sometimes they’ll agree, disagree or otherwise have occasion to comment/reply. Other people more-or-less live in a forum, or post during certain states of mind. Some trolls hang around, some are paid antagonists.

Don’t assume no response means no interest whatsoever – when people make useless, silly or misguided posts here, they’ll generally get a response. That’s the entire modus operandi of trolls, for instance.

Apart from a couple of obvious and irritating trolls, this forum is about as good as I’ve found for signal to noise ratio.

Alfred -

“social mobility is impossible without education, and teaching kids how to put on a condom or how to hate a homophobe is not education it is indoctrination.”

I would suggest that teenage pregnancy does not help social mobility.

“Homosexuality may have been illegal but it was not something that people obsessed about. But if they were, who cared what they did in the privacy of their own home?”

Funny that, homosexuals didn’t want to make a big deal about their lifestyle because it was *illegal*! Pray tell, why should homosexuals have to lie about who they are unless they are at home?

Ahh the good old days, back when people didn’t obsess about priests fiddling with kids.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like all the recent changes in society. But it’s true that every generation has complained about ‘the kids’. it’s nothing new, and I think you would be hard pressed to make the case that we aren’t better off now than say 100-200 years ago. The reason why life seemed so much simpler and more innocent when we were children, is because we were children.

dreoilin

It seems that way now that Craig has deleted the middle bit.

You are only reading the beginning and end of the story.

If you read the middle bit you would have realised it was a critique on how Daud Kamrans alliance with the European far right would have socioeconomic consequences.

But the worst thing about censurship is

Cameron has just been on The Politics Show – sounding earnest and keen – with a panel of voters. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I missed most of it so don’t know if the subject of homosexuality or his EU grouping came up.

I have just added a comment on the New Labour Bastards’ post. Two more troughers have been exposed.

Alfred, you should visit some of these inner city schools you mention with horror. They are less attractive prisons than the prisons of Eton or Stow, but the children inside are bright, funny, clever, naughty, hardworking, dreamy, curious and so on. They are not frightening; they are children.

The accelerated speed of the National Curriculum is frightening (five weeks to ‘do’ Dickens at GCSE) and the amount of work teachers and pupils are set is ridiculous, and the various fads imposed by government are insulting and often nonsensical, and the security measures are repulsive and unnecessary.

I don’t know a way back. But I’m sure ‘social mobility’ isn’t the answer. That will always leave people at the bottom, hungry or homeless or dying of hypothermia, won’t it?

Back to schools: of course teachers will try and impart a joy for learning and word and form (far more important than accents). But it’s pretty hard when society is telling children that a) there are no jobs for them b) all that matters is passing exams and c) that they are potential knife wielding maniacs and need to be fingerprinted and filmed.

By the way, I think it was you who used the word ‘miscegenation’ in an earlier post, and used it as as if the word was not one of the more repulsive in our language. I think you were objecting to relationships between people with more melatonin and people with less melatonin, in fact. That’s why I haven’t bothered to respond. Perhaps you could correct me if I’m wrong.

Technicolour,

well said.

Alfred,

take note. You were CanSpecky or something, weren’t you?

I was under the understanding that polyandry went hand in hand with female infanticide. Because families kill their daughters their sons had to share or remain single?

Arsalan: be assured that Buddhists do not practce infanticide. It’s not due to a shortage a women but a shortage of cash.

Yes, Arsalan, I think you’ve been misinformed. Read up on Buddhism, it’s interesting.

By the way, I was also interested to read that before Islam, people in many of those areas lived in matriarchal communities and paid tribute to a triumvirate of gods, three of them female.

It’s like the bonobos; peaceful creative and matriarchal. Apparently (according to radio 4 which still does produce good stuff) they split from the chimpanzees in a curious quirk of evolution. Of course they are now widely being used in animal experiments for that reason. Humans, lovely.

But the worst thing about censurship is

–Arsalan

Are you pulling my leg again?

That’s interesting, dreoilin, what kind of female? Not a very good one, I sadly predict. On the other hand, I picture you in front of a warm turf fire, surrounded by beautiful artworks (made by friends) and perhaps a cat. Am I right?

In fact, dreoilin, I think you’re Dervla Murphy, and I claim my £5!

You think I’m 78???

Holy cow.

yes ma’am, why not? One of my best friends was 96. Sharp and curious as a sack of ferrets!

Glenn,

Thank you for your kind comment. My complaint was mostly tongue in cheek. The sometimes crazy, irrelevant comments here, are often highly entertaining. Craig attracts some very bright people.

Actually, though, what I wrote above was prompted in part by the failure of my over-serious, and possibly unintelligible comment on another thread to generate any discussion of education and social mobility.

CheebaCow,

You may be right about teenage pregnancy not helping social mobility, although I’ve heard it said that having children is a good thing for a girl to get out of the way early in life so that she can get on with a career in her thirties.

What I object to about the permeation of education with social conditioning about sex is that it has disrupted the basic British method of reproduction ?” you know, in the spring time pretty ring time, etc.

In the fifties, a third or more of all children were conceived out of wedlock (as we used to say). Often there was a hasty marriage. Otherwise, the poor girl was subject to the probably humiliating experience of spending the gestation period in a home for unmarried mothers. On delivery, the the child would be placed with what were usually very loving adoptive parents.

This was an excellent arrangement. Unmarried girls who became pregnant faced social censure, humiliation, etc. Hence they were generally cautions about sex, which meant VD, as we used to call it, was not so common. However, when a girl was totally swept away, then you had the possibility of a very fine little bastard. What I think is involved here is some very important basic biology. Essentially, it is the girls who chose, and if a fellow is totally irresistible, then it’s best (judged in terms of evolutionary biology) not to resist. (This incidentally is the basis of the Ghengis effect, why some males have more luck than others. But I won’t go into that.)

There’s a website somewhere I believe dedicated to exceptional bastards. People like German Chancellor, Willi Brandt, who I met on a beach in Victoria ?” very charming person, Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, and of course Slick Willi Clinton, a remarkably well-adapted individual, who it is hard not to like.

As it is, the Brits can hardly reproduce themselves at all now, and can only maintain their numbers by importing people.

As for homosexuals showing some discretion, would that be a hardship? I find it amusing to see a young, good-looking heterosexual couple obviously mutually engaged, but on the whole, I think public expressions of sexuality somewhat distasteful.

Technicolour,

Yes, CanSpeccy here. I seem to have an identity problem.

I’m sure the kids at rotten schools have immense potential. But it must be difficult to work with them to the best effect when you have little discipline and the curriculum is permeated with a load of bollocks about how to be a good citizen of the New Labor Utopia.

You are right, I think, to question the value of social mobility. Meritocracy sounds like a good thing. But do we want a society in which every dustman is a guaranteed gamma minus moron?

Sorry if I upset you by using the term ‘miscegenation’, if I did. I suspect this is a term that has various meanings according to culture. To me, if I used, it, it was just a polysyllabic way of saying mixing (probably genes?). It’s presumably like the term “nigger”. When I was a kid in Devon there were no colored or other foreign people so there was no racism ?” it would have made no sense (classism was our vice then). However, in the warehouse where I sometimes worked as a student there were sweaters and cardigans in a nice shade of brown called “nigger,” a Latinate word referring strictly to color. This is why not all seemingly offensive language is intended to be so, and why people tend to resist political correctness in language: “It’s my bloody language and the words mean whatever I want them to mean, neither more nor less.”

I agree accents don’t really matter. Some of them are fascinating. But if it impedes a child’s progress in the world to say “Yo” instead of “You” or “dunnum” instead of “don’t they” (as we used to say in Devon) it would be best, I think, to correct them.

Alfred, I can’t cope with everything you write in one chunk; it is too indigestible, and I need to eat supper. For now I would say ‘Yo’ means ‘hello’ (or hi, or howdy, or hey, or ‘morning, depending on the current slang). Not ‘you’. I have never seen it in an essay, anymore than I would have used the word ‘chronic’ in an essay, though it was fashionable as a criticism in my far distant youth.

‘Having little discipline’: well, it would be frustrating, if you saw teachers as people to impose discipline. Interestingly, quite often the people who lose their self control in classrooms are the teachers, not the pupils. In fact, mainly. Perhaps it gets harder as you get older?

No, the term ‘miscegenation’ doesn’t upset me; what upsets me is a person who pruriently dwells on other people’s sexual relationships, and judges them.

Actually, that’s not true; the term ‘miscegenation’ does upset every bone in my semantic body, because it is ascribing a negative – ‘mis’ – to something which is a positive – birth. And it thoroughly upsets me as a person, because of all the people I know, who are the product of their mixed melatonins and cultures, and who are only benefiting from the fact, while we pink British sit and stew in a dead-end nostaligia of our own making. Dammit. Get me a horny Brazilian now!

Tech,

I think that miscegenation is OK. It derives from Miscere (L.), to mix.

Anyway, my memory is playing tricks on me. Walking on the beach here in glorious morning sunshine it occurred to me that I could not possibly have met Willi Brandt in Victoria.

In fact, it was Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and although he was very charming, he was/is not, so far as I am aware, a bastard.

Technicolour,

“Discipline” in the context of school can mean many things. If you have to beat them, then there’s something wrong.

Good teachers achieve discipline in other ways: charisma, making kids understand why what they are being taught matters to them, and so on. Without that kind of discipline, teaching is surely futile. And if one does not teach kids to discipline themselves, one has surely failed.

Alfred, like, ‘mixing’ is only good if you want to ‘mix’, OK. Not ‘good’ per se.

(sees future in which pink people desperately try and mate with brown people on account of global warming, blinks)

Anyway, what’s this thing about ‘bastards’? People don’t really think like that anymore. Obviously it’s nicer/more fun as a child to be around a happy community with responsible adults who are in in it for the long term; but I don’t think that necessarily means marriage.

Cross post: you’re right about teaching.

Technicolor,

Re: bastards

It was not my point to comment on how people think. What I was commenting on was a vitally important biological process: human reproduction; how we do it and how that affects the viability of our population and society. I don’t give a damn how people think. I’m only interested in the reality.

In addition, I was trying to throw a bit of grit into the smooth working of the liberal mind, so well expressed by a Canadian professor of only moderate intellect, but some charisma, named Pierre Elliot Trudeau. “The only sin,” he wrote, “is to to hurt another person.”

The blinding stupidity of the comment being apparent when one asks, how the hell does anyone know what the ultimate consequences of their actions will be, and in particular, how does the permissive, social-engineering liberal know what the consequences will be of their buggering around with social taboos and traditions?

About as much, I suggest, as the mass murdering idiots who created the soviet utopia.

What particular “buggering around with social taboos” did you have in mind, Alfred? Gay relationships and mixed-raced relationships are OK by me, and not really products of social engineering. It’s just social attitudes to these things are improving. I don’t see many gay *and* mixed-race relationships, but they’re fine too, and not harming anyone.

Perhaps you regard the teaching of tolerance as social engineering; personally, I just think it is sensible. What dark consequences might these things have, save a potential future reduction in hate crime?

Jon,

No-fault devorce? Abortion law “reform.”

These are recent examples of social engineering, the latter having resulted in the destruction of millions of perfectly healthy human beings.

As for social engineering, if you don’t believe that the Soviet experience was a disaster in social engineering, I don’t know what example I can point to as evidence of its potential dangers.

The last sentence of my last post seems to be incoherent. But anyway, how about paying unmarried girls to get pregnant, i.e., provision of public housing, welfare, etc. This is social engineering. What are the consequences? How does it impact the average IQ of the next generation — especially when clever girls are encouraged to put off marriage and child-bearing until they’ve qualified as an MD, a lawyer, etc.?

Then bring in three quarters of a million highly philoprogenetive immigrants every year to compete with the locals for housing, jobs, etc.

I don’t know what the consequences will be, but I don’t hear liberals even asking.

Tolerance is often a good thing. But not always. The classic case being the intolerance of liberals for intolerance in others: even if others may simply be adhering to an ancient social code without which society may be in jeopardy.

Zbigniew Brezinski’s book “Out of Control” provides a useful discussion of these questions.

Alfred. It’s late here. Don’t worry about love & babies.

Tech,

I’m not worrying. Just trying to start an argument.

This is a rather bare medium of communication. Without gesture, expression, tone of voice, it can be difficult for people to understand one’s intent.

Anyhow, sleep well.

Talking about babies, does anyone here agree that it is sexist that I can’t get pregnant?

Arsalan, you do my heart good.

Goodnight

All I can say is, there are ‘illegitmate children’ in the current generations of my family, born to ‘unmarried mothers’ and all (of my family and others; until they became family anyway), and they’re good people. If anybody’s got a problem with that, they can stew in it. The kids are there anyway, and to hell with the theoreticians that say they shouldn’t be.

Alfred -

“although I’ve heard it said that having children is a good thing for a girl to get out of the way early in life”

I’ve been to public schools (govt run), private schools and hippie schools, and I can assure you at all of them there was a massive social stigma around getting pregnant while young. It was simply inconceivable that such behaviour would beneficial to upward social mobility. I finished high school in the late 90′s if its relevant. The same is true for all corporate environments where I have worked. All the women in senior positions had not had children while young.

“This was an excellent arrangement. Unmarried girls who became pregnant faced social censure, humiliation, etc.”

Yeah sounds like an amazing system for the guys and a real shitty system for women. All the moral, social (I guess the “bastard” child also shares some of this) and financial responsibilities fall on the woman if the guy decides he doesn’t want the burden. I guess girls sometimes had one other choice, to risk their lives having a ‘backyard abortion’.

“This incidentally is the basis of the Ghengis effect, why some males have more luck than others. But I won’t go into that.”

I can assure you that this still exists *cries* =P

“As it is, the Brits can hardly reproduce themselves at all now, and can only maintain their numbers by importing people. ”

I like to think that humans aren’t a virus, and that it isn’t necessary that our numbers continuously grow. This planet has a finite amount of resources.

“As for homosexuals showing some discretion, would that be a hardship? I think public expressions of sexuality somewhat distasteful. ”

I agree with you about public expressions of sexuality. Affection is fine in my opinion, but it can certainly cross a line. I find women sexier when they leave a little to the imagination.

You seem to be reducing homosexuality to the physical mechanics of dicks going into arses. Homosexual relationships can be just as loving and meaningful as any heterosexual relationship. Have you never spoken to friends or people you work with about non-sexual aspects of your relationship with a woman? It is obvious that you are in a relationship even when your not talking about the sex. Why should this be denied to gay people? Why should they have to fear prison or social isolation merely for expressing their love for a partner?

“The blinding stupidity of the comment being apparent when one asks, how the hell does anyone know what the ultimate consequences of their actions will be”

So your suggesting that we shouldn’t try?

“and in particular, how does the permissive, social-engineering liberal know what the consequences will be of their buggering around with social taboos and traditions?”

Ahh so conservatives know the results of their actions then? I guess they plan for young girls to die when forced to have a backyard abortion. Slavery has a nice and long tradition in human history, better start stocking up on chains for my new project. Silly liberals, introducing laws to outlaw slavery and engaging in social engineering.

You refer to social indoctrination/engineering a fair few times in your posts. However it seems to me you fail to recognise that 1950′s Britain also had similar levels of indoctrination/engineering, only the morals were different. I don’t think you could find a single anthropologist that would argue that 1950′s Britain was the inherent and natural way for a society to be organised.

“No-fault devorce? Abortion law “reform.”

These are recent examples of social engineering”

Got it, allowing people to separate whenever they feel like it is social engineering. Forcing people to stay together for life because of what a 2000 year old holy book says is the natural way of things.

“provision of public housing, welfare, etc. This is social engineering.”

Helping the poor is social engineering, but ignoring the poor and leaving them to die is the inherent instinct of humanity?

I find the arguments about genetics and IQ to be somewhat disingenuous. For starters, historically the poorest have always been a majority and had more children, while the ‘smartest’ and more ‘successful’ have had smaller families. Secondly the social taboo against mixed race relationships is actually hurting humanities genetics. It’s a simple fact that genetic diversity is greatly beneficial to humanity.

It’s a simple fact that eugenics trumps diversity.

http://eugenics.net/

I don’t believe in Eugenics and I don’t think anyone else those.

There was a time when people did, a time when little boys had their nuts chopped off if people thought their DNA wasn’t as good as someone else.

The thing about Eugenics is everyone thinks of themselves as superior and no one sees themselves as inferior.

If you think I am wrong and think of yourself as inferior, you are welcome to chop your own nuts off.

“It’s a simple fact that eugenics trumps diversity.”

Do you know what?

There are people who agree with you!!!

Like the Ancient Egyptians and Hawaiians, they married their sisters to reserve their noble bloodlines.

Or what about the Iranians before they converted to Islam. They married their mothers and daughters as well as their sisters to preserve their superior Aryan traits.

So who are you producing children with to breed your master race?

Or are you going to lie in fear of incriminating yourself?

Well, I think I will leave that Eugenics selective breeding to you guys, because I’m happy with my diversity.

Number one is a Paki, I’m sure I can get hold of 3 others from 3 different races if the first one doesn’t mind too much.

Diversity, I Like it!!!!!!

Alfred: you appeared to start off by suggesting that, by going down the road of making minimum provision for the poor, we are flirting with Stalist Communism. But it would be rather extreme to suggest we are even close to this kind of social engineering. It seems that you might be in favour of little or no government intervention at all – perhaps libertarian? But to your credit you appeared to move away from your original statement.

The dilemma of moving girls up the public housing queue if they become pregnant is a difficult one. I think it is true, and has been for some time, that some people who languish at the bottom of the learning scale in the UK do genuinely think that getting pregnant is a good way to get a free house. They find, of course, that they are still stuck in the poverty trap, with little education and no time or inclination to get one, and meanwhile they also have a child that perhaps they did not really want anyway. It’s a bit much to suggest that these girls are being “paid” – this breadline existence is hardly a bed of roses, though I am in favour of more school classes pointing this out. (I believe little electronic plastic babies that cry in the night and that wet their nappies have been used in education, with some degree of success – what a great idea!)

I think the best we can do here is training children and young adults to use contraception, despite your horror of it; the alternative of puritanism is social engineering via religiously inspired shame, and is psychologically harmful; and the “silver ring thing” abstinence project achieved an increase in teen pregnancy under the Bush administration. (Bush’s religious cohorts in government stopped recording the figures in embarrassment when their abstinence and anti-contraception projects turned out to make things worse; I can only suppose that when these young adults gave up their abstinence, it was their lack of knowledge about contraception that resulted in increased unwanted pregnancies.)

Meanwhile the conservative alternatives are worse, I should think. Let a newly-born child starve because his mother is unmarried? This isn’t even worth entertaining. Encourage a new generation of people stuck in religious and anti-sex shame? That’s a miserable existence, and sadly it’s something that Evangelical Christians have in existence with their would-be arch-enemies, Sharia-supporting Muslims. Not recommended either. More talk of “bastards” and the “homes for unmarried mothers”? Sounds highly socially regressive to me – does it not to you also?

Personally I think despite the attitudes of modern society, we are still stuck in an age of Christian shame – it’s a historical thing in the UK, rather than a resurgence of right-wing evangelism as per the American example. This regressive social malady is not helped by a barrage of fashion and health messages being forced upon us, to the detriment of people’s sense of self and ego security. Sadly the latter is the fault of unchecked capitalism, but conservatives don’t want to look into the “social engineering” there, nor the commodification of our clothes-horse bodies – because they are in favour of it all. And all of these things feed into the problems of unprotected sex, the ignorance of the difficulties of unwanted pregancies, the mental trauma of abortion, and absent fathers.

Alfred

I know what you mean, I work on a call centre and had an older person on the phone a couple of months ago.

Forget what the conversation was about but he was moaning like hell. Came out with a classic line “In my day a pansy used to be a name of a flower, now its a term for a homosexual and I am not allowed to use it”

“In my day a pansy used to be a name of a flower, now its a term for a homosexual and I am not allowed to use it”

Now I’m puzzled. He’s not allowed to talk about his flowers ?

Richard – I think it is a call-centre thing. These days they record the call, and if a conversation is found to change from technical support to gardening, it can land the employee in trouble with their boss for timewasting.

“I think it is a call-centre thing”

Ah, I see it now, he was looking for technical support for his homosexuality.

You could always call one of the said homosexuals “flower” – I’m sure they wouldn’t object!

Funnily enough, the silver ring “virginity pledge” initiative so favoured by Bush and evil-gelical types in the US backfired most spectacularly. Not only did they have higher rates of STDs and unwanted pregnancies, but the subjects were given to favouring oral and anal sex to the more usual practices. Since they weren’t actually having what was considered sexual intercourse, surely that was ok? Ah, for the want of some basic sex education… but no, keep the little darlings ignorant and they’ll stay innocent… right?

I have to admit to being puzzled about why sex acts between men get some people so, erm, worked up. I don’t sit around pondering about the sexual mechanics between every couple I meet, whether mixed gender or otherwise. Why would it be of any interest, let alone business of mine? Various rationalisations seem to get put forward, it being “unnatural”, “sinful” and so on are the obvious ones. But then we get people – with a straight face – expressing deep concern about population levels, as if the human race were in danger of fizzling out.

Perhaps it’s only white gays we should be concerned about, and non-whites can go at it with full approval? Homophobia – at the end of the day – is usually a combination of repressed homosexuality and racism. The rest is just rationalising.

@glenn. The other canard is that “it says so in the Bible” (and presumably the same justification holds true for other holy books also). But I have become increasingly of the mind in recent years that originally, religionists took a poor view of sex due to their distaste for the vulnerability that they found came with physical and emotional intimacy. The male elite in patriarchal societies were also presumably internally psychologically conflicted between their physical strength and an unsettling dependence on the weaker gender!

Western civilisation could have taken another route, and figured out how to deal with things like sexual jealousy, non-monogamous relationship arrangements, polyamory, same-sex relationships and phsyical instincts in general. But they chose differently: they decided to make it a moral issue, and constructed their religious laws around it, and invented the concept of naked shame. Look at Genesis, and it reports that God gave mankind that shame; I contend than mankind gave it to themselves, by writing it down, and promoted it via organised religion. Sadly we’ve not thus far been able to stop transmitting this meme to each successive generation.

In more cases that today’s religionists are prepared to admit, I wonder if some of their anti-sex agendas can be explained this way, even if only on a subconscious level, regardless of whether the target is unmarried relationships, or gay ones.

On homosexuality, I wonder if your point about repressed sexuality is sometimes quite close to the mark. A straight friend of mine will sometimes remark: “We’re all a bit ‘bi’ really”!

I think you miss my point, or several of them.

The social stigma attaching to teenage pregnancy is why a girl with any self-control will normally avoid pregnancy, except if she is overcome by an irresistible impulse. In that case, any child conceived will likely be, in hereditary terms, about as well endowed as any child she is capable of producing: i.e., the birth of such a child will often be a good outcome for society.

But for this outcome, there must be (a) the “shitty” consequences of getting pregnant, which provide the incentive for restraint that will fail only under exceptional circumstances, and (b) no readily available form of contraception.

Today, thanks to wonderful liberal reformers without the slightest idea of what they are doing, society has been so changed that it is now mainly less intelligent unmarried girls who get pregnant — and who do so deliberately for the economic pay off, while intelligent girls may avoid pregnancy indefinitely (by means of contraception as taught in school) and are encouraged to pursue professional careers, which means that many will be long past their prime child-bearing years before they even consider settling into a permanent relationship with a view to having a child.

What I am saying is that a viable society is not likely to be a liberal utopia, and that conversely, a liberal utopia will almost certainly fail.

But before some unmarried mother with a PhD in fluid dynamics berates me for saying only dumb teenagers get pregnant, I know, I know, thank God, that lovely, clever, responsible unmarried girls still sometimes have babies.

My last remarks, as I should have indicated, were in response to comments by CheebaCow.

To which I will add that you are quite mistaken in accusing me of reducing homosexuality to mechanics. I said essentially noting about homosexuality, except to advocate a little old-fashioned discretion, a view with which you seem to agree.

Re: the Genghis effect, I applied this term to the disproportionately high mating success of certain males due to female preference, but on reflection, this seems a misnomer.

Genghis Kahn’s extraordinary reproductive success (16 million living descendants, according to Y-chromosome haplotype analysis) was due, not to female selection, but conquest and rape.

In terms of Y-chromosome haplotype frequency, the exceptional reproductive success of particular males may have similar results whether due to rape or female selection. However, they will have other genetic consequences that are likely to be quite different.

The Genghis effect will increase the representation of the genes of the dominating male(s) in the population gene pool, i.e., all genes not just Y-chromosome genes, but with no selective effect.

Female preference, however, is highly selective: hence the ridiculous tail of the peacock, and the bizarre behaviour of the male Bower bird. In the human population, one might expect, therefore, that universal female mate selection would result in some definite modification of male physique or behaviour: think of Heathcliff, eight feet tall, maybe.

Thus a name other than Genghis effect seems needed: maybe the “Clinton effect.” What do other people think?

Jon,

You say, “Bush’s religious cohorts in government stopped recording the figures in embarrassment when their abstinence and anti-contraception projects turned out to make things worse… ”

It sounds like Bush had the right idea: restoration of the anglo-saxon method of reproduction, likely the only means to prevent European populations from simply disappearing: not that your average liberal gives a damn. We need more aid for Africa, they say, where population has grown from 600 million in 1980 to 1000 million today!

You say, “I think the best we can do here is training children and young adults to use contraception, despite your horror of it … ”

I have no horror of contraception. I say merely that its use can have destructive consequences for society.

You say, “puritanism is social engineering via religiously inspired shame.”

That maybe, but its an old system that has been consistent with the survival and success of British society.

Anyway, I’m not a puritan. I’m a biologist. I’m with Craig: fucking is the prime pursuit of the male (though I hate to say that in mixed company since most women like the dreamy, Byronic idealist, not the sex maniac). For most of us, life is a matter of hanging about, so to speak, for seventy odd years in the hope of getting lucky once in a while and thus leaving our Y chromosome in the gene pool of the future. Other than that, society would probably get on without us ?” a worrying thought.

Alfred: You’ll find both your own and liberals’ ideals are reached with more aid to Africa, and reducing poverty in India for that matter. Countries where children are less likely to die, and where a welfare structure is in place, are likely to have far smaller families. This is simply because when children are more likely to survive childhood than not, you can get by with fewer of them. A welfare structure means you don’t need a large family to provide your pension.

Perhaps the biggest contribution to delaying child-bearing (if not eliminating it) is greater autonomy for women. The more educated and emancipated the female population, the less likely they are hussled into pregnancy.

Your view would seem to look at reproduction the way conservatives look at the economy – people are there to service it, rather than benefit from it. Again and again you assert that it’s a Good Thing for women to have children at an early an age as possible, with some bloke who just bowls her over then disappears. Not for the woman concerned, it isn’t, and certainly not for the child! Maybe we would have a brave new population of swaggering young men with (single) mothers not much older than them, ready to wreck the same on their female counterparts, if nature not nurture completely held sway. But is this really any good for society? Wouldn’t a child be better raised by parents who actually knew a thing or two, were in a stable partnership, and genuinely wanted the child?

You also talk gloomily about the ability of (white) Europeans, British particularly, to reproduce to the extent that our population increases. May I ask why a population increase is in the least bit welcome? And that most certainly applies worldwide, not just in this country. A serious depopulation move all round is our only hope of sustainability.

I might point out that while the “highly philoprogenetive immigrants” [sic] that you speak of compete with locals for housing, jobs, etc., a vastly bigger pool is also freely competing – over a billion Chinese with our manufacturing industry. They are the invisible immigrants, who compete by offering labour in the worst conditions for as little as £0.10/hour. Not to mention their counterparts in the sweatshops of Vietnam, Indonesia, Haiti etc., competing against the Chinese to take away British jobs.

If Britain in its old form is more or less finished (which arguably is no bad thing anyway), that is far more to do with our trading, industrial and monetary policies than some supposed wishy-washy new age liberal policies on race purity and early pregnancy. Recall that it was those standard-bearers of such soft liberalism as Thatcher, Howard, Widdecombe etc. etc. who denounced single-parent mothers as being the scourge of the Earth, and reflected such sentiments in their policies, while the rates went through the roof. Britain has just about the highest rate in old Europe. Strange, is it not, that we don’t see the supposed benefits of having more than twice the teen pregnancy rates of Germany, France, Holland, and four times that of the Scandinavian countries?

I’ve been reading Thurber & White’s ‘Is Sex Necessary?’. There are some grand bits about the ousting of the red-blooded male, and said male’s defensive acquisition of hobbies eg begonias to make up for it.

Jon, in this darker world, your analysis is surely closer (good piece by Yasmin Alibhai Brown in the indy today on religious repression too). Shame must be useful, of course. It would be a very different society if one could walk around naked. Warmer, for a start.

But people would be terrified; wouldn’t they? Certainly they can’t even handle the Naked Rambler (and I had to stop myself adding nudge nudge wink wink there, sigh)

Alfred

a) all my female friends who had children late in their careers: all concerned thriving

b) sweetest sight this week: 16 year old schoolboy’s face lighting up at the mention of his new son. You somehow don’t expect it, do you?

I also think the Bower bird’s behaviour is quite charming, but that peacocks always look embarassed by their tails. Perhaps men who aren’t obviously flash just need to create homes to pull?

Glenn,

You say, “May I ask why a population increase is in the least bit welcome?”

I would be quite complacent in the face of declining western populations if western governments were not in the process of offsetting and more than offsetting declines in European populations with people of much greater fertility from elsewhere.

A decline in Britain’s population could greatly ease the stress of life: less competition for jobs and housing, meaning better wages and lower housing costs, and less need for new infrastructure and thus lower taxes. Under such favorable conditions, some recovery in the fertility of the native population might occur without significant social intervention.

You say, “you assert that it’s a Good Thing for women to have children at an early an age as possible, with some bloke who just bowls her over then disappears.”

That is a travesty of what I said. Among other things, I stated up the page, somewhere, that in the 50s, although one third of all children were conceived out of wedlock, there was usually a hasty marriage within three months of conception. When this did not happen there was the unmarried mothers’ home followed by adoption.

Re: China — Without a rigged currency, British workers should be competitive with those in China. There is a problem with the dynamics of adjustment if there is massive capital export, which is what we have seen, and that should have been controlled, but was not because politicians are controlled by the financiers (Tony Blair gets millions from JP Morgan, etc.) — such control, incidentally, has existed since the immediate aftermath of WW1 and probably long before.

You say, “Strange, is it not, that we don’t see the supposed benefits of having more than twice the teen pregnancy rates of Germany, France, Holland, and four times that of the Scandinavian countries?”

But I just explained, we encourage the wrong kind of teen pregnancy!

Hello Alfred,

ok, so it’s immigration from outside Europe that is the problem, given it’s not more than matched by home-grown people. May I ask why the relative numbers of the “native population” are so important? Could you define what you mean by native, and would you have such concerns if the incomers were, say, Swedish or German natives?

I did not wish to misrepresent you, I have to admit to not reading every word of every post, and apologise if I surmised incorrectly.

To me, the unmarried mothers’ home sounds pretty terrible. Where was the unmarried fathers’ home? The stigma of being an unmarried parent seems to fall pretty heavily on one side. And that’s invariably when the girl in question is poorly educated, from a poor background and without supportive parents who might arrange a termination long before the fertilisation goes much beyond a blastocyst. “Perfectly heathy human beings” as you call them do not get aborted, much as religious fanatics might insist otherwise.

Why pack them off to such a home before pregnancy, so they can pretend nothing happened and retain “respectability” in the street? Yuck.

I’d like to know how you think British workers can compete with their Chinese/ other sweatshop counterparts. There are no environmental laws, no health and safety to concern the employer. No maximum hours, no minimum wage, no minimum age. No pension, holiday, sick-leave or indeed leave to appeal should an overseer decide to beat, sexually molest or otherwise harass you, no unions, and no compensation for injury or arbitrary dismissal. A far-right paradise, in other words!

Import tariffs and trade controls have been done away with since Thatcher/Reagan and particularly Clinton kicked the doors open with NAFTA and GATT. The only competition now is a race to the bottom.

How – tell me – can British workers compete, as you airily assert?

If we have the “wrong kind” of teen pregnancy, and I think no teen pregnancy is “right”, then surely it’s because of backwards, religious-pandering squeamishness against letting our youngsters have awareness through sex education of the kind that is available throughout the rest of Europe. Not to mention the gasps of horror that The Mail would evoke when it thrills its readership with juicy tales of young teens (see pictures!) being told explicit things that no Decent Young Lady should hear.

Most teenage girls do not get pregnant through being bowled over by a Mr. He-Man anyway – it’s usually through drunken fumblings which are definitely not encouraged by government policy. It is encouraged by the vast drinks industry, which has a megaphone to blast the message that drink is cool and grown-up, with “Drink safely now!” added with a snicker, while public information campaigns call barely muster a whisper.

I’d like to know why having a child later – if at all – horrifies you so much, while having a child at a much younger age leaves you feeling so soft. Increasing the generation gap lowers the population, so I wonder if that’s more to do with it that anything.

We’re looking down the barrel of seven billion worldwide – I fail to see why adding more white faces really improves things a heck of a lot. After all, old whitey has hardly made the world a better place by almost every objective measure.

*

Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems your argument comes down to this – you think woman primarily pass on the healthy, intelligence-producing genes. And as long as plenty of these pretty, intelligent and healthy teen girls get knocked up some some jack-the-lad, then everything will be just great! Do you know of many instances this has proven to be the case?

“Do you know of many instances this has proven to be the case?”

–glenn

Wondering if Albert knows much about the Magdalene Laundries.

Glenn,

You say, “ok, so it’s immigration from outside Europe that is the problem… ”

I did not say that, I said people from elsewhere, i.e., anywhere.

You ask, “May I ask why the relative numbers of the “native population” are so important?”

I don’t think I said anything about this. There are many reasons why people may object to mass immigration. I gave you three economic reasons. In addition there can be cultural reasons. How do you like this one:

According to Britain’s former Justice Minister, Mr. Malik, booted from office for expenses fraud:

“… in 1997 we got our first Muslim MP,

In 2001 we had two Muslim MPs.

In 2005 we had four Muslim MPs.

In 2009/2010 we’ll have eight Muslim MPs.

In 2014 we’ll have 16 Muslim MPs.

At this rate the whole Parliament will be Muslim …

I’m confident, as Britain’s first Muslim minister, that in 30 years or so we’ll see a Prime Minister in this country who shares my faith. …”

Here’s the video link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2fiDWzp6C4

There are also racial grounds that I am not inclined to advance. However, if you call those who would preserve their own race, racist, then I say racism is not a bad thing and that anyone who opposes racism, thus defined, is either a nut or a traitor ?” not a description that would apply to Nelson Mandela or Desmond Tutu.

You say, “To me, the unmarried mothers’ home sounds pretty terrible.”

It may have been, but the girls survived it. That’s the problem with liberalism, you think the world can be rid of everything that is a bit icky or makes one feel uncomfortable. Unfortunately that is not so. And if one assumes that it is so, it can end very nastily indeed. For example, if the Lib-left and their Tory imitators ignore the wishes of the great majority of the indigenous population on mass immigration, they will likely see the sharp rise of a fascist right, mouthing on about the Tiber foaming with much blood…

You ask “where was the unmarried fathers’ home? The stigma of being an unmarried parent seems to fall pretty heavily on one side.”

But if you read what I said earlier you would understand that this is irrelevant. It was tough on fellows when they had to stand in the shit and mud of Flanders in the Great War. Life ain’t always fair, men and women are not always and cannot always be treated the same way. The liberal desire to make everything perfectly wonderful without regard to reality is an extremely dangerous tendency.

Then you talk about a girl without “supportive parents who might arrange a termination long before the fertilisation goes much beyond a blastocyst. “Perfectly heathy human beings” as you call them do not get aborted, much as religious fanatics might insist otherwise.”

First, although you apologize for not reading what I already said, I am afraid that I will not not repeat myself. The whole point of the argument was the effect of out-of-wedlock conception on the fitness of the population. I wasn’t talking about better birth control or abortion procedures. Some women may use the morning after pill, nevertheless in America, partial birth abortions are still legal I believe, if they are not in Britain.

You ask “Why pack them off to such a home before pregnancy, so they can pretend nothing happened and retain “respectability” in the street? ”

I was not advocating unmarried mothers’ homes, I said that’s how it worked in the fifties. Obviously we are not going to put the clock back 60 years. What I was suggesting is that we think what we’re doing and what the consequences of our actions are.

You ask “I’d like to know how you think British workers can compete with their Chinese/ other sweatshop counterparts. There are no environmental … ”

Well, if it’s so bloody hopeless trying to compete with the Chinese, why are Jack Straw and company so keen to drive the British population over 70 million through mass immigration?

But the answer to your question is the exchange rate. When ten pounds equals one Renmimbi, or whatever, then British workers will be fully competitive. Then they won’t be driving an SUV to a big box store to buy cheap Chinese crap, eating at KFC, or at home on processed food, they’ll be riding an electric bike to a local store to buy mainly basic commodities and essential items many of which will be made locally. The trouble is, that the adjustment will be very costly and very difficult, because by the time it occurs, Britain will have lost most of the technology that it will need and used to possess.

You talk about “backwards, religious-pandering squeamishness against letting our youngsters have awareness through sex education of the kind that is available throughout the rest of Europe.”

“Backwards religious pandering” sounds a little bizarre, perhaps because I’m an atheist. But if its all about sex education, obviously we don’t want to copy the Germans or the Italians who have an even more drastically failing reproductive performance than the British (fertility rates of 1.4 and 1.1 versus a replacement rate of 2.1).

You say “We’re looking down the barrel of seven billion worldwide”

So you think it would be a good idea to wipe out the British race to make way for the others?

You say “old whitey has hardly made the world a better place by almost every objective measure.”

You sound like a racist. Are you a self-hating white or an colonizing non-white?

You say “Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems your argument comes down to this – you think woman primarily pass on the healthy, intelligence-producing genes. And as long as plenty of these pretty, intelligent and healthy teen girls get knocked up some some jack-the-lad, then everything will be just great! Do you know of many instances this has proven to be the case?”

I was talking of the change in the British way of reproduction that has occurred in the last 60 years. The old method produced Shakespeare (who had at least one an illegitimate son), Newton, Sam Johnson, Charles Darwin, the homosexual Alan Turing who tragically committed suicide almost certainly because of harassment by the police and a few others. So, whatever the exact mechanics the process, what Britain had seems to have worked well. I doubt if what is happening now will work as well.

There are many societies that have embarked on great reforms that resulted in self-destruction. Consider Soviet Communism, German Nazism, now Western European Liberalism, I fear.

Just to revert to the topic, I viewed the David Cameron video interview that Craig mentioned. It is quite strange. For one thing, toward the end of the discussion, the camera was focused on the back of David Cameron’s head. Why did they do that, I wonder.

From the conversation, it was really hard to know what they were talking about, and quite clearly Cameron didn’t know what he was talking about. Not that that really matters, surely. If he gains office he will have people to tell him what to say, plus a teleprompter. The only important thing then will be whether he picks good advisors and has the sense to do what they say.

During much of the conversation Cameron seemed to be experiencing some kind of mental dysfunction, which caused him at one point to plead for an end to the interview. But I should think it was nothing serious: a three martini lunch, perhaps.

Anyway, Cameron did manage to blurt out that the Quaker proposal for civic unions was a good idea, which indeed it surely is. So what’s the problem. I think Craig is a little too severe in his comments about this very likeable young man, who is almost nice enough to be a Liberal.

Hello Alfred,

The three reasons you’d vaguely alluded to for objecting to immigration, all of which are disputable, are vastly outweighed by the exporting of our manufacturing industry to China. Don’t you understand? It’s not that we have got A Chinese against A British person to worry about – the entire manufacturing base has been dismantled and sent over there.

We don’t have a Chinese vacuum cleaner manufacturer competing with a British counterpart – the British counterpart IS in China. And it’s the same with just about everything else – if you have any electronic component under 10 years old which wasn’t made in China, it would be a surprise.

Doubling the number of British Muslim MPs each cycle, and extrapolating the way you have done, is – I fear – a classic invocation of the slippery slope fallacy. Whether Malik is doing it to encourage the faithful, or you are doing it as dog-whistle tactics. In 36 years, by the time we have a Muslim PM, there should be 8192 Muslim MPs

Racism is discriminating against others, and seeing them as lessor, on account of their race. Are you a racist, Alfred?

*

Unmarried Mother’s homes: Girls survive rape and beatings too. Doesn’t make it right. Just because men went off to war, it still doesn’t make it right. Didn’t you ever hear that two (or more) wrongs don’t make a right? Talking about a fascist right, mouthing about the Tiber foaming with much blood… well, I see you’re doing your bit.

I did read what you said earlier, but that doesn’t mean I “would understand” the point. That would imply your point was unimpeachable, which is quite incorrect besides being rather arrogant. Liberals don’t desire to make everything great without regard to reality – that’s just your opinion.

Your buying into the “partial birth abortion” myth in the US shows how badly informed you are, and using that dubious assumption to claim “perfectly healthy human beings” are being aborted all the time here – which was your context, remember – is rather weak. Again, perfectly healthy human beings are not aborted.

*

You have not decided to even begin tackling the economic points of trade imbalance, and the export of our manufacturing base wholesale. It’s all down to the exchange rate, indeed. Jesus!

I suggest that you become acquainted with economics, and find out what’s been happening since Thatcher and Reagan. Look at output compared with wages, and how differently they track each other since their time compared with the start of the Industrial Revolution. Look at the average hours worked since WW-II, as a household total. Then look at debt. That’s what’s paid for our over-padded lifestyles, not just cheap imports.

*

No, I don’t think “it would be a good idea to wipe out the British race to make way for the others”, where did I suggest that for a moment? Straw man arguments do not become you. Reducing worldwide population is what I actually did suggest. And reducing poverty, and empowering women, is how that can be achieved, as I illustrated to you earlier.

The western civilisation – North American etc. too, not just European – is on the road to hell. Not because of your notions of sweeping liberalisation, far from it. We’ve taken a massive swing to the right in recent years, for your information. America is beset by hardline Christianist nutters, half of whom think slavery should never have been abolished. You see liberals and foreigners behind anything wrong anywhere. But we’re all going down through rampant, corporate driven greed, sell-out governments, corrupt and incompetent heads of organisations, with the multinational institutions driving the bus.

Alfred

well don’t take any notice of what Mr Malik MP has to say, he is shall we say economical with the truth and rather likes the sound of his own voice. Does he really think that the number of muslim MP’s will double at each election? He obviously hasn’t factored in BNP into his exponential equation and Dewsbury where he currently stands is a strong possibility. He may in time be booted from parliament as well as the government. Doubt he would be missed apart from home entertainment retailers and the like.

I’m sure Dave will be happy to hear that latin pop star ricky martin has finally come out. I bet dave has all his records..

Glenn,

You say the three economic reasons I gave for opposing mass immigration are disputable. No doubt they are disputable. But are they refutable? You provide no evidence to indicate that they are.

I do understand that capital is a factor of production and that if the capital accumulated through the sweat and toil of generations of British workers is exported it will lower Britain’s standard of living. But it will raise the standard of living of citizens of the third world, which is what you want isn’t it? And as a way of raising the standard of living in the third world, it is surely more effective to export capital from the first world than the have people migrating en masse in the opposite direction.

But whether that is the case or not, the export of capital which has been ongoing for hundreds of years and is hardly likely to stop now, although in delusional moments I have inveighed against it, as have better economists than myself, e.g.,

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/100324_truth.htm

Given that capital export is occurring, the best one can hope for is to control the dynamics of change to limit dislocation and mass unemployment. To this end, I see the pound is coming down nicely, off a quarter in the last few months.

As for the rest, you seem a little heated. Lets call it quits.

Anon,

You say “well don’t take any notice of what Mr Malik MP has to say, he is shall we say economical with the truth and rather likes the sound of his own voice.”

I think you are mistaken to dismiss Mr. Malik’s wild boasting. His remarks constitute an extreme form of religious and racial arrogance, and that from a member of the government. They are a slap in the face to people of Britain.

One should also not ignore the question of why such an oaf was ever included in the Labor Government. And the reason, I suggest that he was, is that New Labor calculate that they can win the next election with the aid of a block ethnic vote, but they need the likes of Mr. Malik to rally that vote.

In adopting this strategy, they must assume that the deluded fools who think that New Labor is still the party of the workers are sufficiently well conditioned by the propaganda of political correctness to be too racially self-deprecating to object to the insolence of such as Mr. Malik.

Mr. Malik is, obviously, a gift to the BNP, who draw support from the less easily duped members of the proletariat, many of whom may not really care if electing the BNP mean “rivers of blood,” to use the BNP misquotation of Virgil’s quotation of the Sibylline Oracle — as translated by the BNP’s St. Enoch Powell (who, before turning against the idea of mass commonwealth immigration, staffed 34% of the National Health Service positions with immigrants from the Caribbean).

Alfred,

in reply to your post in reply to mine.

I think the inclusion of muslim mps like malik in the new labour project were as you suggest a way of getting the ethnic vote. i would guess he really is a useful idiot who will be dispensed with when no longer needed.

it is in places like blackburn where jack straw should be worried given labours adventures in the middle east and i would venture to suggest straw would not have been totally in agreement with the invasions into islamic countries given the knock on effect it would have in his constituency. i would guess though that the muslims will continue to vote labour in spite of the wider picture because they are probably the only party who will continue to buy these people who tend to rely quite heavily on state handouts be it child benefits or JSA. Labour has devloped its own client state whilst in office, it hasn’t been so rash as many would have us believe.

Anon

You say, “Labour has devloped its own client state whilst in office, it hasn’t been so rash as many would have us believe.”

I agree, and they work well in parallel with the BNP, who take working class votes off the Tories as the immigrant tide rises.