32 thoughts on “British Values — Then And Now”

1. Re: “Don’t ‘teach’ British values — demand them”

   This is prima facie idiocy of the most revolting kind, and the common yardstick by which the insanity of Western Europe may be measured: in Germany like in GB; in Holland like in Norway.

   To begin was, no populations ought to be imported to whom the local values ought to be taught. To attempt to make Britons out of Pakis, Norwegians out of Somalis, Dutch out of Moroccans is not only a futile enterprise condemned to failure a priori, but marks the horrifying self-evisceration of all those societies that have no need whatsoever for all those Pakis, Somalis and Moroccans to begin with — and wouldn’t even if those values could be taught.

   Reminds me od a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket.” It’s Hue in Vietnam circa 1968. The craziness of America’s endeavor to save that country from itself is already apparent to the American troops on the ground. A U.S. Marine colonel is trying to motivate his soldiers to continue in this bloody, sacrificial endeavor. The reason, he says, why all this is worthwhile is the “Inside every gook there is an American trying to get out,” and it’s our duty as Americans to help them in that process.

   Such confounded stupidity was still excusable in 1968. But journos and pols who write in 2014 that inside every Paki, Algerian and Gypsy there is a Briton yearning to get out — we have but to demand — ought to be put in a strait jacket and transported to a sanatorium where he can do no further harm.

   • This is why race-realism is a must for all those who oppose immigration. If the issues we see today are primarily a problem caused by immigrants hanging on to their cultures, then there is a strong argument that time will heal these wounds. The left will continually have the upper hand, because even conservatives understand that if immigrants are just like us, then there is certainly a possibility that they will adopt modern sentiments.

     Being honest about racial differences is a must, as difficult as it is.

2. Too bloody late- The door to Hell is open and the horse bolted…
   You ain’t seen nothng yet as the Middle-East implodes and the nukes go off.
   Why do you think Russia and China are so quiet?
   Others and I have been warning for years that ths was on the cards.

   We were shouted down, called racists, Nazis, terrorists, arrested, charged even mysekf with a death fatwa on me for my writings.

   Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind and we sure as hell will……

3. How can one teach British values to third world immigrants who have no idea about what makes us in these islands tick? The problem has been imposed on us and no amount of smooth talking is going to reverse it now! Before 1948 the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish people got along as most families do. We squabbled, complained and sometimes fought, but we had one thing in common, our ancestry. It took many centuries to get to a point where we tolerated one another, especially with regard to the parochial English. But we got there, and it worked, because we fought and sweated together. Then some pea brained politicians decided they had a better idea. “Let’s go multicultural”, they said. And they did. And they messed it all up. Today similar politicians now realise that the whole thing is a disaster and are clutching at straws to try to redeem the situation. No dice! It will only get worse. They pretend that we were always multicultural, a glance at any 1950s street photographs of one of our big cities will expose that lie. Now even UK costume dramas set in the 18th and 19th centuries must have their token minority players. Who the hell do they think they are fooling? They try to make us feel guilty because of the British Empire, while hiding the fact that most of the general population were little more than slaves themselves. It was the upper class who drove the empire forward, not the majority of us. We have nothing to be ashamed of as a nation, except, perhaps, that we allowed this present situation to develop. But even then, we had little choice because anyone who complained about being invaded was derided and scorned for being a racist. They have ruined the country for all time. I feel sorry for future generations.

   • They try to make us feel guilty because of the British Empire, while hiding the fact that most of the general population were little more than slaves themselves. It was the upper class who drove the empire forward, not the majority of us.

     ABSOLUTELY! As a white working class Scot I have absolutely NO interest whatsoever in what some upper class twit from south of the border may or may not have done many years before I was even born – it has nothing whatsoever to do with me, end of story.

     • The British Empire is not far off being the precursor model of globalisation and multiculturalism, all the British politicians are doing now is wrapping those values in a false patriotism.

4. When these creatures return from Iraq……
   We will become like Iraq….

5. The “Windrush” era West Indians were well into being British, they were assimilating perfectly well when sub-Saharan Africans started pitching up here. Many, many well managed, middle class black families have been blighted by one or other child being drawn to gang behaviour or primitivism. Just because they were betrayed by this country. They wanted to come here to be accepted. Enough, already, repatriate those whom we can, find another solution for those whom we cannot. Not that I would suggest that we are capable of finding a final answer.

   • I disagree: Caribbean blacks never assimilated fully, as the 2012 race riots vividly proved. This was largely an explosion of Caribbean black resentment, even if most of the rioters were born in London. Caribbean blacks were always marginalized and remain so (and for that both host and guest communities are to blame).

6. True, they were: the V.I. Naipaul generation. But GB did not need them, assimilated or not. The arrogant managerial class believed and still does that it has the answers; it knows. But it never does: puring massive doses of West Indies into the British Isles was like pouring an unknown acid into a demographic porrige that, composed though it was of a dozen largely kin but not always easily mixable white alkali, had come to settle after a process of 3,000 years. Why take the risk of a new kind of ferment, for whose benefit?

   Ultimately, it hasn’t worked out. It’s not only the children. Even the most eminent specimens of that import, rewarded with all the wealth and honors that their country could bestow on them, ultimately turned against it. In the U.S., for instance, think Eric Holder; or Harry Belafonte and what has come out of his mouth; or Colin Powell who often talked as though he represented the interest of Blacks, while in the highest position to further the interests of all, which means, predominantly, Whites.

7. I usually read the Daily Mail every day, and have done for a number of years now which has led me to notice the growing number of comments that are posted when anything concerning Islam is put up.

   At times the comments reach into the few thousands!

   The numbers of comment have exploded over the past year or so and are in the majority Islam negative. So it really comes as no surprise that the London Daily Telegraph – that fancies itself as being ‘conservative’ but before this latest expose concerning the inroads that Islam is making into ridding the British of their own culture – which would once have censored the Islam negative comment is now printing them.

   And as the presenter of this post points out; what has caused this paradigm shift?

   Are we now at the tipping point where the British people have finally had enough of the multicultural shenanigans and are now prepared to do something about it apart from the usual political jockeying?

   • It has been suggested that Allison Pearson’s article at the Telegraph of 11 June 2014 which attracted nearly 7,000 comments may have been responsible for this sea change – possibly – but the waters have been rising for a few years/decades now and the dam of British patience & goodwill was bound to show signs of cracking sooner or later.

     Trojan Horse debate: We were wrong, all cultures are not equal

     For years, we all turned a blind eye to the segregation of Muslim pupils. Now it is time to stand up to propagators of barbarism and ignorance

     at http://bit.ly/1n7b9Zu

     Quote from the article: “And still our politicians will not face up to what multiculturalism has unleashed: one of the biggest peacetime challenges ever faced by Britain.”

8. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10904177/Political-class-ignore-strength-of-feeling-on-immigration-at-their-peril.html

   From the telegraph just now ..

   • Thanks for the link.
     Having extracted my family from an invasion of our larger community by immigrants and the degradation of our services and public life from same, I have thought about this “disconnect” between the elites and the general public quite a bit.
     The fact is that the elites are insulated from the negative effects of immigration due to their wealth and status. They are driven around in fancy cars, their children are sent to private schools and they live, shop and eat in tony neighborhoods.
     Let them put their darlings in a school system overrun with immigrants that don’t speak their language, move into a 2 bedroom, 2 bath starter home neighborhood and take the bus! I bet their attitude would change…
     I remember a small reference here on GOV to a Brussels EU bureaucrat that said that his driver was having to change up his route home due to “unrest.” What an inconvenience! Meanwhile the rest of Brussels is living it in real time.

9. Even Cameron was making what could be interpreted as anti islam noises. There is a general election due in 2015 and his advisers have done the maths. Appeasement of islam is a vote loser. Chasing the islamic bloc vote will not make up the difference. If Con/Lab/Lib get re-elected, expect them to forget about islam for another five years while they sit on their fat backsides and do nothing.

   • “Even Cameron was making what could be interpreted as anti islam noises.”

     2005, Cameron “islamic extremists are Nazis” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4179106.stm

     2014, Cameron “No-one should be in any doubt that what we see in Syria and now in Iraq in terms of Isis is the most serous threat to Britain’s security that there is today” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-27891624

     Cameron is less critical of islam now than he was 10 years ago. And this with all the failures of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan piling up.

     When Cameron made his remarks in 2005, less than 10 muslims in Britain had been convicted of terrorism. Now more than 332 muslims have been convicted of terrorism. And Cameron focuses his worries on Iraq and Syria?

     It was on the day of an EDL demo in Luton in 2011 when Cameron said “multiculturalism has failed”. Roll on 2014, and his government is only just starting to talk about promoting British values, without even any idea of what those values are.

     I know that GoV has a policy against gutter language, but Cameron is [micturating] in the wind. And if the media were anything other than LibLabCon lackeys, they’d point out that his trousers and shoes are soaking wet.

10. We are where we are and the clock can’t be wound back, at least not without bloodshed.

    Many recent immigrants who came as genuine refugees would likely suffer torture and death if returned; how many Jews might have avoided the same fate if we’d been more generous in the 1930s?

    The situation is far from ideal with those who’ve been here longer and won’t integrate, but at least Janet Daley is trying to put forward a positive proposal which should be acceptable to most Brits. I suspect that most people here would find the more radical solutions favoured by some unacceptable, unless and until we arrive at a similar state to Sweden’s today, due to the inherent decency of we British, in which I take some pride.

    • Sounds a bit like the Chamberlain type of pride…

      • If you can’t distinguish compassion from expediency and spinelessness, Beach Bum, we have nothing to say.

      • A British multkulti decency and pride that has already spilt blood and has set the bloody parameters for what may transpire, multiculturalism had blood on its hands from the start.

    • “the clock can’t be wound back, at least not without bloodshed”

      The clock CANNOT be wound forward without bloodshed, either, so it is rather a false choice to pretend that we are going to avoid bloodshed….

    • The following is the most worn out, nauseating and intellectually bankrupt trope in the playbook of the PC Multi-Culti champion of the West’s suicidal “asylum seeker/refugee” policies:

      “Many recent immigrants who came as genuine refugees would likely suffer torture and death if returned; how many Jews might have avoided the same fate if we’d been more generous in the 1930s?”

      As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, not that her narrative is essential to comprehend the scam (it is but a mere instance of a vast scheme taking place all over the West), made crystal clear in “Infidel”, third-worlders ubiquitously engage in outright and premeditated fraud to gain entry into the West. And once they have arrived they are coached and encouraged by “compassionate” Western welfare bureaucrats, social workers, etc, who make their virtuous taxpayer-funded livings in the immigration industry.

      It is a shibboleth that the majority of such people face “torture and death” in their countries of origin: they are overwhelmingly economic migrants exploiting whatever loopholes they can in order to gain access to prosperous stable Western welfare states. And who can blame them?

      Witness the phenomenon of Afghani refugees seeking asylum in Australia: they enter Pakistan – a Muslim country – overland, pay “Snakeheads”, ie organised human traffickers, US$10,000 plus to get them to Malaysia and then to Indonesia – two more Muslim countries where they face no political or religious persecution – and thence to Australia by unseaworthy boats. Why seek asylum in Australia? Because, unlike Pakistan, Malaysia or Indonesia, it is a wealthy democracy with an absurdly generous welfare system.

      By the same token, what possible rationale can there be for “refugees” from Somalia being granted asylum in the USA, Britain, Norway, etc? If political persecution in Somalia is genuinely the problem, that problem is solved upon entry into neighbouring, to the north, fellow Muslim, states.

      As for Jews in Nazi Germany 80 years ago being unable to find asylum in other countries, it is a profoundly ugly paradox that the people who invoke this spectre to justify (by providing, through a very weak analogy, some kind of moral underpinning) the West’s self-destructive immigration policy, OVERWHELMINGLY are not in the least bit concerned about the plight of Jews then or now. You will not find in the Western refugee-immigration industry any supporters of Israel, quite the contrary they are invariably hotbeds of “Anti-Zionism” with deep wells of “compassion” for the Palestinian cause. You will find however, in vast measure, that the third world beneficiaries of that industry religiously (literally and/or figuratively) subscribe to rancid Jew-hatred.

      It is indeed a pity that Western countries did not provide asylum to more German, Austrian (and Polish) Jews in the 1930’s, not because it would have been the “nice” and “compassionate” thing to do, but because it would likely have improved the human capital and overall vitality of the recipient states – which should be the paramount guiding spirit of any nation-state’s immigration policy.

      Western countries were, it should be stressed, under no obligation to provide asylum to European Jews*. Just as they are now under no obligation to admit millions of unassimilable Third Worlders – notwithstanding the various UN conventions entered into through political pressure applied by preening, self-righteous do-gooders. Such do-gooders, as someone rightly noted above do not live with or send their children to school with, said Third World immigrants.

      *It is conveniently forgotten in the West’s selective and unctuous embrace of the tragedy of the Holocaust that there was an internationally sanctioned homeland for persecuted Jews to go to and millions wanted to go there. The problem was that the country controlling that homeland, Britain, refused to let Europe’s Jews migrate there. Quantitatively speaking, much of the Holocaust could have been avoided if only Britain had honoured the undertaking it gave in return for recognition by the League of Nations of its hegemony over “Palestine”.

      • Ali may well be correct in her assertion. Nevertheless there are Muslims living in Western countries who would be treated dreadfully if forcibly repatriated. Do you actually follow the news about Somalia, Syria, Iraq etc.? Or, say, the recent struggle of a Nigerian mother against the UK Govt’s attempts to deport her and her daughters, who face the very real threat of enforced FGM, of which the mother, and Ali herself, are victims?

        Of course genuine refugees and seekers of asylum should go to the first safe country, but if they end up here, and the intermediate country won’t take them back, would you send them to their fates in their country of origin?

        I’m not in the “Western refugee-asylum industry”, but am a staunch supporter of Israel, and have recently been well educated in these pages, by MC, about Britain’s shameful record over the Palestine Mandate, thanks.

        Problem is, I think we can agree, successive governments have allowed/encouraged mass immigration, against the wishes of the majority community. Some, eg the Poles, generally fit in well, and they’d probably be welcome to remain even if we left the EU. Others, many now into the second or third generation, are the chief problem. I really can’t see us forcing them onto Airbuses at gunpoint, at least not yet.

        Which brings us back to Janet Daley, and the increasing number of formerly acquiescent commentators now ringing the alarm bells. IF- and I know it’s a big if- it can be made crystal clear, in the manner of Sir Charles Napier, that savagery and supremacism will not be tolerated, we may have a solution.

11. To be honest never learned values in school other than the teacher scolding our Scots vernacular, mostly learned good values from the elders and an innate value structure that we all seemed to share which would come to the fore in the rules of street play and interactions.

12. I can’t remember who wrote it, but it was a contributor to this site:
    “The first generation Muslim immigrants were not seeking a new way of life when they arrived; they expected to continue their old lives, but more prosperously.”

    Bill Warner – “Islamic culture is incompatible with all of the best aspects of European civilization. No form of Islam as it exists today, belongs in any Western country.”

    • Awhile back I heard a Mexican/Latino open-borders/amnesty activist make a similar statement about migrants from south of the U.S. border: Don’t we understand that people come here because of economics? she asked. Her point was that we the citizens should therefore not expect any kind of cultural assimilation from migrants, because they don’t want any such thing. What WE want for our country was, in her mind, completely irrelevant.

      That’s pretty much the same attitude one can see in the Wall Street Journal brand of “conservative”: that if people want to improve their economic circumstances, we should welcome them in (to be low-wage workers or gardeners to the affluent) without any thought to anything else they might bring with them.

13. I believe that there have been two related catalysts for the rise in candid discussion about Islam in Britain. First there was the ludicrous and offensive responses of the political leadership, per David Cameron and Boris Johnson to the murder of Lee Rigby, ie that it had nothing to do with Islam, stretched public credulity to breaking point. It could not have been plainer to anybody over 10 years old that the murder was a specifically Islamic act: the perpetrators said so on camera. For the political leadership to pretend otherwise was so egregious that every Briton knew they were being lied to.

    Lee Rigby’s murder was the perfect opportunity for the British, especially a Conservative, Prime Minister to stand up and finally speak the truth and thereby gain some credibility: British Muslims get your house in order or there will be serious consequences for your community. The pusillanimous Cameron dodged the challenge.

    And that led to the second catalyst: the extraordinary electoral success of the UKIP (and the corollary, the devastation of the Lib-Dems) in the EU elections. It has put the fear into the governing coalition. The Telegraph is reading the political wind and permitting blog comments which previously would have been deleted.

    Janet Daley’s call is too late by at least 30 years.

    Appropos the Windrush immigrants and Afro-Caribbean assimilation, in 1948, with millions of soldiers having been recently demobilised and awaiting re absorption into a peacetime economy, there was no economic justification whatsoever for importing Afro-Caribbeans into Britain to, ostensibly, man the hospitals with nurses and auxiliaries and man the railways with conductors and the like. Across the Irish Sea there were, in an Ireland suffering massive unemployment, scores of thousands of Irish girls willing to become trainee nurses in Britain for the simple reason that trainee nurses in Britain were paid whilst those in Ireland were not paid; thus reserving the occupation of nursing to the daughters of the Irish upper middle class who could afford to support them during four years of training.

    Afro-Caribbeans assimilated? Hardly. It is an incontrovertible fact that marijuana was introduced into the UK by Afro-Caribbeans, gaining serious market traction in the 1960’s, the subsequent gross over-representation of that ethnic group in drug-dealing and violent crime is there for anyone with eyes to see. The Windrush migrants have been a unmitigated social disaster, eclipsed only by the more pernicious and malignant Islamic tsunami.

    • Another self-loathing libel that has to be redressed is that the indigenous unemployed from the nineteen eighties to the present shirked gainful employment for the pseudo scientific “welfare dependency”.

      A white libel that mainstream conservatives have embraced as their own but in principle and practise is a major socioeconomic assault that debased the indigenous unemployed and advanced the multikulti immigration agenda. As with the Irish girls the indigenous unemployed were dumbed down and locked out of the economy.

    • My father was living in Jamaica at the time that Britain began to allow large number of immigrants from the West Indies. He was discussing this one day with a (black) Jamaican businessman, the question he put to my father was this: “Why is your country taking all our trash?”

      • Patrick- Many of the Windrush generation had served as volunteers- not conscripts- in the defence of the Mother Country against facism. Also, with all due respect to your father’s acquaintance, some came from the middle classes, but were compelled to take low-status jobs in the UK.

        • The MV Empire Windrush named after a river wonder if Enoch Powell in his “Rivers of Blood” speech was making that connection.

          Mark H,

          Some came from the middle classes is that a social qualifier of immigration that gives them a status above the indigenous working class – shame the Windrush immigrants were compelled to take those low-status jobs that were so beneath them, maybe they should be compensated and memorials built to remind the indigenous working class of their guilt.

          • I was responding to Patrick Brompton’s reference to “trash”, not justifying special treatment for anyone.

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