Who got it right - the sequel

Further to Craig’s level-headed article, here’s a contribution on behalf of reactionary panicmongers everywhere.  

It was refreshing that the news about the census showing the sharp rise in immigration was headlined on the BBC all day yesterday. Headlined! 

One might think the BBC would play it down, but one would be wrong. Not completely, though.  They didn’t play it down, but they did pass it through the BBC’s particular prism and it came out the other side all gift wrapped and pretty, with something distinctly elephant-sized missing. 

Okay, so the sharp increase in the number of immigrants is ‘changing the demographics’, as they like to put it, but political correctness means that the most significant ways in which the demographics are changing are the ones we’re not allowed to mention. The census is out, it’s ‘news’, therefore the BBC must report it. What to do? 

If they can’t discuss the unmentionable thing that is occupying the minds of the politically incorrect, they must stick to naming, and if necessary blaming and shaming the ones they can. In a politically correct collusion with politicians of all persuasion, they make the most of directing all negative analysis at the group they feel they can justify complaining about - not the ones who don’t work, but the ones that do. Not the ones who demand massive supremacist religious buildings, but the ones whose presence is marked by a few extra specialist grocery stores.   

They had to include something about religion, because it was in the census, so the fact that Christianity is in decline took top spot. The massive rise in the population of Tower Hamlets was noted, but about you-know-what there was not a lot.

The BBC, for some reason, thinks it’s okay to talk about the Poles, but it’s nasty and racist to talk about the Muslims. Why?

On the BBC’s review of the papers this morning, Jonathan Freedland was quoted because he has written something favourable about diversity, citing a guardsman with a turban instead of a bearskin. Yippee. “The panicmongers on the reactionary right will compare that to the rise in the number of British Muslims to 2.7m – from 3% of the total population in 2001 to 5% now – and warn that Christianity will one day be outstripped by Islam.”

I am a panicmonger, and you have not allayed my panic by simply shouting ‘Don’t Panic!!” 

There’s undoubtedly something joyous about ‘colourful’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘rainbow nation’. There’s also something colourless about insular, bigoted, parochial and unimaginative. But this isn’t about that. The relatively small proportion of Muslims in the UK and Europe are disproportionately disruptive, and the way the world is turning against Israel and by extension all Jews bar the ones in the chorus, should  set alarm bells ringing in the ears of Jonathan Freedland.

P.S. I’d just like to mention this in Dominic Casciani’s piece.

“Thirdly, if the UK's population becomes more highly skilled and educated, there will be more and more jobs that people do not want to do.”

For a start, it’s a big ‘If’, judging by the way our education standards are slipping down the world’s league tables, but as for these hypothetical skilled people not wanting to do unskilled jobs - well, does that mean the immigrants do want to do them? Or do they have to because necessity is the mother of invention.   Because they and their dependents are not cushioned by welfare, whereas our own unskilled and uneducated are, because they are driven by a work ethic, whereas our own unskilled and uneducated are not. Because  they have little alternative and because our own unskilled and uneducated have.