Political correctness

"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is...in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."

Theodore Dalrymple.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Dalrymple

Delusions of the Left

Over the years I have met and debated with many representatives of a Left Wing point of view. As human beings, as people, as friends they are often not just good representatives of the Left but of human kindness itself. But with regards to understanding world history or politics I think they are deluded. Here are my reasons:

1. From the 1930’s onwards left leaning members of the Labour Party were keen on promoting good relations with the Soviet Union. In fact many British Trade Union leaders have walked down this path for decades after believing that Communism was the promised land. As history unfolded the Left's naivety beckoned.

2. In the 1970’s it was clear to me that The Left considered that the environment was the main way to understand the nature of Man. I had decided at that time that depending on each individual a person is usually governed by both environment and genetics. The latest thinking on nature nurture debate has shifted the ground from what the Left generally thought to be the case. Genetics and DNA have broken new ground in understanding the nature of Man.

3. Economically, The Left lost the argument in the 1980’s when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took charge of economies which at that time needed regeneration and good governance. Both leaders influenced the history of the world by contributing to the downfall of the Soviet Union. At this time the Left were still in thrall to Socialism and under Michael Foot wanted to disarm unilaterally British nuclear defence. Had this Labour policy been implemented the implications for the world do not bear thinking about.

4. The latest economic crisis has arisen largely because of politically correct left liberal ideology in America leading to a sub prime mortgage collapse and, as far as Britain is concerned, Gordon Brown’s de-regulation of the banking sector. The Left argue that “it was the banks fault” without any regard for the aforementioned reasons. Sure the banks played their part by exacerbating human greed but the real reasons the reasons that matter are for all to see.

5. Multiculturalism. I have met intelligent Left thinking people who seriously argue that Britain has always been a multicultural nation. Honestly. Their reasoning is that the Vikings followed a different religion to the native British and so on. When people are as deluded as this questions must be asked. Multiculturalism is about the preservation (by the state) of different cultural identities. I hardly think that the Vikings had this in mind. A better argument might be the Romans but this would lead to discussions about the benefits of Imperialism and I do not think the Left would support that. Incidentally, the word Multiculturalism originated in about 1960.

6. Having argued that the context of Multiculturalism is usually understood to be a modern phenomenon – the process of Europeanization around the world is one main reason – it is significant that the leaders of Britain, Germany and France have recently admitted that this social engineering project has been an abject failure. I wrote about this probability on MyT nearly four years ago and asked for a referendum on the subject when writing my first ever blog. You can imagine the Left Wing response. But yet again the Left are shown to be not only deluded but wrong.

7. Similarly, with the European Union. Until Jacque Delors gave a speech to the British Trade Unions in the late 1980’s The Left were mainly against the EU. But that all changed and the New Labour leader, Tony Blair, wanted to adopt the Euro as British currency. If it wasn’t for the ongoing clash of personality between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair the Euro may well have replaced Sterling. Then attempts to deal with the debt problem would be similar to those in the Republic of Ireland where current options are severely limited. The Left largely supported more and more European Union and those who objected who were mainly so called Tory sceptics were often portrayed as ‘little Englanders’. The Left got it wrong yet again. They are deluded.

On a more personal level, I was called a coward by someone I work with for using a pseudonym. I had thought this good practice since the likes of George Orwell or George Elliot and others before them have done likewise. So I wondered does anyone else consider themselves “a coward” for preferring blogging anonymity?

Given that the police in the UK has been politicized by the Left I would have thought this made common sense. But what do you think?

Immigration into the UK

The Guardian newspaper recently posted this information on immigration:

“Since the year 2000 to June 2010 it is estimated that 572,000, people came into the UK. This figure has remained broadly the same since 2004.”

The way this information is presented appeared misleading and/or ambiguous. So I contacted MigrationwatchUK http://www.migrationwatchuk.org/

This is their response:

“Thank you for your email and for taking the time to write to us.

There has been a swell of interest in the numbers of people coming to the UK since Cameron made his speech which is excellent as there is a lot of misinformation out there.

I have taken data from the Office for National Statistics who compile the data on Long-term international migration, which gives us a good idea of the number of people leaving, coming in, and the net figure. Below are some figures for you:

Total number of people coming into the UK
1997 – 327,000
1998 – 391,000
1999 – 454,000
2000 – 479,000
2001 – 481,000
2002 – 516,000
2003 – 511,000
2004 – 589,000
2005 – 567,000
2006 – 596,000
2007 – 574,000
2008 – 590,000
2009 – 567,000

So as you can see, over the period of 1997 to 2009 there has been a massive increase in the number of people coming to the UK. Of course these are offset in numbers terms by those emigrating. If we take these numbers into account we get a net migration which is either positive or negative, depending on whether more people came than left. Net migration has been high for a number of years. In 1996 net migration was +55,000. This figure hit +245,000 in 2004 and for the year June 1009 – June 2010, net migration was +226,000.
Annual statistics on migration will be released in August of this year for the year 2010.

I hope this is of help to you.”

See link for details on how the Guardian presents this information:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jun/26/non-eu-immigration-uk-statistics?commentpage=2#start-of-comments