Victims of Our Own Culture?

Whenever someone starts a discussion with the words, “I’m not a racist but …” you can be pretty certain that he is about to say something which he really believes is going to be or may perceived to be, racist. And the conclusion most arrived at, although it may not be the general thrust of his argument, is “…there are just too many of them…”and by that he means immigrants.

But there arises an interesting slant which does deserve some serious consideration in view of the recent upheavals engendered by not so recent newspaper cartoons depicting Muslims with a variety of head wear.

In Britain we have a disturbing degree of street-level, opportunity lawlessness; muggings, burglaries, car crime, gratuitous violence which is something many of us have just come to accept, and which we have to bear in mind when we plan night, evening and, more frequently, day commuting.

The more of it we encounter, either directly or vicariously, the more we realize that amongst these young thugs is a fair proportion of immigrant stock, and that the sheer number of incidents, many carried out in and around the “rat runs” of sink estates, make it very difficult for the police to deal with.

We are also endowed with a growing number of Eastern Europeans who seem busily occupied with people smuggling, running teams of prostitutes, organizing major credit-card scams and fraud and by all accounts, they seem damn good at it. Catching these people isn’t easy because many have “thin” (or no) personal files; on paper they just do not exist. Incidentally, neither of these problems will be resolved by the introduction of identity cards.

To tread in the daily press about the huge sums of money doled out to the immigrant population, and of the child benefit sent to e.g., Poland is a red rag to a bull whenever the topic of immigration arises. And make no mistake, there is a growing groundswell of discontent about this, far greater and more menacing that any government minister will admit to.

On the other hand, there are considerably more citizens of immigrants stock who display high standards of behaviour, study hard at school (when not suffering verbal and physical abuse at the hands of a minority) and go on to do extremely well in their chosen and legal careers. In fact, they are doing so well that the odds are that we could not perform as a major economy without them.