Britain – Page 7 – praag.org

‘Anti-immigration is not racist’

The success of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s flagship immigration policy was called into serious question on Sunday, dealing him a potential blow ahead of 2015 elections by playing into the hands of a populist anti-immigration party.

A report by lawmakers from across the political spectrum concluded that Britain’s migration statistics were grossly unreliable and “not fit” for purpose, undermining the credibility of Cameron’s assertions about the issue.

Immigration is a hot button issue in Britain, where Cameron is trying to stop an exodus of voters to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) before a parliamentary election in two years’ time, and polls show the issue is one that worries voters the most.

Concerns have been fuelled by warnings in the right-leaning press about “hordes” of Romanians and Bulgarians moving to Britain next year when EU freedom of movement restrictions lapse, at a time when Britons face rising competition for jobs.

To compound Cameron’s problems on immigration, a government pilot scheme that involves vans driving around London with billboards telling illegal immigrants to “go home or face arrest” has angered his junior coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats, and prompted allegations of racism.

Questioning immigration was for years regarded as racist in Britain, but all three main parties have started to talk tough about the subject in response to rising public anxiety, campaigns in the country’s popular tabloid press, and the popularity of the anti-immigration UKIP.

Cameron’s ruling Conservatives, who are trailing the opposition Labour party in the polls, have promised a far-reaching immigration crackdown and say they have cut net migration – the numerical difference between people coming in and out of the country – by a third.

They have also pledged to cut that figure to tens of thousands of people a year from over 100,000 now.

Data ‘too uncertain’

But the report, by the lower house of parliament’s Public Administration Committee, said that government migration data was neither systematically nor rigorously collected.

“We are struck by the advice of the Migration Advisory Committee to the Government that it should aim for net migration of only 50,000 as the only means of being certain that net migration is in fact below 100,000,” it said.

Bernard Jenkin, a Conservative lawmaker who oversaw the report, told local media government statistics were “little better than a best guess and could be out by tens of thousands.”

Chris Bryant, a Labour lawmaker, said the report showed the government’s assertions on immigration could not be trusted.

“We should be able to count people in and out of this country,” he told Sky TV. “If the government is going to boast about having cut net migration then you would think that the statistics would be reliable ones. The truth is they’re not.”

Cameron’s Conservatives are trailing Labour in the polls, but several surveys show Labour’s lead, which until recently had been fairly steady at ten percentage points, is narrowing.

One opinion poll published earlier this month put the Conservatives in joint first place with Labour for the first time in over a year.

UKIP, which campaigns for Britain to leave the European Union and for a halt to “open door immigration,” made sweeping gains in May local elections, winning almost one in four votes.

But its poll rating has since fallen from a high of 22 percent. Some polls suggest it has lost one or two percentage points. Others suggest its fall in support may be more serious.

A spokesman for Britain’s Home Office (interior ministry) said the government was confident it was on the right track.

“We disagree with the report’s conclusions,” he said. “Government reforms on immigration are working and the statistics do show that net migration is at its lowest level for a decade.” – Reuters

Royal baby will boost British economy

Not boosting the British economy... — Mugabe visiting the Queen: Not boosting the British economy…

Kate Middleton and Prince William are expecting their first child within days, and U.K. and global media outlets are gearing up for what is expected to be the biggest royals story of the year.

The royal birth will directly boost U.K. retail sales by around $367 million (£243 million), according to an estimate by the Centre for Retail Research in Nottingham, England. The figure covers all of July and August.

Festivities-related expenses will lead the way with an estimated $131 million (£87 million) in additional business thanks to the royal baby, according to the research. That includes increased spending on alcohol ($94 million, or £62 million), with the group predicting three million bottles of champagne and sparkling wine will be opened across the country, mostly in informal celebrations, to celebrate the baby.

“We expect plenty of people, not necessarily fervent royalists, to welcome the happy event in a demonstrative way,” the center said in a report.

Souvenirs and toys tied to the baby could bring in $121 million (£80 million), a figure that includes items sold overseas, it estimated.

And spending on royals- and royal baby-related books, DVDs and media could reach $115 million (£76 million), according to the Centre for Retail Research.

Beyond sales within the U.K., sales abroad of souvenirs, toys, books and DVD/media could also add to the economic impact to the tune of $56 million (£37 million), according to the center. That estimate includes overseas sales by U.K. online retailers.

“There is considerable interest in this event across the world, but particularly in North America, parts of Europe and Australia and New Zealand,” the center’s report said. “The Cambridges are seen as a “good news” story and surprisingly normal.

Bookies and betters are also looking to make money off the royal baby.

Bookmaker William Hill says the royal baby betting market might see $150,000 spent on various bets – from the gender and name of the baby to its hair color.

But that would be a minimal sum compared to the hundreds of millions of pounds placed on Britain’s annual Grand National horse race.

“Since the announcement that the Duchess was pregnant, there has been considerable interest in her changing shape, the sex of the baby, what new things she is wearing, as well as the baby products that are being acquired,” according to the report from the Centre for Retail Research.

It projects that in the months after the baby is born money spent on strollers could rise by 13 percent, or $50 million (£33 million) “as new parents “trade up” to more exclusive baby carriages following a trend that is expected to be set by the royals.”

Said the center: “The lucky manufacturer can expect a similar boost in sales to that achieved by iCandy Peach when Victoria Beckham adopted one for her daughter Harper.”

Observers have already spoken of the “Kate Effect” in such areas as fashion as items that Middleton wears tend to see a sales boost.

Similar gains are also expected to be made by the manufacturers of the royal baby’s clothes, crib and other products associated with the baby and its parents, according to the center. – The Hollywood Reporter

The US and Britain’s proxy war in Syria threatens planetary civilisation

by Dan Roodt

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The news that the UK, US and allies will provide ‘urgent military support to Syrian rebels’ has signalled the prolongation and possible escalation of the Syrian civil war. Not surprisingly, it was followed by news that Russia (is) to supply advanced weapons to Syria.

The so-called “Friends of Syria” group comprises Britain, France, the US, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. We can safely say that America and Britain are the driving forces behind the initiative and that the other countries have merely been roped in to lend some international legitimacy to what is turning into a proxy war between the US-UK and Russia.

The Syrian conflict represents a threat to world peace. In fact, it could lead to the end of civilisation as we know it!

That may sound like an outrageous statement, but let me explain.

The civil war in Syria is not only a proxy war between the Atlantic powers (or Atlanticists) and Russia, but once Syria falls, the next target will be Iran and after that Russia itself.

Putin understands this. He is also correct when he accuses the American and British governments of disregarding the sovereignty of other states and nations. Especially Democratic and Labour governments have in recent decades embraced the doctrine of “regime change” whereby the two Anglo-Saxon powers see fit to start wars and uprisings in other countries to serve their own interests. However, a lot of the time they are not even serving their own interests but are acting to promote the new Soviet ideology of multiculturalism. Racial equality, or “equality of outcomes” is to the Atlanticists what class equality was to the former totalitarian states of Eastern Europe.

Elsewhere on this website, Felicity Arbuthnot quotes Sbigniew Brzesinski as saying that the United States is courting “large-scale disaster” in Syria:

“Having covertly provided arms and equipment to insurgents from numerous different countries for over two years, they have now moved to the overt stage, a move over which even arch hawks such as former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and former Republican Senator Richard Luger, six term leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee urged caution.

“Luger said such action would boost extremists, with Brzezinski dismissing Obama’s talk of ‘red lines’ as thoughtless and risking “a large-scale disaster for the United States.”

The geostrategic scenario predicted by Russian writer and commentator Aleksandr Dugin, is being realised. I posted his essay The Great War of Continents on my personal blog some time ago. Dugin was influenced by the great German legal philosopher, Carl Schmitt, who was skeptical of democracy. In fact, we can see how democracy plays hardly any role in the decisions taken by the Atlanticists as the populations of both the US and the UK are vehemently opposed to further wars. A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that Americans (are) overwhelmingly against arming Syrian rebels. Schmitt also wrote a book on Land and sea in which he theorised about the conflict between the Atlantic “sea powers” and the Eurasian “land powers”.

However, I think the Syrian conflict, together with the so-called “Arab Spring”, colour revolutions, as well as the South African revolution of 1994 portend a major movement with the ultimate objective of abolishing the nation state as we know it. Almost all of these revolutions were fomented from the outside by Atlanticists who discerned weaknesses in the ethnic, religious and multinational compositions of the states being attacked. The use of media and the arming or financing of “rebels” and terrorists were features of all these revolutions or “regime changes”.

Apart from the thalassocratic elements identified by Schmitt and Dugin – the USA and the UK being maritime powers – there is another, archaic driver behind Atlanticist overreach and that is the resurrection of a kind of Zombie British Empire (ZBE). America, being a republic, has always been ill at ease with its role as the New Rome. Americans are not well-versed in foreign languages, customs and geography. The average intern or staffer in Washington would not be able to find Syria on a map, let alone appreciate the ethnic, religious and political complexities of that society.

But in its economic and geostrategic decline, Britain has become the tail wagging the dog. It is clearly seeking to influence and direct the United States in re-establishing its nineteenth-century dominance as a global imperium. Earlier this year, an Historic strategy meeting between the USA and the UK was announced. More recently, it was revealed by Edward Snowden that the British are worse than US in spying. Just yesterday, it appeared that the UK (was) tapping the EU’s data flows and the “German Justice Minister… called the British spy agency’s massive eavesdropping of international fiber-optic cables ‘a catastrophe’.”

There is a long-standing hostility towards the nation state in Britain, which has become deeply rooted in academia, the media, the ubiquitous left-wing NGOs and especially in the Labour Party. European nationalism or the historical desire of European peoples to exercise their right to self-determination is routinely equated with Hitlerism. But even in the United States where Woodrow Wilson is remembered as a champion of self-determination and the nation state, there is another school of thought expressed by Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, in the aftermath of World War I:

“The more I think about the President’s declaration as to ‘self-determination’, the more convinced I am of the dangers of putting such ideas into the minds of certain races. It is bound to be the basis of impossible demands on the Peace Congress, and create trouble in many lands. What effect will it have on the Irish, the Indians, the Egyptians, and the nationalists among the Boers? Will it not breed discontent, disorder and rebellion?”

The successful suppression of Afrikaner self-determination or “Boer nationalism” over more than a century, as well as the so-called “peaceful regime change” in South Africa in 1994, has emboldened neo-imperialists in the UK and the US to engineer many more regime changes, starting in Iraq, but also the Maghreb and Egypt, with the focus now on Syria.

This is what opponents of the Obama administration in the United States are starting to call the “New World Order”. The adherents of the NWO envisage such a radical change in global government, coupled with Big Brother spying techniques and sci-fi mind control, that we are indeed seeing the end, not only of Wilsonian self-determination, but even of the European order that arose at the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648. The so-called “Peace of Westphalia” in 1648 established national sovereignty and religious freedom as the two inviolable principles of European statecraft.

Under its current government, there is religious freedom in Syria, unlike in other Muslim states. On the other hand, we have seen Christian churches being attacked by the so-called rebels. The question has already been asked on this website: Who will the US really arm in Syria? Quoting from that RT report, we can only conclude that it must be radical Islamists opposed to the current modern-Arab regime of Bashar al-Assad:

“The US decision to arm the Syrian rebels fighting government troops has sparked feuds among various rebel factions dominated by radical Islamist fighters. As internal schisms among the rebels deepen, fighters from the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front have reportedly assassinated a large number of officers of the Free Syrian Army.”

The love-hate relationship that the USA is entertaining with Al-Qaeda may be conceptually difficult to grasp. But not if one takes a step back to look at the big picture, both present and past. On the one hand and especially after 9/11, Al-Qaeda was Enemy No. 1, the target for Bush’s “war on terror”. On the other hand, Al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and similar fundamentalist groups are being funded, supported and armed by the United States to take over Arab countries and establish a form of theocracy, including shariah. Are the US and the UK being run by idiots who simply do not understand what they are doing?

The answer is no. The ostensible paradox of modern, so-called Western states with same-sex marriage laws, equality of the sexes, religious and political pluralism, aiding and abetting mediaeval, theocratic groups is no paradox at all.

Some years ago I realised with a shock that globalist capitalism would succeed where communism had failed, in establishing a denationalised, internationalist empire. Two Marxists, one American and one Italian – a former member of the Red Brigades – wrote a book looking forward to this global imperium being created by the United States, appropriately entitled Empire. We all know that Lenin was apparently funded by a New York banker called Jacob Schiff.

Like globalism, fundamentalist Islam is also a doctrine that does not recognise secular government within a nation state, of the form established in Europe and America after 1648. Arabic Islamic culture is already transnational, as opposed to the Nasserist nationalist regimes of a Saddam Hussein or a Bashar al-Assad that must be destroyed at all costs. What the proponents of the New World Order, or the Atlanticists, are telling us is that Muslims and Arabs have no need of nation states. Neither do Europeans, Asians or Africans, for that matter. Within the globalist, new-world-order logic, only transnational entities such as the UN, the EU or the African Union matter. The nation state must be razed to the ground.

It follows that a failed state is always preferable to a functional one. Iraq was attacked and in its wake there is now a failed state, more or less bordering on chaos. Africa is littered with failed states, including Zimbabwe, the creation of British foreign policy. Many of these states cannot even supply potable water to their citizens, yet they are praised to high heaven as examples of “postcolonial democracy”. The New York Times recently declared Zimbabwe’s disastrous “land reform” a “success”, during which the property of private white land owners was confiscated. South Africa too, is on its way to becoming a failed state with rampant, crime, corruption and marauding bandits attacking houses and farms, often torturing white farmers to death. But South Africa is the darling of the Anglo-American world, as a transnational state with more or less open borders – that which is envisaged for the whole planet as peoples, races and cultures mingle and we all sit at McDonald’s having a Coke. However, some of us will be wearing the burka and others will be sacrificing a goat outside to appease the forefathers.

Apart from the ideological imperative to destroy national identities and nation states wherever they are to be found, the globalist powers also have an economic imperative. As we all know, the United States has to a large extent transferred its manufacturing to China and the Far East. Both American and Britain have financial and service economies that depend on capital flows and trade. Up to a quarter of British GDP is generated in the City of London, by bankers, brokers, traders, consultants, accountants and other economic parasites that produce absolutely nothing. They are so-called “intermediaries”.

The British bank HSBC, one of the world’s largest, has been described as a criminal enterprise, for its role in money laundering.

The two bellicose countries are also bankrupt, amassing mountains of government and private debt. Successive bailouts of the banking industry have left them with amounts of debt that normal handheld calculators cannot even process unless one leaves out substantial numbers of zeroes. It is an old adage that war is the only way out of a prolonged economic downturn and financial melt-down. After the failure of quantative easing to kickstart the US economy, war is all that America has left.

The war economy is, by definition, a subsidised economy. The American taxpayer is funding the military-industrial complex, which can almost charge what it likes, having a captive market for its goods. Free weapons for Syrian rebels may therefore be seen as the latest round of quantitative easing and “stimulus”.

America will not attack China because, as some commentator put it the other day on a blog, that country represents “our T-bill sugar daddy”. China is the biggest buyer and holder of US debt, so for the moment no Chinese rebels will be armed.

Not so Russia, which competes with the USA in fhe only field where it has real industrial capacity left: armaments. With its military parades, patriotism and sense of tradition, Russia is the exact antithesis of globalist transnationalism. It also celebrates its own language, music and literature. In the USA and Britain, what passes these days for “literature” is mostly guilt-ridden, anti-white tracts attacking any sense of identity, tradition, genius or cultural standards. Nietzsche called it “nihilism”. Risking opprobium, one may even resuscitate a German term from the 1930s, Entartete Kunst or “degenerate art”. Let’s stick to “nihilism”.

The Nasserist, nationalist Arab regimes have fallen like the proverbial dominoes, pushed by American money and CIA tricks. Syria is proving a harder nut to crack. After Syria, Iran will be next, that citadel of Shiite power. Not only is Iran a country with a large population, but it also has a unique sense of self, with its religion and traditions.

However, the ultimate target is Russia. Whatever one may think of Russia and its role in the twentieth century, it is obvious that it has become a “guarantor of sovereignty” of sorts. Many Afrikaners muse today that we would have been better off if Vorster had surrendered to the Soviet Union in the 1970s than De Klerk’s capitulation to the Nordic and British-backed “rebels” of the ANC in 1994. Soviet nationalities policy was an enlightened way of allowing regional and national identities to flourish. Even as communists, Russians had respect for culture, including the culture of others.

Looking at pictures of Syrian churches being vandalised and sacked by the US-backed rebels, it saddens one to think that such acts are being condoned by some of the fresh-faced, all-American and probably Christian boys and girls that one still encounters in Washington offices, although they will probably soon be replaced by multicultural imports.

The modern civilisation whose fruits we are enjoying today came about during the European Renaissance and after the Peace of Wesphalia during 1648. French Socialist President François Mitterand was wrong when he stated: Le nationalisme, c’est la guerre. (“Nationalism means war.”) More often than not, nation states have created institutions, schools, universities, academies, opera houses, and theatres; such states have allowed peoples to determine their own destiny. As Woodrow Wilson put it to Congress a month after his famous Fourteen Points Speech, sometimes referred to as his “Four Point Speech” on 11 February 1918:

“National aspirations must be respected; people may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. ‘Self-determination’ is not a mere phrase; it is an imperative principle of action…”

In Syria and elsewhere, Obama and Cameron, like Bush and Blair before them, are pitting themselves against this principle and that of sovereignty. If the Atlanticists succeed, a global disaster might ensue which could take us back to a high-tech version of the Middle Ages. We will be subjected to and even forcibly converted to various faiths, of which fundamentalist Islam is one and multicultural leftism is another. Heretics will again be persecuted, stoned to death or simply executed by various uniformed militiamen, either belonging to rebel movements or government forces.

Perhaps some of the global corporations and oil companies, employing their own private armies for protection, will do quite well in such a postnational world. But the rest of us will be terrorised by gangs, mobs and armed “rebels”, as is happening in many parts of Africa already.

Of course, South Africa is the guinea pig country, the first open-border, transnational state with hardly any sovereignty where any government official may be bought. Organised crime and multinational corporations share the spoils. Private property is open to interpretation and any Marxist historian’s vague theories about exploitation could jeopardise your title deed.

Is this the kind of world we want?

If Germany and France want to follow the arming of rebels and the destabilisation of whole countries, we should start boycotting their cars and buy Korean or Japanese. Russia should also do its best to wake Europe up to the dangers of the New World Order unfolding before our very eyes. Patriotic Americans and Britons who oppose the inteventionist role of their countries in wrecking the states and societies of other peoples, should also make their voices heard. Many are already doing so, via radio staions and the internet, but if we are to stop the powerful insiders taking control of the globe, much more action and information are needed.

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The Left wouldn’t mind seeing South Africa destroyed

by Dan Roodt

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In my last column, I went to the trouble of explaining what happened on 16 June 1976 and that none of the six rioting Soweto high schools had actually been forced to learn anything in Afrikaans, whereas a seventh studied only the subject of history by medium of Afrikaans.

However, the motley collection of so-called English-liberal whites do not like to be “bored with the facts”. Just today I read on the website of the leftist Mail & Guardian: “The issue of language has been a sensitive one since June 16 1976, when Soweto pupils rose up against Afrikaans as a primary language in schools.” No, the issue of language has been moot since 1806 when the British permanently set foot in South Africa and embarked on a drawn-out attempt to stamp out, first Dutch, and then its inveterate spoken variety, Afrikaans, a policy that continues to this day under the ANC regime.

There always seems to be one newspaper in Johannesburg that is vehemently anti-Afrikaans. A century ago it was The Star. When the first Afrikaans high school opened in the city in 1921 (my old school called Helpmekaar), The Star opined: “There is something rotten in the state of Denmark.” In the 1960s and early 1970s it was the Rand Daily Mail where Helen Zille cut her teeth. The late journalist Chris Louw once overheard the editor of that paper, Alistair Sparks, during an aeroplane flight raging against the “sub-human” Afrikaners and how South Africa would have been better off if Britian had “finished the job in 1902 and killed them all”. The Rand Daily Mail ultimately closed down, with its business section continuing as the current Business Day. The present Mail & Guardian was in fact started as a replacement Rand Daily Mail. It regularly vilifies Afrikaners and tells us how ugly our language is, how reactionary we are, how we should disappear forever and just how backward our music, literature and art are. For good measure it keeps a few renegade Afrikaners – mainly because they are prepared to work for lower salaries – who now and again write about their identity crises and how they felt much better when they managed to forget their Afrikaans, including their horrible conservative upbringings.

However, some of the Mail & Guardian journalists have absconded to set up an online rag or electronic wet wipe known as The Daily Maverick. This is a complete misnomer as it should have been called The Daily Conformist. After all, the term “maverick” denotes, especially in American usage, exactly the opposite of a conformist. I could copy and paste a definition from any number of online dictionaries, but let me climb onto my little wooden step ladder and fetch the Shorter Oxford Dictionary off the top shelf.

According to the dictionary, the term may be traced to one Samuel A. Maverick, a “Texas engineer who owned but did not brand cattle”. Hence its two meanings: “1. An unbranded calf or yearling. 2. An unorthodox or independent-minded person, an individualist, US, a politician who will not affiliate with a regular political party.”

Obviously, there is nothing maverick about The Daily Maverick. It keeps us corralled or herded within the enclosures of South Africa’s tedious, second-hand and stupid leftist tradition. Every academic in South Africa, as well as many a journalist, especially the kind that writes for The Daily Maverick, dreams of becoming a British Marxist and being able to kiss Terry Eagleton or E.P. Thompson’s boots. Well, E.P. Thompson is dead now, but any old pommie commie would do.

The thing to understand about English-South African leftists, is that they are something like T.S. Eliot’s “hollow men”, a notion which may be traced back, appropriately, to the character Mister Kurz in Joseph Conrad’s great novella about Africa, Heart of Darkness. You probably recall the first lines of Eliot’s poem:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Since 1994, with all the cultural Marxists in control of the media and the universities in South Africa, there is almost no debate possible. Just repeat all the tired clichés and propaganda after us.

However, as Oscar Wilde would say, there is one thing worse than a left-wing snot who fancies himself a journalist and that is a snot who writes about cricket. South Africa is a bit like Nero’s Rome: the worse it gets, the more fanatical people become about games, nonchalantly stepping over all the casualties that we learn about daily. Not sports casualties and not in The Daily Conformist a.ka. Maverick either. Just the men and women dying by the thousands every month, the human sacrifices to the god of political correctness.

Kenneth Borland is a cricket correspondent for a provincial paper, The Natal Witness, who also writes for The Daily Maverick, it appears. They are not keeping him properly corralled, for he seems to stray off the pitch sometimes, but then he keeps his comments firmly within the quasi-Soviet style of labelling any dissident or heretic on the misty horizon as a “Nazi, fascist, racist” or other imaginative terms. Oh, I left out “homophobe” and “white supremacist”.

Just yesterday Mr. Borland called me a “white supremacist” in the following passage from The Daily Maverick‘s comment section:

“As opposed to your evil, divisive, hate-filled propaganda Dan?

“As a member of the white middle-class I can safely say I am not under attack by the state, however appalled I am by Zuma, the corrupt political elite and the worrying signs of a return of oppression through state security apparatus.

“You and your shameful ilk are the biggest cause of ethnic conflict in this country. Your statement elsewhere that white South Africans are the nicest people in the world is laughable. I, for one, am extremely grateful that the majority in this country, oppressed for so long, have been able to show such magnanimous ubuntu that I do still believe there is hope for South Africa.

“You are nothing short of a white supremacist and you should be living somewhere like Nazi Germany rather than a country that is still striving for reconciliation and meaningful democracy.”

I do not intend entering into a literary analysis of this passage, which is hardly on a par with T.S. Eliot or Joseph Conrad. Nevertheless, I find it quite telling that the author admits that South Africa “is still striving for reconciliation and meaningful democracy” as no-one in his right mind would describe the current one-party state with non-existent boundaries between party and state as a “democracy” in the Western sense.

He also acknowledges that there is some kind of “ethnic conflict” going on in the country. When our “good democrats” are not assaulting or killing foreign Africans (a little “xenophobia” here and there), they are elsewhere engaged in farm murders, house robberies, hold-ups, rapes and other mayhem. Sometimes the police force join in too, in full uniform! Recently there was a case in Naboomspruit where two black policemen committed a robbery in full uniform, using their service pistols. They are out on bail but have not been suspended. Their weapons having been retained as court evidence, they have simply been issued with other pistols and are back at the station.

This is South Africa, the leftist utopia. Anything goes. From gay unions to policemen moonlighting as armed robbers.

But according to Borland – and he probably speaks for the entire pack of hounds yapping away every day at The Daily Conformist, in their pompous imitations of British-Marxist cool – “me and my shameful ilk” are somehow responsible for all the violence and lawlessness in the country, apart from relegating me to “Nazi Germany”.

I have news for these mauve Brits or would-be Brits, merrily uploading their daily wet wipe which wouldn’t even clean my screen without leaving an opaque layer of obfuscation. I don’t need to time-travel back to Germany in the thirties. This is Nazi Germany already! Except that we Afrikaners are being treated like Jews. If we are not being attacked by your daily Einsatzgruppen, torturing, killing or raping us, we are vilified, smeared, labelled and blamed as scapegoats for the mess known as the “New South Africa”, or Mbeki’s “youngest black republic”. This is a failed state and its failure was planned so that it would either drive us out of here or we would simply be eliminated during a protracted uhuru, realising Alistair Sparks’s dream of a final solution for us.

Afrikaners, as educators, engineers, administrators, farmers and founders of industries such as Sasol over which the Rand Daily Mail and “its ilk” once guffawed as “sheltered employment for stupid Afrikaners”, have always tried to bring development and stability to South Africa. Not so the destructive, know-it-all uitlander opportunist and pompous purveyor of revolution, “transformation” and other radical concepts.

The present Zimbabwe is entirely the result of Briitsh foreign policy that saw Ian Smith as just another intractable white patriot to be eliminated. Regime change was needed. Ten years later a reforming South Africa was seen as a threat to the Marxist-revolutionary ambitions of the ANC and the South African Communist Party. So we got regime change too. After us it was Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt and other countries of the so-called Arab Spring where the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood was deemed preferable to the more secular, modernist but autocratic Arab regimes. We now have civil war in Syria, another country destroyed by Anglo-American foreign policy and support for Al Kaida-type “rebels”. Among other things, the British-supported “rebels” are destroying churches, portending an end to religious freedom in Syria.

South African leftism, of which The Daily Maverick is but one of the many mouthpieces that have mushroomed and grown like weeds since the South African revolution, is also a form of fundamentalism. Its creed, like every strain of communism during the twentieth century, is “equality at all costs”. Except the very people who propagate this utterly totalitarian idea do not themselves believe that they are equal to anyone else. In Orwell’s famous phrase: “Some animals are more equal than others.”

It follows that even a low-life cricket commentator like Kenneth Borland believes himself to be far above the average middle-class Afrikaner, concerned about his children’s education and the safety of his family while revolution rages about him. Borland and his coreligionists are part of a British-Marxist nomenklatura egging their ANC storm troopers on. Go kill some Boers, go take their land! Go rape their daughters and teach them not to be “racist” in their choice of a sexual partner. After all, in Soweto “forced sex” is not considered wrong, according to opinion polls among the enlightened youth of that conurbation, so why should we conservative, Calvinist, “Nazi” Afrikaners object? “Corrective rape” already exists for lesbians in South Africa, so why not introduce it for “white-supremacist women and girls” too?

I could expatiate on the peculiar, almost racial (Nazi?!) sense of superiority that one encounters in Natal with its virulent anti-Afrikaans chauvinism. Despite Natal, or KZN as it is now known, being one of the poorest provinces in the country, its inhabitants believe that somehow the British Empire is not dead. As long as Britain can still bomb a few Iraqi children or supply weapons to Syrian Islamists, I suppose there is life in it yet. Small wonder then, that the ANC and the SA Communist Party have recruited some of their most pliable white “cadres” from that most English of South African provinces, who will serve the Bantu Empire with a zeal once reserved for the British one.

The Natal Witness cricket commentator, Kenneth Borland, hails from Pietermaritzburg, the smaller of the two KZN cities. Need one say more? Hence the pregnant “you and your shameful ilk”, implying that to be descended from the Dutch, French Huguenots, Germans and Scots as we are, is somehow beyond the pale.

Reading an e-wipe like The Daily Maverick, I sometimes get the impression that this whole tragic, violent revolution slowly consuming our country, is based not on Karl Marx – although he is in there somewhere – but on some imitation or simulacrum of English snobbery. I imagine that Baron David Owen or Lord Carrington condemned Rhodesia to death over gin and tonic while boasting about his new Jaguar. Likewise, South Africa’s demise was concocted as some act of upper-class insouciance. People were just tired of PW Botha’s hat that he wore sometimes at a time when it was no longer fashionable, whereas now it would have been perfectly à la mode.

I think author Nadine Gordimer – she got her anti-Afrikaans attitude from Lithuania, not from Natal – summed it up when she said in an interview: ““We were naive, because we focused on removing the apartheid government and never thought deeply enough about what would follow.”

Gordimer makes it sound as if she cares. However, none of the South African leftists care about this country. If it had to descend into a Zimbabwean abyss of hyperinflation and famine tomorrow, they would simply pack up and leave, with a shrug.

Besides smugness, they are also motivated by Schadenfreude. The notion that they are powerful enough to destroy and dilapidate all that Afrikaners managed to create in 360 years, gives them a tremendous sense of satisfaction.

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Turkey to probe ‘scandalous’ British spying

Turkey on Monday said it had contacted British authorities to inquire about “unacceptable” newspaper allegations that Britain spied on Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek’s emails and phone calls when he was in London in 2009.

Documents leaked by US former spy Edward Snowden appear to show that Britain spied on foreign delegates including fellow NATO member Turkey at G20 meetings at the time, British newspaper The Guardian reported Monday.

“It is clear that if the report is true, such an action by an ally country is unacceptable,” the foreign ministry said in a statement, stressing that it was waiting for “an official and satisfying statement from British authorities” on the matter.

“This will constitute a scandal in terms of relations between the two countries if any truth is found in the allegations,” it added.

As with the other G20 participants who were reportedly spied on, including South Africa, there is no suggestion that Simsek and his party were involved in any kind of criminal offence, according to the newspaper.

The newspaper said it had seen a document showing that Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), its electronic eavesdropping agency, put Simsek under surveillance while in London, and possibly up to 15 members of his delegation as well.

The document stated that the objective was “to establish Turkey’s position on agreements from the April London summit” and their “willingness (or not) to co-operate with the rest of the G20 nations”.

According to the leaked files seen by the Guardian, British spies tricked delegates into using specially prepared Internet cafes. Those cafes allowed the spies to intercept communications and monitor email messages and phone calls through delegates’ BlackBerry devices. – AFP

Dept. of International Relations wants British spying on South Africa probed

Reports that Britain spied on G20 delegates, including South Africa, during meetings in London in 2009, should be investigated, the international relations and co-operation department said on Monday.

Spokesman Clayson Monyela said the government had noted with concern the reports published by the UK’s Guardian newspaper.

“We do not yet have the full benefit of details reported on, but in principle we would condemn the abuse of privacy and basic human rights particularly if it emanates from those who claim to be democrats,” he said.

“We have solid, strong and cordial relations with the United Kingdom and would call on their government to investigate this matter fully with a view to take strong and visible action against any perpetrators.”

The newspaper reported that Britain had used “ground-breaking intelligence capabilities” to monitor communications between officials at two meetings in April and September of 2009.

According to the report, British agents repeatedly hacked into foreign diplomats’ phones and e-mails.

Speaking at the G8 summit on Monday, British Prime Minister David Cameron declined to address the issue, the French news agency Agence France-Presse reported.

“We never comment on security or intelligence issues and I am not about to start now,” he said.

“I don’t make comments on security or intelligence issues. That would be breaking something that no government has previously done.” – Sapa

Britain, not US, prepared for war in Syria two years before the crisis

Former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas said that Britain had been preparing gunmen to invade Syria two years before the crisis there flared up in 2011

During a TV show, Dumas said ”I was in Britain two years ago, and I met British officials, some my friends…they admitted that they were up to something in Syria.”

”They even asked me to join them in my capacity as a foreign minister, but I declined,” he added.

He indicated that the plan of striking Syria had been prepared in advance long before the 2011 events, adding that the goal was to overthrow the Syrian government that considers Israel an enemy.

The TV show was dedicated to discussing the war in Syria.

French magazine: ‘Jihadists’ involvement in Syria much bigger than Afghanistan

The French magazine “Le Nouvel Observateur” quoted a senior French official as saying that the participation of French Jihadists in Syria is bigger that their involvement in Afghanistan war.

The French magazine said that the French intelligence verified the identities of 270 French nationals who are fighting in Syria, indicating that their return has become a major concern for the French interior ministry.

The magazine said that the number of European ‘Jihadists’ fighting in Syria ranges between 1,500 and 2,000, in addition to hundreds of Tunisians. – SANA

Britain spied on G20 delegates, including South Africans: report

Documents leaked by US former spy Edward Snowden appeared to show Britain spied on G20 delegates during meetings in London back in 2009, Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported Monday.

Among the officials targetted were delegates from NATO ally Turkey and from South Africa.

Britain used “ground-breaking intelligence capabilities” to monitor communications between officials at the two meetings in April and September of 2009, the paper reported.

The revelations are likely to be an embarrassment to Britain, which is hosting the two-day G8 summit in Northern Ireland from Monday.

The paper cited documents it had seen concerning the work of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which handles signals intelligence.

According to the files, British spies tricked delegates into using specially prepared Internet cafes. Those cafes allowed the spies to intercept communications and monitor email messages and phone calls through delegates’ BlackBerry devices.

GCHQ was also able to track when delegates were contacting each other and the agency targeted certain officials, including the Turkish finance minister, according documents shown to the newspaper.

They also singled out South African computers for special attention, according to one document.

The paper also said that GCHQ received reports from a US National Security Agency attempt to listen in as then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, made a call via satellite to Moscow.

The documents suggest that orders to gather intelligence on delegates came from a senior level within the government of then prime minister, Labour’s Gordon Brown, said The Guardian.

Two documents explicitly mention information being passed on to ministers.

Snowden is hiding in Hong Kong and the United States has launched a criminal investigation after the former CIA technical assistant blew the lid on the NSA’s vast electronic surveillance operation.

Leaders from the G8 nations meet in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland, on Monday for two days of talks on issues including the Syrian crisis, tax collection and free trade. – AFP

South Africa’s decadence is an advanced form of British decadence

Dancing at the Gupta wedding at Sun City

‘The principal of Healdtown was Dr. Arthur Wellington, a stout and stuffy Englishman who boasted of his connection to the Duke of Wellington. At the outset of assemblies, Dr. Wellington would walk onstage and say, in his deep bass voice, “I am the descendant of the great Duke of Wellington, aristocrat, statesman, and general, who crushed the Frenchman Napoleon at Waterloo and thereby saved civilization for Europe — and for you, the natives.” At this, we would all enthusiastically applaud, each of us profoundly grateful that a descendant of the great Duke of Wellington would take the trouble to educate natives such as ourselves. The educated Englishman was our model; what we aspired to be were “black Englishmen,” as we were sometimes derisively called. We were taught — and believed — that the best ideas were English ideas, the best government was English government, and the best men were Englishmen.’ – Nelson Mandela, Long road to freedom, p. 37

Black-consciousness activist Andile Mngxitama writes in The roots of anti-Indian racism about the nouveau-riche vulgarity of the Guptas and why blacks resent Indians:

“The vulgarity of the showmanship at the Gupta wedding shows a desperate attempt to flee from blackness. The same madness is seen throughout post-colonial Africa, in the form of conspicuous consumption, and we would do well to remember that this is true for South Africa as well. The ministerial handbook is a bible for entering the white world. Why do we think Julius Malema and Jacob Zuma want houses with bunkers? Why would Juju so prize his R250 000 watch? These are all comical schemes to run away from blackness.”

However, it is too late to try and wean blacks from so-called “conspicuous consumption” and the abuse of public money to buy cars, houses, clothes and other status symbols. It is like trying to talk a drug addict out of his habit when he is already in an advanced stage of dependency.

Both blacks and Indians in South Africa have as their model the English, who are the most vulgar nation in Europe. The English pray to money and ostentation like others pray to God, tradition or nationality. Britain only became civilised in the nineteenth century and therefore lacks any real culture or tradition, unlike the French, the Italians, the Austrians/Germans or the Spanish.

In their quest to become “English gentlemen” and British celebrities, South African blacks are going to bankrupt the country. Having the right house, the right car, watch, jewellery, etc., is what counts. Mngxitama is right when he says: “…they are merely running away from blackness and mimicking whites, like all blacks do”. V.S. Naipaul wrote a novel called The mimic men, the title of which characterises the behaviour of the ruling class of a newly independent Caribbean country. However, South Africa’s nouveau riche class of blacks and Indians are not mimicking whites in general, they are mimicking Britain, possibly the last of Europe’s class societies.

In a way, I think the ANC is doing Afrikaners a favour by impoverishing us through affirmative action and BEE. I see it with my children. They accept that they are never going to be rich, being the wrong colour and speaking a marginalised, oppressed language. Therefore what is important to them is getting more than 80% for mathematics or writing an Afrikaans essay that would simply blow their teachers away.

We will go back to living simple lives like our grandparents did, keeping a few chickens and fruit trees, but with the difference that we will use technology to harness energy and invent new ways of survival. While billionaire blacks run Eskom and burn coal, we will turn to the sun and solar energy. The other day I heard over the radio that there are now light bulbs that only use 1W of electricity. Amazing! Soon we will have no need of this “English” civilisation which is but the final stage of decadence and decline before it collapses, exhausted, like a beached whale.

The greatest civilisation that Europeans built, was the Roman one. It was founded upon stoicism, asceticism, wearing a simple toga and a wooden armband, to show that you were proud to be poor. Poor but intelligent, cultivated and patriotic. When Rome became decadent under Nero and others, it declined and ultimately came crashing down.

Contemporary Britain is extremely decadent, but South Africa is even more decadent. It has surpassed its colonial centre in its plebeian excess, its sexual, dipsomaniac, money- and drug-crazed, orgiastic consumption.

If only we had had any educated authors, they could have written brilliant novels about the last days of Empire, the Trimalchian splendour of the Guptas. They invaded our country with Anglo-Indian arrogance, as if the Raj had suddenly risen from the dead, Lazarus-like, in Sun City.

David Cameron’s statement on the Woolwich attack

David Cameron, prime minister of Britain

What happened yesterday in Woolwich has sickened us all. On our televisions last night, and in our newspapers this morning, we have all seen images that are deeply shocking. The people who did this were trying to divide us. They should know something like this will only bring us together and make us stronger. Today our thoughts are with the victim and with his family. They are grieving for their loved one and we have lost a brave soldier.

This morning I have chaired a meeting of Cobra and I want to thank the police and the security services for the incredible work they do to keep our country safe. There are police investigations and security service operations underway, so obviously there is a limit on what I can say. But already a number of things are clear: first, this country will be absolutely resolute in its stand against violent extremism and terror. We will never give in to terror or terrorism in any of its forms. Second, this view is shared by every community in our country.

This was not just an attack on Britain and on the British way of life, it was also a betrayal of Islam and of the Muslim communities who give so much to our country. There is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act. We will defeat violent extremism by standing together, by backing our police and security services, and above all, by challenging the poisonous narrative of extremism on which this violence feeds.

Britain works with our international partners to make the world safe from terrorism. Terrorism that has taken more Muslim lives than any other religion. It is an utter perversion of the truth to pretend anything different. That is why there is absolutely no justification for these acts. And the fault for them lies solely and purely with the sickening individuals who carried out this appalling attack.

Confronting extremism is a job for us all. And the fact that our communities will unite in doing this was vividly demonstrated by the brave cub pack leader Ingrid Loyau-Kennett who confronted one of the attackers on the streets of Woolwich yesterday afternoon. When told by the attacker he wanted to start a war in London, she replied ‘you’re going to lose. It is only you versus many.’ She spoke for us all.
The police and security services will follow every lead, will turn over every piece of evidence, will make every connection and will not rest until we know every single detail of what happened, and we’ve brought all of those responsible to justice. I know from three years of being Prime Minister that the police and intelligence services work around the clock to keep us safe from violent extremists. I watch their work every week. They do an outstanding job. They show incredible heroism, much of which cannot be reported. They have my staunch support and the support of the whole country.

The point that the two suspects in this horrific attack were known to the security services has been widely reported. You would not expect me to comment on this when a criminal investigation is ongoing. But what I can say is this: as is the normal practice in these sorts of cases, the independent police complaints commission will be able to review the actions of the police, and the intelligence and security committee will be able to do the same for the wider agencies. But nothing should be done to get in the way of their absolutely vital work.

After an event like this, it is natural that questions will be asked about what additional steps can be taken to keep us safe. I will make sure those questions are asked and answered. But I’m not in favour of knee-jerk responses. The police have responded with heightened security and activity, and that is right. But one of the best ways of defeating terrorism is to go about our normal lives. And that is what we shall all do. Thank you.

Woolwich: South Africa’s present is Britain’s future

I have just tweeted: “What goes around comes around. Britain supported terrorism against South Africa in 1980s, now they have it at home.” I feel sorry for the British people about the gruesome murder of a British soldier in Woolwich. However, the problematic ideology is not Islam but political correctness. There are almost worse horrors happening every day in South Africa, yet the media do not even talk about it because it is not politically correct, being attacks by blacks upon whites. In the 1980s, there were 240 terrorist attacks on Wimpy Bars and other public places in South Africa, as well as the Church Street bomb in Pretoria in which 19 people died. Yet British popstars were collecting money for the perpetrators of these acts! Nelson Mandela gave the order for the Church Street bomb from his prison cell and the City of London erected a monument to him which was unveiled by the then prime minister, Gordon Brown.

The problem is not the terrorists; it is the media. They thrive on these horrors, yet they carefully select what they show and what they do not. This statement by Cameron already shows his immense fear of the media. He is grovelling in front of Islam and multiculturalism. He is managing the “outcry” of the ordinary British people.

In South Africa, the BBC and its South African counterparts have now progressed so far that when incidents like this happen, the victims have to blame themselves. That will be the next step: the British people will be blamed for multicultural violence. Extremist acts like this will be seen as “caused by” white British racism.

The worst is: as in Orwell’s dystopian novels, people ultimately get used to it. They worry about their mortgages and car payments and are just glad to have survived another day of violence on the streets. It always happens to someone else.

Our present in South Africa is your future.

British Intelligence wastes $140m on failed data project

British Secret Service Headquarters in London, along the Thames

UK intelligence agency MI5 reportedly terminated a failed multimillion-dollar IT project to centralize the agency’s data stores. The system was supposed to be ready ahead of last year’s London Olympics, but the consultants hired by MI5 failed to deliver.

The new digital records management (RM) system was supposed to allow for search queries and returns of various MI5 data and records, from intelligence reports to older paper archives. The RM was intended to replace the existing system, which the agency has deemed outdated and unfit in light of the threats the country currently faces.

The new RM was supposed to go online by time the Summer Olympics began in London last year, in order to help the UK’s intelligence agencies identify possible terrorist threats to the games. But in July 2012, only weeks before the event, MI5 fired the IT consulting firm responsible for the system’s development, as it had failed to meet deadlines.

Then-director of MI5 Sir Jonathan Evans said the system would be implemented at a later date, and the agency hired new IT consultants to finish the job.

But according to the Independent, the project failed to play out, and earlier this year Evans decided to scrap it altogether and restart from scratch with a new generation of IT specialists. The newspaper reported that the abandonment of years of progress means the loss of about £90 million pounds (about $140 million). The UK’s Home Office would not comment on either the fate of the project or the reported loss figure.

In 2012, when the RM’s troubles were first revealed, some British media estimated the cost of the project to be considerably lower; the Daily Mail believed the program’s cost to be about £1 million (over $1.5 million). – RT.COM

Britain heading for ‘triple-dip recession’?

Recession may just be a word. But in Britain it may become a habit – and a dangerous one at that.

It’s possible that official figures on first quarter economic growth, to be released Thursday, could show the country is back in recession, and tension is building.

Although economists on average expect growth of 0.1 percent on the quarter, they warn it would take the smallest statistical variation to put the figure in negative territory. That would place the country in recession, typically defined as two consecutive quarters of economic contraction.

Another recession – the third since the 2008 financial crisis – is already being referred to with foreboding in the media as a “Triple Dip.” Experts warn that its confirmation would create a wave of negative media attention that would scare consumers away from spending, feeding into a vicious cycle that has the economy flat-lining.

“It’s psychological – this is all psychological,” said Cary Cooper, a professor at Lancaster University Management School. “It’s about the message that those figures send to consumers and small businesses.”

The government desperately wants a strong number to justify its increasingly criticized policy of painful spending cuts. But recent indicators on Britain’s economy, the third-largest in the 27-country EU after Germany and France, have been disappointing.

Inflation is rising faster than wages, cutting into people’s standard of living. Unemployment is up at 7.9 percent. Two international ratings agencies have downgraded the country’s credit grade from the top level AAA, warning about the government’s fiscal policies.

The government, which has long played on its AAA rating as a sign of its economic might, has been pursuing a harsh program of spending cuts and tax increases to reduce the budget deficit, which at 7.4 percent of annual economic output is more than twice the EU’s 3 percent limit. Like many governments across Europe that have been scarred by the bond market turmoil that forced Greece and four other countries to need rescue loans, Britain is focusing on reducing debt quickly, even at the cost of short-term economic pain.

What some governments and economists are slowly realizing, however, is that they may have underestimated the damage such austerity would do.

There’s long been pressure domestically in Britain to ease off the budget cuts, but in the past few days the International Monetary Fund also chimed in. The fund, whose views carry weight as it is involved in all of Europe’s sovereign bailout programs, has pressured Treasury chief George Osborne to slow down the austerity measures in hopes of reviving the economy, whose output was worth 1.4 trillion pounds ($2.1 trillion) in 2012.

As the austerity debate rages on, no other person than the national spiritual leader – the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby – has waded in and used a word no want wants to hear: Depression.

Welby has unusual standing in the world of money because in a previous life he served as an oil industry executive and now sits on the parliamentary banking standards committee. He told an audience at the heart of government in Westminster on Monday that there was an issue of confidence and trust – and there is need to rebuild both.

“I would argue that what we are in at the moment is not a recession, but essentially some kind of depression and it therefore takes something very, very major to get out of it in the same way as it took something major for us to get into it,” he said.

The Bank of England has cut its interest rate to a record low 0.5 percent and pumped money into the financial system in the hope that will encourage banks to lend money more cheaply. But the results have been mixed and experts say there is only so much a central bank can do to create jobs.

On Wednesday, the Bank of England and the Treasury extended until January 2015 a program to boost lending and help the economy. The program offers funding at low interest rates to banks on condition that those rates are passed on to small businesses and households. Its results so far have been mixed, however.

Even if the economy dodges recession, the daily reality for many Britons remains tough.

The Trussell Trust, a food bank network, said it fed more than 350,000 people in the year ending in March – more than double the 128,000 served in the previous 12-month period. Tim Boyce, a retired investment banker who runs a south London branch, said he’s seeing the people behind those numbers. Inside a frosty church that’s opened its doors to the desperate, he watches as they come for emergency handouts of rice, pasta and beans.

“Most people don’t realize the extent of poverty,” he said as he sipped coffee to keep the edge off the chill. “It’s hiding in plain view.”

Take the cases of Kevin Bishenden, 50, and his wife, Nicola, 40. He’s an upholsterer who says that no one wants to hire someone his age. She says she just can’t find work. The only reason they aren’t homeless is that Britain’s welfare state manages to keep a roof over their heads.

But they’ve slowly been shedding all their possessions, together with memories of a past life. First a bike, then stuff from the kitchen. All the DVDs are going, though even Star Trek only gets you a few pennies. They’ve already sold their wedding rings.

He lamented a new council tax payment of 15 pounds ($22.80) that came into effect as part of government austerity plans. His exhaustion was plain as he tried to imagine paying for it.

“Where’s that supposed to come from?” – AP

London’s white flight

More than 600,000 white British Londoners have left the capital in a decade.

Census figures show that between 2001 and 2011 the level of ‘white flight’ reached 620,000.

It is the equivalent of a city the size of Glasgow – made up entirely of white Britons – moving out of the capital.

White Britons are now a minority in the country’s capital with 620,000 leaving in a decade

The figures, reported by the BBC yesterday, mean that for the first time, white Britons are now in a minority in the country’s largest city.

At the same time, the census shows, some rural areas have seen a rise in the proportion of people who describe their ethnicity as ‘white British’.

Some 3.7million Londoners classified themselves as white British in 2011 – down from 4.3million in 2001 – despite the city’s population increasing by nearly one million over the decade to 8.2million.

Sir Andrew Green of MigrationWatch thinks that the BBC should have addressed such a serious issue less trivially

White Britons now make up 45 per cent of the population, compared with 58 per cent in 2001.

London’s population has been boosted by immigrants. Three million foreign-born people now live in the capital.

Five London boroughs saw the proportion of white Britons fall by more than a quarter. The largest decline was in Newham, East London, where the decrease was 37.5 per cent.

In Barking and Dagenham, on the East London/Essex border, 80 per cent of residents were white British in 2001 but by 2011 the proportion was 49 per cent.

There were also big falls in Redbridge, Harrow, Brent, Enfield, Ealing and Waltham Forest. The BBC website was criticised by readers for its depiction of the change as a ‘story of success’ in which many white Britons had moved out to live by the sea or in the countryside.

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the MigrationWatch think-tank, said: ‘The BBC make a very serious mistake in addressing an issue of such importance to the British public in such a trivial and superficial manner.

‘It’s surely obvious that the main reason for white flight is because people are not willing to live in an environment which has changed beyond recognition and against their own wishes.’

Ralph Baldwin, a Tory councillor in Barking and Dagenham, said: ‘I think people left for a variety of reasons.

‘If you look back to the early 2000s many people were able to retire to Clacton-on-Sea and they saw their friends going and followed.

‘But people also watched all this demographic change going on between 2000 and 2010 and they thought, “We don’t know where we are living any more”.

‘One day they are in a place that they think is Essex and then they are living in another place.
‘It has never been an issue of race. It’s about the inability of people to affect change. The world was changing around them and they couldn’t do anything about it.’

Behind white Britons, the largest ethnic group in London is now Asians – including those born here and those arriving from overseas – who make up 18 per cent of the population.

Black Londoners – including Africans, black Britons and those from the Caribbean – make up 13 per cent.

The census shows the proportion of white Britons in South Derbyshire went up by 13.7 per cent over the decade.

Other rural boroughs that saw big increases included North Kesteven and West Lindsey in Lincolnshire, Uttlesford in Essex, East Northamptonshire, East Cambridgeshire, Mid Suffolk, South Norfolk, Mid Devon and Forest Heath in Suffolk.

The census shows the population of England and Wales was swollen by nearly four million immigrants in a decade of sweeping social change.

In 2011 there were 7.5million people who were born abroad living here, of whom more than half had arrived since 2001. – Daily Mail