RE: Crime and Punishment
Friday 12th April 2002
Crime and Punishment
What can be done to restore law and order in a Britain that is falling apart at the seams?
Discussion
Teds views are strong to the point and i agree with what is said.
I have experienced a lot of jealously because of the car that i have brought. but its ok to buy a big house for hundreds of thousands of ponds but as soon as you get a new car which says somethong about your character. People start getting jealous.
The best comment i have recieved was "why buy a car like that, it only gets you from A to B" this was said to me by someone in my own family. I admit i am only 22 and drive a Cerbera my fiance 21 drives a 1992 chimera (waiting Delivery on a Tamora 2 weeks away) we have had constant backlash from people because of our age. We both work and have 3 businesses between ourselves.
I see having a car like a TVR is something we have worked for and deserve.
We have been a victime of crime in tha last 6 months and to be honest were we live is not the best area but a teenager mentioning no name broke into our chimp and stole a mobile phone (forgot to take it out at night) i was not to bothered and jsut phone the police and insurance company about the claim. A week later while driving like a madman a wallet flung pastr my head while breaking hard for a Hairpin thought thats funny that aint mine. started thinking the worst about my fiancee then i relised it was the teenagers he dropped it. it had everyhing in it pass port driving license credit card none were his. to cut the story short he later went down for 3 years for theft of 78 credit cards and obtaniing money by deception (using the cards) and theft of a phone.
>>> Edited by stc_bennett on Friday 12th April 01:17
I have experienced a lot of jealously because of the car that i have brought. but its ok to buy a big house for hundreds of thousands of ponds but as soon as you get a new car which says somethong about your character. People start getting jealous.
The best comment i have recieved was "why buy a car like that, it only gets you from A to B" this was said to me by someone in my own family. I admit i am only 22 and drive a Cerbera my fiance 21 drives a 1992 chimera (waiting Delivery on a Tamora 2 weeks away) we have had constant backlash from people because of our age. We both work and have 3 businesses between ourselves.
I see having a car like a TVR is something we have worked for and deserve.
We have been a victime of crime in tha last 6 months and to be honest were we live is not the best area but a teenager mentioning no name broke into our chimp and stole a mobile phone (forgot to take it out at night) i was not to bothered and jsut phone the police and insurance company about the claim. A week later while driving like a madman a wallet flung pastr my head while breaking hard for a Hairpin thought thats funny that aint mine. started thinking the worst about my fiancee then i relised it was the teenagers he dropped it. it had everyhing in it pass port driving license credit card none were his. to cut the story short he later went down for 3 years for theft of 78 credit cards and obtaniing money by deception (using the cards) and theft of a phone.
>>> Edited by stc_bennett on Friday 12th April 01:17
I think the enclosed text sums up how allot of us feel.
If you have read Ayn Rand’s objectivist epic Atlas Shrugged, you will remember the novel’s compelling central conceit: America has fallen victim to a variant of communism. Some businesses, it is decided, are becoming too successful and their shareholders too rich. A Fair Shares Law is implemented to make sure that those who cannot prosper by their own efforts do so thanks to the efforts of others. (One of Miss Rand’s most celebrated aperçus was that ‘the difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time’.)
A character in the novel, John Galt, has more to lose from this than most. He has discovered the secret of perpetual motion, and stands to make an unimaginable fortune. He is determined not to be enslaved by indolent, cowardly mediocrities, and so he disappears and sets up a community in the Rockies. He invites to live with him all the other entrepreneurs, risk-takers and toilers who create America’s wealth; they ‘disappear’ too. America rapidly crashes to a halt. Galt, who has shown that the will of individuals must always be more powerful than that of the state, becomes ‘the man who stopped the motor of the world’. The moral, of course, is that it is an illiberal, ignorant, thoughtless government that has stopped that motor. In the end, Galt returns on his own terms. The experiment is proved to have failed, and order is restored.
Miss Rand herself had been part of a similar sort of emigration: she had fled Russia after the 1917 revolution, along with many others from the ruling class or intellectual elite. The dark ages that fell upon that country, and lasted for decades, were exacerbated by the loss of so many talented people. In a minor way, we had a similar phenomenon here in the 1970s: the so-called ‘brain drain’, when many of great talent and earning potential went abroad — often, like Miss Rand, to America — to avoid a top tax-rate of 83 per cent and to escape a country where innovation and enterprise seemed all but impossible.
Those who remember that time might have noticed something familiar of late. We may not have the high taxes, but there is widespread discontent with the way the country is governed, and a lack of belief that anyone can ever put it right. A few years ago the most popular middle-class dinner-party conversation concerned property prices. Now it is about the desire that more and more people have to get out of England. Those who create the country’s wealth — who form its opinions and shape its non-governmental institutions — are feeling increasingly alienated. The past used to be the foreign country where they did things differently. Now many of us find, to our horror, that the foreign country is the present, and that the England we knew is not the England we live in. The place is becoming increasingly dangerous and uncongenial. Maybe the time has come, if not to seek our fortune elsewhere, at least to consolidate it there.
The world is in a convulsion of mass emigration. Europe, for the moment, is the prime target. Waves of people seeking a better economic future are coming north from Africa, west from Central Asia, or even just making the comparatively short hop from the other side of what used to be the Iron Curtain. A substantial proportion of them end up on this already cramped and crowded island. Many are refused permanent admission, on the grounds that they have entered illegally and are not fleeing persecution. However, the government is lax about expelling them. Of the 150,000 such cases who have arrived in little over the last year, 120,000 who were deemed to have no right to be here are still to board the plane home. Thus, by stealth, a mass immigration is well under way. The question is: will the indigenous population absorb it, and the changes to life and culture it will bring; or will the British, too, start to get on the move?
Given the bureaucratic obsession in this country for collecting statistics, one crucial figure is, surprisingly, hard to find. No one seems to know how many people in Britain already own or have access to a second home abroad. Casual inquiries raise some interesting, if anecdotal, observations. Knight Frank, one of the country’s leading estate agencies, with a big overseas property business, estimates that interest among Britons in foreign properties has doubled in the last five years. Others in business reckon that there are already formidable numbers of Brits abroad. A consensus is hard to find, but some say that there are as many as half-a-million in France, 350,000 in Spain, and perhaps 100,000 in Florida alone.
Such conversations trigger a host of further anecdotes. Those seeking homes overseas are noticeably younger than they used to be: this is no longer a business aimed at retirement boltholes. They are no longer simply the traditionally monied classes. They are not people who wish to spend just the odd weekend and perhaps one month a year there. Thanks to cheaper air travel, they might go there every other weekend. Thanks to the Internet and superior telecommunications, some might work from their foreign outposts some of the time, most of the time or all of the time. And many of them, when buying, say that they have had enough of living here. While Europe is popular — more space, better food, better weather, yet proximity to ‘home’ — America is becoming an increasingly attractive destination. This is not least because those who have visited many of its cities recently are impressed by how safe they are compared with our own, how clean everything is, and how easy it is to get around.
The cheapness of property in charming parts of the near-Continent also has an incentive effect on would-be migrants. As one of Knight Frank’s spokesmen put it, ‘Ten years ago, people had a small place in London and a bigger house in the country. Now you find that they’ve sold in the country, bought a larger place in London and have a house abroad.’ With ten-bedroom manor houses in spacious grounds in Brittany and Normandy going routinely for about £250,000, it is easy to see why. More and more people are making the leap. A friend of mine bought a house abroad two years ago for the odd holiday and weekend, and now seems to spend about a third of the year there. Another couple I know have just bought in Provence, with a view to spending as much time there as possible: the wife doubts she will want to come back once she moves in, on the grounds that Britain has become so dirty, dangerous and disgusting.
Nor is the potential exodus confined to white-collar workers. My builder, who routinely works six or seven days a week so that he can take his wife to Australia for six weeks in the winter, now so despairs of this country that he is looking to buy in Brittany. Infected by this pessimism and wanderlust, I can begin to imagine having a permanent home outside England. I suspect that I would have to be in the sort of horrible predicament faced by the white farmers of Zimbabwe before I actually tried to persuade my wife that we ought to go. Many others seem to need far less persuasion.
That was not always the case. Something is happening in Britain that happened in America in the 1960s and 1970s: whole areas of cities are being surrendered to an underclass. In London, although we have yet to see Mayfair, Belgravia or Chelsea taken over by menacing Albanian ‘illegals’, residents of premium areas are banding together to hire private security patrols, and people are afraid to wear their Rolexes out of doors. Even in the most salubrious streets, few relish going for a walk after nightfall. In America, the authorities — by a policy of zero tolerance — have been largely successful in reclaiming the streets from the criminal. Here, there has been no effort to do so, and there is unlikely to be one. And it is not just the inhabitants of cities who rail against the ineffectualness of politicians and the law in protecting them. Country people, as was shown in the Tony Martin case (where a Norfolk farmer shot a gypsy burglar), feel that they are almost entirely unpoliced and unprotected, and that the law’s main concern is not with the victim.
Crime is just one symptom of the problem. Unlike in the 1970s, the root causes of the dissatisfaction are not financial. They stem from all the things about which one reads daily in the newspapers, and for which the government is now being held increasingly to blame. Also, the dissatisfaction is not confined to the native population: many who have migrated here since the war, and have worked hard and honestly to establish themselves, share the view that the country is going to the dogs. The malaise cuts across classes, races and regions. At a time when essential public and social services seem not to be guaranteed even for the most vulnerable — such as the sick and the elderly — there is widespread annoyance at the millions being spent on benefits for illegal immigrants. Schools are perceived to be failing, after years of promised improvements. The transport system compares abominably with other First World countries. Our agriculture has been decimated, mainly thanks to governmental stupidity and carelessness. Unfortunately for the government, we now have a well-travelled population who see how things are in other countries, and who are starting to wonder why on earth they cannot be like that here.
The inevitable effect of this institutionalised disappointment is a disengagement from the political process as part of a general disengagement from society. The turnout at the last general election was, at 59 per cent, the lowest since the introduction of universal adult suffrage. The calibre of those wishing to participate in government, whether at national or local level, is (with certain honourable exceptions) pitiful. Politics no longer holds any appeal for those who traditionally dominated it. The middle classes, who are the most vociferous complainants about rising crime, avoid jury service if they can. A concept of civic duty is not yet entirely absent, but it is fast evaporating. A largely corrupt central government, whose leader openly tolerates lying and graft, has set an example of rottenness that trickles down through society. That, and an almost total absence of national pride, forces people to reconsider their commitment to such a community.
One almost begins to wonder whether the failure of the government to get to grips with any of these problems is deliberate. One is reminded of William Hague’s much-criticised (and much misunderstood) ‘foreign land’ speech of just over a year ago, in which he suggested that we were now being ruled in a way that was entirely alien to us. This assertion was undoubtedly true, and it seemed all part of ‘the project’ to nationalise attitudes in this country in accordance with those held by senior members of the government. Also, Mr Blair’s commitment to the great European adventure is certainly not hindered by his helping to create a climate in which many Britons are happy to go and live in Provence, Umbria or on the Costa del Sol. There can be no doubt that the creation of a European Union has made it easier for people to take the option of living abroad, whether permanently or part-time; but ease is not necessarily what encourages them to do so.
Part of the process of the Briton’s disengagement from Britain is, as Mr Hague hinted, to make him feel like a foreigner in his own country. We saw another magnificent example of this the other week, in the absurd remarks of Gavyn Davies, the chairman of the board of governors of the BBC, about white, middle-class people and their so-called attempt to ‘hijack’ the Corporation’s output. New Labour’s constant rhetoric of multiculturalism — in a country where 95 per cent of people are white and 96 per cent Christian — is designed to exacerbate the feeling of alienation by undermining the old certainties that any established nation and its people ought to be able to take for granted. The grand temple of this ethos was, of course, the Dome, which had no palpable relevance to Britain.
That should have been no surprise. The Blair government is probably the most anti-British and certainly the most anti-English in history. For much of its duration there has been no feasible opposition, though that might be changing. It has set about vandalising much that we used to take for granted in our constitution and our lives. The Queen is treated as a troublesome museum-piece, the House of Lords is stripped of expertise and stuffed with cronies of the Prime Minister, the House of Commons is treated as a rubber-stamp, the civil service is demoralised and humiliated. No wonder the public increasingly find the whole idea of politics repellent.
We have recently had, too, an acceleration in the process of alienation with the unpopular decision to metricate our weights and measures, and the heavy-handed, illiberal and extreme decision to prosecute and punish those traders who prefer to stick to imperial measures. Although just one of many laws inflicted on us from Europe, it is one of the most noticeable, for it affects people’s everyday lives. It removes from Britain an important part of its distinctiveness, and helps make elsewhere a less foreign place. It is all part of the torpedoing of what British culture remains; like the attempts to abolish fox-hunting, and the turning of rural Britain into a gigantic theme park punctuated by hideous and inappropriate housing developments.
In an age when many factors conspire to make mobility much more feasible than in the past, it might, of course, be coincidental to the state of the country that so many people wish to leave or have already left. After all, if there had been no exchange controls in the 1970s, if the Internet and satellite communications had existed, if what is now called the European Union had been in such an advanced state of cohesion, then millions more might have gone then. What is not in doubt is that many more have not just the means, but also the will, to leave Britain now. They already play no part in their country except for paying taxes. There may not be a John Galt, but the loss of a few hundred thousand more proto-John Galts would be something this country could not afford, morally or culturally.
What is so frightening is that it could, now, be very easily accomplished. Anyone who imagines that the surrender of England by the English to a new wave of incomers is the stuff of fiction should note how simple it would be to effect, and how little interested our present rulers seem to be in preventing it. There is no reason why history’s next great exodus should not be from here.
·
First class job, Ted - right on the money..
Of course, and I hope you won't take this personally, if you were to become Prime Minister, revolution notwithstanding, you'd probably turn into the same sort of manipulating, truth dodging pragmatist that runs the country now - it's about the way power corrupts really - there are many people in government now who have in their lifetime endorsed very sound and radical political opinions - Jack Straw is a good example - only to put all that in a locked casket as soon as the reins of power beckon.
Two (not entirely complimentary) things that are at the root of the problems we face (IMO):
1) Liberalism - amongst other things, this is responsible for the abolition of corporal punishment, forced racial and gender integration and the undermining of marriage as an institute inside which to raise children in a secure and beneficial environment. In short the diluting and dismantling of every social structure which has in the last 100 years helped to form a cohesive and co-operative society.
2) Consumerism - By focusing on aspirational messages linking one's personal success and fulfilment with the ownership of a product and in so doing, refining media marketing into a modern form of brainwashing and social control. People no longer respond to traditional social stimuli so much as they do advertising. Children are manipulated by TV to the point that by the time they become adults, they are enslaved to the culture of the material. Before you know it, gone is any need for the common man to discover philosophy, politics, history, arts or anthropology. Better to manipulate the public into abandoning intellectual dissent than to throttle it like Stalin or Mao Tse Tung would have. No, consumerism guarantees complicity of the public by superceding thoughtfulness with avarice.
Phew - I'll get me great-coat
Of course, and I hope you won't take this personally, if you were to become Prime Minister, revolution notwithstanding, you'd probably turn into the same sort of manipulating, truth dodging pragmatist that runs the country now - it's about the way power corrupts really - there are many people in government now who have in their lifetime endorsed very sound and radical political opinions - Jack Straw is a good example - only to put all that in a locked casket as soon as the reins of power beckon.
Two (not entirely complimentary) things that are at the root of the problems we face (IMO):
1) Liberalism - amongst other things, this is responsible for the abolition of corporal punishment, forced racial and gender integration and the undermining of marriage as an institute inside which to raise children in a secure and beneficial environment. In short the diluting and dismantling of every social structure which has in the last 100 years helped to form a cohesive and co-operative society.
2) Consumerism - By focusing on aspirational messages linking one's personal success and fulfilment with the ownership of a product and in so doing, refining media marketing into a modern form of brainwashing and social control. People no longer respond to traditional social stimuli so much as they do advertising. Children are manipulated by TV to the point that by the time they become adults, they are enslaved to the culture of the material. Before you know it, gone is any need for the common man to discover philosophy, politics, history, arts or anthropology. Better to manipulate the public into abandoning intellectual dissent than to throttle it like Stalin or Mao Tse Tung would have. No, consumerism guarantees complicity of the public by superceding thoughtfulness with avarice.
Phew - I'll get me great-coat
Yerrsss.
There are some good points in Nils Baker's rant but it plays fast and loose with the truth to supports some rather dodgy conclusions.
How can 150,000 people constitute a mass immigration in a country of 50 million? I make that 0.03% of the population. Put it into the context of the numebr of people who have left and entered the country over the last ten years (before the current crop of immigrants) and it's minute.
What's more, the last so-called mass immigration which occurred in the 1950s resulted in huge benefits to this country, because the immigrants were prepared to work for very low wages to do the jobs no-one wants to do. Such as a bus or train driver, of which there's a shortage right now. Fill those jobs and guess what? Public transport works better, fewer cars on the road, you fill in the rest.
And the trader who wanted to show prices in pounds and ounces (measures which, incidentally, people under the age of 35 won't have been taught about in school, so they might feel a tad dis-enfranchised)? He was at liberty to do provided he also showed the metric prices. What's wrong with that?
Yes, we want better things of the government and I've got a yen to move to France for all sorts of reasons, many of them similar to the ones that Nils raises. Like millions of others, I've travelled much more than I could have expected had I been born 50 years earlier so I've seen and experienced more, and so have a wider palette of cultures to choose from if you see what I mean.
And yes, public services are pretty ramshackle in the UK -- but then 20 years of neglect and disbelief in public services tends to have that effect. No finger of blame pointed here, oh no
They're not getting better as quickly as you or I would like either and Blair's adoption of a world statesman role is irritating when there's so much to be done here.
But things here are not as black as Nils' posting paints them. I don't feel like a foreigner in my own country. Your view of this depends what you see when you observe the world around you -- and to some extent you see what your own prejudices (and we all have them) pre-dispose you to see.
And I don't agree that because change is happening it's bad -- for instance questioning the role of the monarchy is a healthy thing for any country, especially one as conscious of its history as ours.
I'd argue too, CarZee, that forced integration in this country is unknown - in fact if you look at the record of a lot of council housing policies, the opposite has occurred. People move where they do for their own reasons and marry whom they like, or not as they see fit. That's not goivernment policy -- in fact the government is and has always been way behind the curve of social movements such as the decline in marriage and religion. Look at the time it took to remove the married mans allowance which effectively meant that women were deemed not to exist for tax purposes.
Let's base this discussion on the basis of facts not a handful of half-truths gleaned from the Daily Mail.
There are some good points in Nils Baker's rant but it plays fast and loose with the truth to supports some rather dodgy conclusions.
How can 150,000 people constitute a mass immigration in a country of 50 million? I make that 0.03% of the population. Put it into the context of the numebr of people who have left and entered the country over the last ten years (before the current crop of immigrants) and it's minute.
What's more, the last so-called mass immigration which occurred in the 1950s resulted in huge benefits to this country, because the immigrants were prepared to work for very low wages to do the jobs no-one wants to do. Such as a bus or train driver, of which there's a shortage right now. Fill those jobs and guess what? Public transport works better, fewer cars on the road, you fill in the rest.
And the trader who wanted to show prices in pounds and ounces (measures which, incidentally, people under the age of 35 won't have been taught about in school, so they might feel a tad dis-enfranchised)? He was at liberty to do provided he also showed the metric prices. What's wrong with that?
Yes, we want better things of the government and I've got a yen to move to France for all sorts of reasons, many of them similar to the ones that Nils raises. Like millions of others, I've travelled much more than I could have expected had I been born 50 years earlier so I've seen and experienced more, and so have a wider palette of cultures to choose from if you see what I mean.
And yes, public services are pretty ramshackle in the UK -- but then 20 years of neglect and disbelief in public services tends to have that effect. No finger of blame pointed here, oh no
They're not getting better as quickly as you or I would like either and Blair's adoption of a world statesman role is irritating when there's so much to be done here. But things here are not as black as Nils' posting paints them. I don't feel like a foreigner in my own country. Your view of this depends what you see when you observe the world around you -- and to some extent you see what your own prejudices (and we all have them) pre-dispose you to see.
And I don't agree that because change is happening it's bad -- for instance questioning the role of the monarchy is a healthy thing for any country, especially one as conscious of its history as ours.
I'd argue too, CarZee, that forced integration in this country is unknown - in fact if you look at the record of a lot of council housing policies, the opposite has occurred. People move where they do for their own reasons and marry whom they like, or not as they see fit. That's not goivernment policy -- in fact the government is and has always been way behind the curve of social movements such as the decline in marriage and religion. Look at the time it took to remove the married mans allowance which effectively meant that women were deemed not to exist for tax purposes.
Let's base this discussion on the basis of facts not a handful of half-truths gleaned from the Daily Mail.
Manek.. was the previous post really daily mail stuff.. I'll reduce my previous reply to 1 clapping smiley..
A good post but 1 minor thing:
"measures which, incidentally, people under the age of 35 won't have been taught about in school"
Sorry, at 27 now I was well in pounds and ounces land as school I'm afriad..
Cheers
Matt.
A good post but 1 minor thing:
"measures which, incidentally, people under the age of 35 won't have been taught about in school"
Sorry, at 27 now I was well in pounds and ounces land as school I'm afriad..
Cheers
Matt.
I just know that at my old school they stopped teaching imperial measures shortly after I left -- and my younger brother who went to a different school wasn't taught them either. And conversations you hear on trains and buses suggest to me that most people below middle age seem to work in metric these days. But if you were taught the other stuff too then I guess I'm wrong
Manek
By forced integration, I'm talking of a number of aspects, but not housing necessarily - and on that I appreciate that you're right.. people move where they want to move to and often end up in communities with peopel of their own ethnic group.
But, this government toys with ideas to oppose this fact of human nature in an effort to quell racial tension in run down areas - this is forced integration. Blunkett toys with the idea of forcing schools to have quotas of students matching up with some statistical model, so that a Christian school is forced to take (for the sake of argument) 25% non christian pupils and the Muslim school is forced to take 25% non-muslims etc.. if this is not forced integration I don't know what is..
Employers have quotas of ethnic minority (and female) employees which they must fill. Do you want to be employed on the basis that company X is obligated by law to employ Y people of your race/gender or do you want to gain employment based on merit and the needs of yourself and the company. This again, I call forced integration.
I want you to know that I do appreciate and approve of the motivation behind equality laws, but they more often than not result in mere machinations which seem absurd and irrelevant to any ordinary member of the public and largely provides a raison d'etre for 'Human Resource' staff rather than solving any identifiable problem.
When these absurdities are identified and railed against by the press (Mail, Express, Times, Telegraph, Sun, Mirror - take your pick) this compounds the sense of alienation many Britons feel today.
By forced integration, I'm talking of a number of aspects, but not housing necessarily - and on that I appreciate that you're right.. people move where they want to move to and often end up in communities with peopel of their own ethnic group.
But, this government toys with ideas to oppose this fact of human nature in an effort to quell racial tension in run down areas - this is forced integration. Blunkett toys with the idea of forcing schools to have quotas of students matching up with some statistical model, so that a Christian school is forced to take (for the sake of argument) 25% non christian pupils and the Muslim school is forced to take 25% non-muslims etc.. if this is not forced integration I don't know what is..
Employers have quotas of ethnic minority (and female) employees which they must fill. Do you want to be employed on the basis that company X is obligated by law to employ Y people of your race/gender or do you want to gain employment based on merit and the needs of yourself and the company. This again, I call forced integration.
I want you to know that I do appreciate and approve of the motivation behind equality laws, but they more often than not result in mere machinations which seem absurd and irrelevant to any ordinary member of the public and largely provides a raison d'etre for 'Human Resource' staff rather than solving any identifiable problem.
When these absurdities are identified and railed against by the press (Mail, Express, Times, Telegraph, Sun, Mirror - take your pick) this compounds the sense of alienation many Britons feel today.
Top Rant Ted!!!
I'm enclosing my rant to various british papers which is on the same theme as follows
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am disgusted to find that the BBC is committed to the scourge of "political correctness". I am proud to be British, born and raised in GB, with a family which goes back over 1000 years. My father was disabled and he was against all this socialist egalitarianism which shows everybody (exept the majority of Britons of course) as either disabled, black or asian. I am proud to be white and british but have no problems with unfortunates who fled their countries due to oppression (or financial) problems.
I do have problems however with people who try to lump us all together and dumb us down to a PC grey unity. I am proud to be a white Scot without any minority adhereance and would wish that the majority of Britons are correctly represented and not forced into the backgriound by (very small) minorities. This PC thinking does lead to aggravated acccentuation of the differences and does lead to racial hatred. Please desist from this pinko egalitarianism!
I do also have problems with people who insist they're British but refuse in any way to adhere to the British way of life by refusing to speak any British language (English, Welsh, Gaelic, Scots) or otherwise integrating into our society. I have had to integrate into german society, speak their language etc. so why do people still expect me to speak Gujurati or some other minority language in Britain?
What I forgot to add was that they should bring back the birch (IOM has no football rowdies or scrotes), hanging for 1st degree murder, and forced labour for convicted politicians...
Rant over
I'm enclosing my rant to various british papers which is on the same theme as follows
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am disgusted to find that the BBC is committed to the scourge of "political correctness". I am proud to be British, born and raised in GB, with a family which goes back over 1000 years. My father was disabled and he was against all this socialist egalitarianism which shows everybody (exept the majority of Britons of course) as either disabled, black or asian. I am proud to be white and british but have no problems with unfortunates who fled their countries due to oppression (or financial) problems.
I do have problems however with people who try to lump us all together and dumb us down to a PC grey unity. I am proud to be a white Scot without any minority adhereance and would wish that the majority of Britons are correctly represented and not forced into the backgriound by (very small) minorities. This PC thinking does lead to aggravated acccentuation of the differences and does lead to racial hatred. Please desist from this pinko egalitarianism!
I do also have problems with people who insist they're British but refuse in any way to adhere to the British way of life by refusing to speak any British language (English, Welsh, Gaelic, Scots) or otherwise integrating into our society. I have had to integrate into german society, speak their language etc. so why do people still expect me to speak Gujurati or some other minority language in Britain?
What I forgot to add was that they should bring back the birch (IOM has no football rowdies or scrotes), hanging for 1st degree murder, and forced labour for convicted politicians...
Rant over
Top article Ted, and Nils, your post is exactly how I feel but put a lot more elequently than I ever could.
What has happened to this country? Its shocking. I remember as a child in the late 70's there was a completely different ethos. People were pleasant in shops, took ownership of issues you had. Workers worked and didnt bleat over insignficant issues. Britian has become lazy and stupid, and I find it rather upsetting to see the greatest nation on Earth slide down a slippery slope due to the almost universal mismanagement of government.
Matt.
What has happened to this country? Its shocking. I remember as a child in the late 70's there was a completely different ethos. People were pleasant in shops, took ownership of issues you had. Workers worked and didnt bleat over insignficant issues. Britian has become lazy and stupid, and I find it rather upsetting to see the greatest nation on Earth slide down a slippery slope due to the almost universal mismanagement of government.
Matt.
How do you deal with this little git
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/wales/newsid_1919000/1919723.stm
Give him a thump as he eyes up your motor and you will be done for assault.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/wales/newsid_1919000/1919723.stm
Give him a thump as he eyes up your motor and you will be done for assault.
CarZee
You make a couple of good points but I'd argue that the thing to do about religious schools is not to try and integrate them. This is a potential minefield which is beyond the power of legislation. Instead we should abolish them altogether. In a multi-cultural society (which we are) we have to accept that even though the majority are nominally Christian (though most in practice aren't) there's a significant minority in particular areas who are not. To start trying to come up with formulae that somehow satisfy the statistical requirements of this that or the other bunch of people seems to me near-impossible., And I don't agree with the concept of religious schooling anyway
On the issue of employment quotas, I agree that they can be iniquitous and, at one time, I was in favour of them. For instance, in some areas, you used to find that the people administering and making decisions about benefits, housing and other matters that touch people's lives very directly were white, while the recipients weren't. I used to live in Lambeth where in the late 1970s this was the case. So they introduced quotas. In 1983, I actually worked for Lambeth council for a year in the housing benefit department. Under quotas, the people who did the grunt work were mostly dunces while the management couldn't manage their way out of a Ford Fiesta. Result: crap service for the local community and a totally hands-off approach by the council -- apart from the occasional bit of hand-wringing. But then, it was very poorly managed, from employee selection onwards.
So quotas probably aren't the way forward - though there is a need for them in limited circumstances as long as it's well-managed. There is for instance a case for saying that, if two candidates are EQUALLY QUALIFIED then you should hire the minority person. I can't see the point of it in, for instance, an engineering firm where race is entirely irrelevant. In housing benefit though, it's a different story...
You make a couple of good points but I'd argue that the thing to do about religious schools is not to try and integrate them. This is a potential minefield which is beyond the power of legislation. Instead we should abolish them altogether. In a multi-cultural society (which we are) we have to accept that even though the majority are nominally Christian (though most in practice aren't) there's a significant minority in particular areas who are not. To start trying to come up with formulae that somehow satisfy the statistical requirements of this that or the other bunch of people seems to me near-impossible., And I don't agree with the concept of religious schooling anyway
On the issue of employment quotas, I agree that they can be iniquitous and, at one time, I was in favour of them. For instance, in some areas, you used to find that the people administering and making decisions about benefits, housing and other matters that touch people's lives very directly were white, while the recipients weren't. I used to live in Lambeth where in the late 1970s this was the case. So they introduced quotas. In 1983, I actually worked for Lambeth council for a year in the housing benefit department. Under quotas, the people who did the grunt work were mostly dunces while the management couldn't manage their way out of a Ford Fiesta. Result: crap service for the local community and a totally hands-off approach by the council -- apart from the occasional bit of hand-wringing. But then, it was very poorly managed, from employee selection onwards.
So quotas probably aren't the way forward - though there is a need for them in limited circumstances as long as it's well-managed. There is for instance a case for saying that, if two candidates are EQUALLY QUALIFIED then you should hire the minority person. I can't see the point of it in, for instance, an engineering firm where race is entirely irrelevant. In housing benefit though, it's a different story...
Gassing Station | General Gassing [Archive] | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff