The lies of the land

Spectator

3 days ago

You can gauge the fragility of an ideology by the blind fury with which it reacts to questioning. So it is with neo-liberalism. Teacher Simon Pearson, for example, was sacked for suggesting that the jailing of Lucy Connolly – who said very nasty things about asylum seekers – was an example of two-tier justice and that, while her words were indefensible, she should not have been sent to prison.
One could counter that opinion, but only at the risk of coming into collision with hard facts concerning sentencing – hence the sacking. Best to get shot of your political opponents, especially when he or she is demonstrably correct. Only by doing that can the ideology cling on. The other form of defence, if you are the adherent of an ideology which is palpably on its way out, is to lie to people, or to withhold information from them. Just shrug your shoulders and say: 'Search me, mate – we don't have any information on that, I'm afraid.'
For a good 60 years the British public have been lied to about immigration and had information withheld from them. The reason that information was withheld is because the authorities know full well that possession of it would infuriate the great mass of people. And so, when some deranged jihadi murders somebody, we are not given his ethnicity, or we are told a lie (that he is a Norwegian, say), or a truism – that he is mental. If the police released the ethnicity of the suspect every time a serious crime was committed, the public would be even more averse to continued mass immigration from cultures dissimilar to our own than they are at the moment. I still suspect that Crimewatch was taken off air a decade or so ago because the gallery of criminals displayed each week revealed a remarkable dearth of white folks in it. The programme is back, by the way, with diverse presenters and they don't do the rogues' gallery thing any more.
The lying, or obfuscation, about immigration has included withholding crime figures from us. Until recently we were un-aware that foreign nationals living in the UK were 70 per cent more likely to be convicted of sexual crimes. Meanwhile Algerians were 18 times more likely to be convicted of theft. The proportion of the under-18 prison population which is of black heritage is 30 per cent, compared with 5.5 per cent of under-18s in the general population.
These figures are all comparatively new to us and they have been released for the simple reason that the dominant paradigm, the guff we've been fed for decades – that multiculturalism is terrific and immigrants commit no more crime than do the locals – is increasingly rejected as being not merely untrue, but absurd. The only comeback you will hear from the left on the issue of, say, young black offenders is that if they constitute 30 per cent of the under-18 prison population, then the majority of underage crime must be committed by white youths. This is what I call the Dave Allen argument, and it has been deployed over and over again in the case of the Pakistani rape gangs, despite what we might agree are its obvious flaws.
So we have been lied to about crime rates among immigrants, or simply not told. But we have also been lied to about how many immigrants are here, how many will continue to flood in and what benefit they will be to society. It is quite common for the left to insist that an influx of 900,000 or so every year will not have any impact upon our crumbling infrastructure – housing, schools, the NHS and so on – despite the epic denial of reality that this involves.
More recently, however, the truth has begun to leak out. While we are continually told that immigration boosts the economy, a report last year from the Office for Budget Responsibility showed that a low-skilled migrant costs the British taxpayer an average of £150,000 by the time he or she has reached pensionable age, and £500,000 if they make it to 80. This is the first time we have been given such information, and my suggestion is that in future the OBR breaks it down by individual ethnicity.
Meanwhile, at the beginning of this year it was estimated that by 2063 white British people will be a minority in their own country. For decades anti-immigrant groups and right-wing politicians have warned of this and their claims were laughed off as ludicrous. Nope, not ludicrous: the truth. And of course any time conscientious politicians raised the issue of mass immigration, the liberal authorities wheeled out the great wicker man of Enoch and set it on fire, while denouncing all those who questioned the avidity with which this country yearned for suicide as 'racist' and 'far-right'.
The slightly better news is that the public no longer buys this rubbish. For a long while, attitudes towards immigration among the general public seemed to soften, the consequence of being kept in the dark, being lied to and not wanting to seem 'racist' to the nice researchers. Not any more. The latest YouGov poll shows that a whopping 45 per cent of Brits are in favour of admitting precisely zero new migrants and wish for large numbers to be persuaded somehow to leave the country. That would have been an unthinkable proportion even ten years ago. Meanwhile, only a small minority believe that immigration has been mostly good for the country, and three-quarters oppose greater numbers still coming here.
The lesson from this is that the centre cannot hold, that the disinformation no longer works – and that people are angry. Here, as in continental Europe, the indigenous populations have roused a little from their enforced slumber. A shame, really, that it's too late.