UK riots: It’s not about criminality and cuts, it’s about culture… and this is only the beginning
22nd August 2011
Increasingly, skin color has little to do with it — it’s the dysfunctional culture.
What a week! It’s not every day that you’re the subject of direct personal attack from the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition. On Tuesday, after he had spoken at his old school, Haverstock Comprehensive, about the riots, Ed Miliband was invited by a member of the audience to “stamp out” the now-infamous opinions I had expressed on the same subject on last Friday’s Newsnight.
Mr Miliband might have replied that he disagreed with what I said, but in a liberal democracy defended my right to say it since it broke no laws. Not a bit of it, I fear. Instead, Miliband – the son of a refugee who fled from Nazi Europe to preserve his life and freedom of thought – agreed enthusiastically with the questioner. Mine were “racist comments”, he said, “[and] there should be condemnation from every politician, from every political party of those sorts of comments.”
Well, that’s a socialist for you. Best haters in the business.
I was trying to point out the very different patterns of integration at the top and bottom of the social scale. At the top, successful blacks, like David Lammy and Diane Abbot, have merged effortlessly into what continues to be a largely white elite: they have studied at Oxbridge and gone on to Oxbridge-style careers, such as that of an MP.
But they have done so at the cost of losing much of their credibility with blacks on the street and in the ghettos. And here, at the bottom of the heap, the story of integration is the opposite: it is the white lumpen proletariat, cruelly known as the “chavs”, who have integrated into the pervasive black “gangsta” culture: they wear the same clothes; they talk and text in the same Jafaican patois; and, as their participation in recent events shows, they have become as disaffected and riotous.
And the same thing applies in America. But saying so gets one tagged as raaaaacist by grifters like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the Congressional Black Circus Caucus.
One of the most striking things about the England riots is where they did not happen: Yorkshire, the North East, Wales and Scotland. These areas contain some of the worst pockets of unemployment in the country. But they are also characterised by a powerful sense of regional or national identity and difference that cuts across all classes and binds them together. And it is this, I am sure, which has inoculated them against the disease of “gangsta” culture and its attendant, indiscriminate violence.
Scotland, Alex Salmond says smugly, is a “different culture”. It is indeed, since the Scots are allowed – and even encouraged – to be as racist as they please and hate the English with glad abandon.
August 22nd, 2011 at 15:55
Well, look who caught up. Newsflash: It’s always been about the culture.
Black culture (and there is such a thing) was allowed to develop in isolation, mostly imposed from outside at first (“We don’t want no niggers ’round here.”) but then embraced and self-imposed by the early decades of the 20th century. Isolated breeding populations eventually lead to speciation, in this case not physically but culturally.
The don’t think like we do. They don’t hold the same values that we do. They don’t want the same things that we do. There will never be racial/cultural harmony until they are assimilated, and at this point they have the same siege mentality that the Ashkenazic Jews had in the ghettos of Russia and Poland in the 18th and 19th centuries.
I don’t know what the solution is, but we won’t get a grip on the problem until we recognize that it exists.
And posting endless stories of Colored People Behaving Badly doesn’t help, it only reinforces the “We don’t want your kind ’round here” mentality.