Racism, rude names and the children of McCarthy

I am beyond the pale. My views, said the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, “border on fascism”. David Aaronovitch claimed in The Observer that I am guilty of the “stock-in-trade mendacity of the anti-immigrants”; Yasmin Alibhai-Brown called me a “xenophobe” in The Independent; The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee dubbed me “the particularly pernicious Anthony Browne”, guilty of “naked hate”; on Radio 4’s Moral Maze I was told by the scientist Steven Rose that my arguments were “tinged with racism”.

What is depressing about this abuse — apart from how it makes my Mum feel — is that none of my denouncers engaged with my arguments about how mass immigration is pushing up the levels of HIV, TB and hepatitis B in this country, and how we need health tests as part of the immigration process.

I take these personal attacks as an implicit admission of intellectual defeat: if they had counter-arguments, they would have used them. As the joke goes: what’s the definition of a racist? Someone who is winning an argument with a liberal.

I have news for my insulters: the Government now agrees with me. With official figures showing that immigration has helped to more than double the number of new HIV cases to more than 6,000 in 2002, Cabinet ministers want to introduce the same Canadian and Australian-style health tests that I first advocated on this page. Downing Street admits “this is an issue that has to be dealt with”.

But the neo-McCarthyites don’t deal in arguments, they indulge in character assassination. The aim is simple — not to win arguments, but to make opponents shrivel up in silence, and to frighten decent people from expressing their views. Instead of winning arguments, they create taboos, hate and fears.

As John Lloyd, the former editor of the left-wing New Statesman complained recently, the Left has “abdicated analysis for denunciation”. It may not be right, but it certainly feels virtuous: those it opposes are not just wrong, but wicked. It has made the tag “right wing” a stigma in polite society.

Nowhere was this self-righteous left-liberal hate-mongering more obvious than in the Netherlands, where the media demonised the anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn. Despite holding views that are now mainstream in Dutch politics, journalists competed with each other to turn him into a bogeyman, until he was felled by a hate crime, murdered by a left-wing animal rights activist.

Only in the aftershock did the Dutch media repent, admitting that they may not have pulled the trigger but, by turning him into a hate figure, they pointed the gun. But why did they feel such a powerful need to act like medieval villagers screaming for heretics to be burnt at the stake? My denouncers say that I should not write what I do because it is bad for race relations. But the opposite is true: you have to confront awkward truths to found good race relations on reality rather than denial.

When it comes to immigration, you can either try to hide all adverse effects from the public until they explode in your face; or you can confront problems when they arise, and engage in honest debate about how to tackle them. Avoiding issues doesn’t make them go away, it just lets them grow and fester. The neo-McCarthyite stifling of debate leads to disastrous policies that have ruined race relations in Bradford, where no politician dared tackle growing difficulties, but found it safer to stand by and watch as race relations plummeted to violent depths.

But winning arguments with reason, rather than rabid denunciation, is difficult. Too difficult, too often, for too much of the Left.

Thank you, MadIvan, for this eye-opening expose of the reality of daily life in Britain--our ally in the drive to free Iraq. One is tempted to ask: With allies like this in the war for global freedom--who needs enemies?

.More on this very troubling subject:

A Tale of Two Cities

By Taki

Sticks and stones no longer count; it’s words that land one in trouble—at least in the tight little island that is modern Britain, far removed from the green and pleasant land I chose to live in thirty-five years ago.

But before I go on, a bit of nostalgia: After leaving the University of Virginia in 1956, I moved to Paris. The City of Light, according to Papa Hemingway, is, like an older mistress, a necessary part of a young man’s education. At twenty, one indeed dreams of older women, and Paris in 1956 was full of them: chic, sophisticated, and beautiful females, mostly French, but also many South Americans as well as Scandinavians. (When I say older, I mean in their late twenties or early thirties.) There was nothing quite like the recently recovered from the war Paris of the Fifties. London was bleak and stuffy, Rome provincial, and Berlin was, well, partly occupied and under pressure from you know who. Paris was it. Fashion had come back with a vengeance, De Gaulle had brought order by 1958, Malraux had beautified the city, and I was a young man on the tennis circuit looking for fun. I shared a flat with two Argentine polo players off the Avenue Foch—La Residence du Bois—a beautiful 19th century family house run by a wonderful lady, just like in old-fashioned black and white movies. ....

They say it takes about ten years after a world war for people to stop feeling guilty and start enjoying themselves. Parisians began a frenzied run of festivities and balls once the Algerian conflict came to an end in 1962. April, May, and June were one long party, as were October and November.... The place was crawling with Brazilian tycoons, Argentine oligarchs, Bolivian tin magnates, Greek shipowners, and rich American expatriates. The Brits were broke—in any case, they never spend money—the Germans too insecure to show off, the Russians enslaved, the Italians just starting to branch out, the Scandinavians too uptight to matter....

The end of the fun came rather suddenly. Some students at Nanterre University decided to revolt because they were not allowed to share campus digs with their girlfriends. Leave it to the French to revolt because they wanted to make love rather than to stop war. The only good thing to come out of the May ‘68 “revolution” was that I decided the party was over and it was time to go to work.

Journalism beckoned, and London became my base because of the language. Swinging Sixties London aside, Britain was still a very traditional country in 1968. Self-restraint, rather than draconian laws, was key to the most civilized and crime-free society in Europe. As Peter Hitchens writes, “Unborn babies were safe from being butchered. Little children were far less likely to be deserted by their parents and dumped in the nightmare of ‘care.’ People were safe in their homes, and there were no guns . We still governed ourselves, made our own laws … we could throw the Government out at the next election.” As in Paris, I was happy living in England. I made countless friends, built a career, and enjoyed a way of life that was uniquely British. No longer.

The rot had begun with the catastrophic immigration policies of successive Tory and Labour governments, centralization and European Union directives, and the fall of Margaret Thatcher, but went into overdrive when Tony Blair came to power in 1997. Far from a civilized society, Britain is now the most uncivilized, lawless, and badly-governed country in Europe, with a bleak, disenfranchised countryside, filthy and dangerous cities, a Health Service and transport system that are the worst in Europe, a crime rate that is the highest in Europe, and an asylum system which has become mass immigration under another name.

Last week, on a brief visit, I ran into many friends, but the sense of gloom was as bad as the weather. Tony Blair can win elections through sheer demagoguery , but he certainly has no idea how to run a country. His government has lost the plot on education, on prisons, the health service, the transport system. All government services are in a state of chaos. Britain is now a haven for gangsters and racketeers from all over the world—Jamaican drug dealers, Kosovar gun smugglers, and Albanians running prostitution empires. Even ex-Taliban soldiers who fought against British troops are seeking asylum and receiving benefits while their cases are being processed.

Last month, Britain’s top judge sent a signal to the courts about how burglars should be treated. His preposterous edict was that burglars should not be jailed and that it’s all a question of the degree to which the crime is aggravated. This was one Lord Woolf. His direct superior, Lord Irvine, a lawyer crony ennobled by Blair, had loftily announced that most people did not want to see violent thieves jailed. With 72,000 people behind bars, Britain’s jails are bursting, ergo the buffoon’s solution: no more jail for two- and three-time losers.

And it gets worse. While I was there, a police officer was stabbed to death by an Algerian asylum seeker who had already been refused asylum three times but had been allowed to stay in Britain pending appeal. The politicians, needless to say, paraded their grief for the cameras but ignored the incontrovertible fact that they were the ones indirectly responsible. The next day, Abu Hamza, a notorious Muslim rabble-rouser who preaches at a North London mosque where the murder suspect and his three cohorts worship, compounded the agony of the slain cop’s family by announcing that the police had no business raiding the suspect’s flat. (The four are also suspected of a terrorist plot to spread the poison ricin). As my luck would have it, I had just written in my Spectator column that repatriation of criminal minorities would be a welcome change and quoted the great Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech as prophetic and true.

The result was predictable. A London Times journalist demanded I be fired for racism. My superior washed his hands but did not fire me. In the meantime, Abu Hamza went on preaching, no politician took responsibility for the murder, and the elite who govern the British people took a tea break and discussed—I am sure—how the innocent have, in fact, some sort of obligation towards the guilty.

Welcome to Blair’s Britain, whose government is itching to go to war, and rightly so. War will take their incompetence and criminal irresponsibility off the front pages. Had I known it, I woulda stood in bed, in Paris, but my young son, now living there as a painter, tells me that the City of Light is now a very dangerous mistress and has little to teach a young man except to stay away from Arab neighborhoods.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.