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THE BRITISH DREAM -Important New Book on the Wreckage Caused by
"Diversity"

That insight, that a 'diverse' society becomes ever more difficult to
draw together or to represent is pure 100% Enoch Powell. I remember
well reading it in one of his longer speeches and thinking OMG - this
is amazing. He noted, for an internal Conservative party policy
paper, that the voting record since WWII (at the time of the late 60s)
showed that as Britain became more diverse, no one party was able to
meet the needs of constituents - that both parties had suffered
grievously from voter disenchantment - that a diverse population would
splinter, with votes increasingly going to fringe parties as
confidence in the traditional governors withered. And in the end,
both Labour & Tories had lost huge swathes of their voting share , on
the order of in 1945, Tories & Labour between them commanded 98% of
votes, but that by the late 60s, they accounted for something like 60%
between them - and he noted the falling away of voters too: As the
make up of the country changed (and there was less sense that the two
"bigs" could meet voter needs), more and more people every election
were simply foregoing the polling booth.

The British DreamDavid Goodhart
[as reviewed in The Spectator]
Atlantic, pp.416, £20, ISBN: 9781843548058

David Goodhart’s new book, The British Dream, is an important study
of postwar immigration into the UK, its successes and failures. He
explores the tension between growing diversity and national solidarity
and examines the meaning and significance of national identity.

In his introduction he quotes a conversation he had over dinner at an
Oxford college in the spring of 2011. He told his neighbour that he
intended to write a book arguing that liberals should be less
sceptical about the nation state and more sceptical about large-scale
immigration. His neighbour, described as one of the country’s most
senior civil servants, said: ‘I disagree. When I was at the Treasury
I argued for the most open door possible to immigration. I think
it’s my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’

The man sitting next to the civil servant, one of the most powerful
television executives in the country, said he believed global welfare
was paramount and that therefore he had a greater obligation to
someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham.

I hope I am not alone in finding these sentiments deeply shocking and
in expressing the hope that the senior civil servant is no longer in
post. This is not because I don’t believe that we owe some
obligation to those who share our planet with us. It was partly out of
a sense of that obligation that, when I was its leader, I committed
the Conservative party to meeting the United Nations target of
devoting 0.7 per cent of our national income to international aid. But
another, at least equally important, strand in my thinking was that it
is in our own national interest to promote the alleviation of poverty
and disease in other parts of the world, not least because if we
succeeded in doing so it might go some way towards easing the
pressures which impel people from those countries to seek to emigrate.

There can surely be no doubt that the primary duty of those in
positions of authority is to our own national interest. That, of
course, means governing in the interest of all our citizens and one of
the most interesting aspects of Goodhart’s book lies in his
examination of how the increased diversity of our population makes
this task even more difficult than it would otherwise be. In
particular his dissection of that much overused and misunderstood term
‘multiculturalism’ is the best I have read.
Goodhart prescribes a number of steps, including a reduction in
immigration, which should be taken to increase the integration of the
new immigrant communities. Not everyone will agree with all of them.
But he is surely right in emphasising the importance of a sense of
national identity and pride, which all of us can and should share, as
a key element in achieving this objective.He also recognises the
significance of ordinary day-to-day contact across racial and communal
divides in helping to weaken the feeling of ‘otherness’ which
constitutes one of the biggest obstacles in the way.

Here is a small personal example: the East London mosque does not
escape criticism in Goodhart’s book, largely on the grounds of its
alleged links with the Jamaat e Islami movement which supports an
Islamic republic in Bangladesh. But I have visited the mosque on a
number of occasions, as chairman of Help the Hospices, to encourage
local Muslims who worship there to use the excellent hospice
facilities which are available in the neighbourhood. This initiative
has the full support of the Imam and other leading members of the
community. If it succeeds and, as we hope, can be replicated in other
parts of the country, the coming together of our citizens from
different backgrounds at the end of their lives could have
implications far beyond the inevitably small number of people directly
concerned.

Above all, Goodhart is right in asserting that shared pride in our
country is the key. My father emigrated to Britain as a young man in
the years immediately before the second world war. He lived to see me
graduate from Cambridge and fight my first parliamentary election but
died before I was elected. The

In a more relativist age the certainty of that belief may not be as
widespread as once it was, but the revival of a strong sense of
national identity is a legitimate objective of government. If achieved
it could make all our other challenges just a little less daunting.
This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator
magazine, dated 13 April 2013 (
http://www.spectator.co.uk/issues/13-april-2013/ )

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August 3 Commemoration of British Torture of German Prisoners of War AFTER WW II at

Written by Paul Fromm

Monday, 12 August 2013 05:18

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