Melanie Phillips calls for end of mass immigration
Karen writes from England:
In her latest Daily Mail article, Melanie Phillips at last, in her final paragraph, recommends that mass immigration be stopped. I think this is the first time that she has formally stated this in her writings. It would be better if she had stated that all immigration be stopped and Muslim immigration be both stopped and reversed. But this is a move in the right direction.
She writes:
With the best will in the world, immigrants find there is no British national identity into which they can assimilate.
And indigenous Brits have been forced to become strangers in their own country—and are then vilified as racists if they dare protest.
Even the BBC, through its current “white working-class” season, has finally grasped that a section of the community has been effectively shut out of the national conversation.
But welcome as this recognition is, the season itself also encapsulates the problem. For it regards the white working class as a kind of vanishing primitive tribe towards whom disdain is only temporarily suspended in the interests of anthropological curiosity.
But these people are the indigenous people of England, whose cultural heart has been broken.
So what is the remedy?
Not the Government’s citizenship hurdles or loyalty oaths, to be sure.
If Humpty is to be put back together again, fundamentals need to be addressed across the board.
Things like mass immigration which must be stopped; multiculturalism which must be abandoned; human rights law which must be abolished; the welfare state which must be remodelled; and membership of the EU which must be renegotiated.
There are growing signs that David Cameron recognises at least some of this.
If he can summon up the courage to take this agenda and run with it, he will find not only that he speaks for the nation—he may save it.
LA replies:
Well, finally, a definite, if very brief and summary, statement by Phillips calling for immigration restriction. This is certainly promising, after years of her rejecting every call to come out with such a position and even refusing to reply to readers who had called for it and who had asked her why she was saying nothing about it.
I’m also pleased at her calling for the end of the human rights laws, which would include the totalitarian anti-hate speech laws. I’ve been saying that it’s absurd to complain about the hate-speech laws without advocating their repeal, and now she’s finally done it.
And here’s another important first in the article. She writes:
Mass immigration—the single most important but unacknowledged source of Mr Brown’s concerns—has transformed the country beyond recognition.
This came about through an alliance between those who wanted to stop Britain from being—in the words of a former BBC director-general—“hideously white”, and those who, looking again at America, thought mass immigration was the route to national prosperity.
She says that part of the motive driving the open immigration policy is to make Britain non-white. Well, if it’s the case that the other side—the side seeking to destroy Britain—is doing so by means of eliminating Britain’s white character, it follows that part of the way of saving Britain is to defend Britain’s white character.
In other words, even a person, such as Phillips, who professes not to care about race at all, but who only cares about British nationhood and culture conceived apart from matters of racial identity, must acknowledge that if British nationhood is to be defended, Britain’s historic racial identity must also be defended.
So this article has radical and hopeful implications for conservatives. As a persistent critic of Melanie Philips on these issues for the last two years, I congratulate her.
However, at the same time, I can’t help but be bitterly amused when she refers to immigration as “the single most important but unacknowledged source of Mr Brown’s concerns.” Unacknowledged? WHO has systematically refused to acknowledge it? Phillips herself. In column after column, for year after year, she’s treated the loss of British nationhood solely as a matter of Britain’s lack of will to resist multicultural and Muslim demands, not as a function of the fact that these unassimilable peoples had been admitted en masse into Britain in the first place.
Finally, while very pleased by Phillips’s advocacy of a cessation of mass immigration into Britain, I don’t want to be naive about it. Let’s see if she revisits the issue again and expands on it and actively argues for it, or if she drops it like a hot potato, just as Robert Spencer finally talked a year ago at his blog about stopping Muslim immigration, and then never mentioned the subject again.
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Jeff writes:
Maybe my recent unsuccessful attempt to talk to Melanie about restricting Muslim immigration when she was signing copies of Londonistan after a talk—she turned away from me and began talking to the next person on line—had some effect after all! She did say I had reminded her many times about the need to stop immigration.
But, seriously, the casual nature of her mention of how immigration needs to be stopped (all of it? some of it? legal? illegal?) leaves me less than enthusiastic. Remember how excited we got about Spencer’s call for stopping immigration.
If Melanie is serious about the subject, then she must write whole tracts dedicated to showing how it can be done.
In addition, even if Melanie and Spencer and various other suspects change their tune, what makes you think the mainstream populations (whatever that term means now) and the governments of the UK and USA would move to restrict Islamic immigration. And even if they did, it is unlikely that the restriction would be in significant amounts. And even if it was, I would suggest that the Muslim birthrates plus illegal immigration (which would increase if there were quotas) would mean that Muslims would keep increasing significantly in proportion of the population statistics.
That is why we need to concentrate on a Plan B or Plan C and not worry if Melanie or Spencer have a sudden conversion. You see me as nagging you but I think I am talking reality here.
LA replies:
I would say this. It’s time to stop expecting mainstream writers such as Phillips and Spencer to come out with better and more consistent positions on Islam, and criticizing them when they fail to do so. And let’s face it, even when technically on our side, these people will never be strong voices for such things as immigration restriction. Instead, we need to do more to push these positions ourselves. The respectable conservative mainstream will never be good on these issues. We have to create a new mainstream.
Alex A. writes:
Mainstream journalists like Melanie Phillips will never associate themselves with an all-out position on mass immigration by consistently opposing it root and branch. It would be professional suicide if they did.
LA replies
For years people have been telling me that that Melanie Phillips can’t oppose immigration because that would be professional sucide. But today she just opposed all mass immigration (meaning virtually all immigration) So your pessimistic argument has already been happily disproved.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 10, 2008 11:13 AM | Send