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  hat's
all this about race riots in England?" my American friends keep
asking me. "Who are these 'Asians' that are throwing rocks at
the police? What's their beef? Can you explain this?" You bet
I can. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.
It is important
to understand that England's race problem is nothing like America's.
The U.S.A. began her existence with three different races in residence,
and has never had any choice but to make the best of things. No
white American, whatever he might think privately of his black or
red fellow-countrymen, could ever, with a clear conscience, say
to them: "You don't belong here. Go live somewhere else."
His black neighbors came here in bondage, and the red ones were
already here long before either black or white showed up. Nobody
is going anywhere. The actual answer to Rodney King's famous question
— "Can't we all just get along?" — is still not clear,
at any rate not to me; but we must surely try our best.
England is
a completely different case. The country was essentially monoracial
until the 1950s. Multi-culti propagandists try to fudge this, saying
that the English have always been a gorgeous mosaic of different
peoples — Romans, Saxons, Normans, and so on. These arguments do
not bear close examination. The English have no folk memory of the
Romans whatever; the Romans made their impact on the Celtic British
(who have since turned into the Welsh), not on the English, most
of whom arrived long after the legions had left. The French-speaking
Normans and Plantagenets were, demographically speaking, a thin
layer painted on to the top of Anglo-Saxon society, and had been
completely absorbed into that society by the 14th century. Of later
influxes, there is nothing to report but a few thousand Huguenots
(i.e., French Protestants) in the 17th century, and a similar number
of Russian Jews in the 19th, all of whom were easily accommodated
and soon melted into the general population. The last really big
influx of foreigners into England, displacing masses of ordinary
English people, was that of the Danes in the 9th century; and since
the Anglo-Saxons had themselves come from Denmark and its neighborhood
three or four hundred years previously, this was an invasion of
cousins. (It made a great impression on the English, though. I grew
up a mile or so from Hunsbury Hill in Northamptonshire, an old Iron
Age hill fort. The locals referred to it anachronistically as "Danes'
Camp," still remembering the great events of eleven hundred
years before.) The immigrants who arrived in the 1950s found the
English, as a people, pretty much undisturbed since the Peace of
Wedmore, A.D. 878.
These differences
of origin explain the differences of feeling. The most important,
most fundamental feeling behind America's race problem is the anger
nursed by black Americans over the enslavement of their forebears,
and over the indignities and insults of the "Jim Crow"
century that followed. The driving force behind England's race problem
is utterly different: It is the resentment felt by native English
people toward the floods of foreigners that have taken over large
parts of their towns and cities. Most of these foreigners are dark-skinned:
blacks from the Caribbean and West Africa, and south Asians from
India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. However, though I am using "race
problem" as a convenient short-hand for the topic under discussion,
it is not clear that the issue of England's black and Asian population
has anything to do with race. It is easy to imagine that very similar
problems would have arisen if the hundreds of thousands of foreigners
flooding into English cities had been Portuguese or Polish. Indeed,
some of the nastier "racist" incidents of recent years
have featured attacks by white Englishmen on "asylum-seekers,"
most of whom are white-skinned Slavs from the Balkans.
It cannot be
said often enough that the immigration policies of the 1950s, 1960s,
and 1970s were a great and terrible injustice on the English working
class. I have an aunt who lives in the Aston district of Birmingham,
a large industrial city in the West Midlands. (Samuel Johnson, who
hailed from the much more sedate, nearby city of Lichfield, said:
"We are a city of philosophers: We work with our heads, and
make the boobies of Birmingham work for us with their hands.")
When my aunt went to live there as a honeymooner in the early 1950s,
Aston was a sleepy working-class neighborhood with a community life
centered on churches, pubs, schools, and corner shops. Now it is
all Asian. My aunt and uncle are the only white faces in their street,
and feel, as they will tell you with much bitterness, "strangers
in our own country". The neighboring Lozells district has suffered
even worse, being taken over by Caribbeans. In the 1950s it was
a cut above Aston, very nearly lower-middle class — "Very bay
window over there," as Birmingham people say. Now it is a bedlam
of vice and crime, and there was a ferocious race riot there in
September 1985 when police launched a campaign against drug trafficking.
The fact that
these immigration policies were cruel and unjust to the English
working class — who had borne the brunt of the resulting social
dislocations — does not, of course, mean that the immigrants themselves
were to blame for them. The immigrants were seeking a better life,
just as I was when I moved to the U.S.A. England in the 1960s was
not an especially wonderful place to live; but if your standard
of comparison was a village in Bangladesh, or a slum in Jamaica,
England looked like paradise. The first generation of immigrants
kept their heads down, worked all the hours they could get, and
put up with the hostility of the natives. Their children have a
different outlook. Those who were bright and disciplined enough
to take advantage of the educational system rose easily into the
middle classes. The last time I had a job in England — I was a systems
analyst at an investment bank in 1991 — my department head was black,
and my team leader from a Sikh family. Race relations in the middle
class are very good — much better than America's, in my opinion.
The problem is with the left-hand end of the bell curve: educationally
unsuccessful young people from immigrant families. They simmer angrily
in derelict post-industrial cities like Manchester, where this week's
disturbances took place, and organize themselves into gangs. There
is, of course, no easier way to mark gang membership than by race.
In the case
of the Asians there has been an unsettling transformation of manners
and even appearance. The first generation of south Asian immigrants
had the physique of people raised on a subsistence diet, and the
manners of those who, to survive at all, have had to fawn and scrape
for centuries before callous, arrogant landlords and bureaucrats.
When I started doing office work in London, the companies were full
of Indian bookkeepers who had to be restrained by force from beginning
their business letters: "Esteemed Sir..." and ending them:
"I beg to remain, esteemed Sir, with consideration, you most
humble, most obedient servant...". Their children (who are
sometimes called "boscos" from the census-taker's category:
"British, of Sub-Continental Origin"), raised on an ample
diet, tower over them, and are physically a match for any gang of
white English skinheads. Products of modern western culture and
an educational system steeped in psychobabble, they esteem no one
but themselves.
Many of these
young boscos say: "Why shouldn't we be here? The English came
to our parents' countries without being asked, and lorded it over
them, and insulted them, and milked their economies, and looted
their historical relics, for 200 years. Well, now it's payback time!"
There are a number of things to be said in response to this. (Other
than the obvious: "Do you promise to leave after 200 years?")
The U.S.A., a nation that broke free from the Imperial grasp, is
naturally hostile to imperialism, and most Americans probably believe
that the British Empire was what George Orwell said it was — an
exploitative racket. I don't agree with this myself. It seems to
me that the British Empire was one of the greatest civilizing forces
the world has ever seen. At the very least, the post-Imperial history
of places like Uganda suggests that there are worse things that
can happen to a country than to be ruled by Englishmen. (And I recall,
from my Hong Kong days, the 12-foot fence that separated that British
colony from mainland China, erected so that the mainlanders would
be unable to act on their inexplicable impulse to flee from the
delights of Chinese government into the horrors of British Imperialism.)
But be all that as it may, and whichever side of that particular
argument you come down on — please don't write to tell me, I've
heard it all far too many times — there are two things that cannot
seriously be denied: one, that the British authorities could have
kept the country closed to immigration if they had wanted to, whatever
the rest of the world thought about it, and two, that those Englishmen
who profited from the Empire were not the ones whose neighborhoods
were flooded with strangers.
It is not easy
to lay blame for this situation. As I have said, you can't blame
people for trying to better themselves; and the black and brown
young Englishmen who are now busily erecting ghettoes for themselves
had no choice about where they were born. Though I am not a big
fan of victimological poses, if the blacks and boscos are victims
of anything, they are victims of stupid policies enacted by British
governments. The British ruling classes were the ones who actually
opened the country's doors, and people like the late Duncan Sandys,
Commonwealth Secretary in the critical early 1960s (and a son-in-law
of Winston Churchill — this English surname is pronounced "Sands,"
by the way), have much to answer for. Their motives as stated at
the time, to the limited degree that they bothered to explain themselves
to their people, were "to relieve labor shortages." This
is not very plausible. Any economist will tell you that there is
no such thing as a labor shortage, only an unwillingness to pay
sufficient wages to induce people to work. My own neighborhood here
on Long Island is currently infested by illegal immigrants from
Mexico who work as laborers for local contractors and landscaping
firms. "Nobody else will do the work," moan these employers.
Well, there is some level of wages at which plenty of local people
would be glad to do it. Heck, for forty bucks an hour, I
would do it.
The real motivation
of British elites seems to have been guilt and sentimentality. Most
of these people, especially those from the upper- and upper-middle
classes like Sandys, had done pretty well out of the Empire. Their
natural cast of mind was a guilt-soaked paternalistic indulgence
toward the black and brown folk they and their parents had ruled
over. And of course, it was not to their neighborhoods that
the immigrants had poured. People like Sandys were in the happy
position of being able to assuage their post-colonial guilt at zero
cost to themselves. To the degree that they were shareholders in
industries that used cheap immigrant labor, they actually profited
from unrestrained immigration. The costs fell on those like my aunt
and uncle, factory workers who were paid on a Thursday and flat
broke the following Wednesday. Or on those like 76-year-old Walter
Chamberlain, a veteran of WW2, who was attacked by a bosco gang
in Manchester last month, thrown to the ground and kicked in the
face for having had the impertinence to stray into "their"
part of the city.
Yet as satisfying
as it may to pin it all on Britain's insufferably arrogant ruling
elites, the country is a democracy, and the people had plenty of
opportunities to make their voices heard. In 1968 a leading English
politician, Enoch Powell, made a well-publicized and colorful speech
in which he deplored the incoming flood of immigrants, and predicted,
pretty accurately, the problems his country would face in the future
if the process was not reversed. Powell was promptly sacked from
his post in the Conservative party (then in opposition) and all
the panjandrums of the British establishment denounced him. Yet
a poll taken at the time showed that 74 percent of the public agreed
with his opinions. Why did that 74 percent not translate into actual
government policies through the ballot box? Presumably because,
when time came to vote, people thought other things were more important;
and also because citizens were willing to be browbeaten by their
elites into being ashamed of their own feelings — to believe, because
politicians, intellectuals, clergymen, and TV talking heads told
them so, that their own instinctive national pride, which had preserved
their country's independence for a thousand years, was a sinful
thing, a species of that greatest of all modern sins, "racism."
Orthodox modern
thinking, of course, blames the whole business on "racism,"
and sees the solution as one of education and enlightenment. Even
if there were any truth in this, which I do not believe, it would
still be a deeply unhelpful point of view. These kinds of conflicts
turn up everywhere in the world that people of different cultural
backgrounds are obliged to live close together, so if there really
is such a thing as "racism," it seems to arise from deep
within human nature. And if education is a solution, the prospects
are dim indeed, since the British educational system, like the American
one, is increasingly unable to instill even the rudiments of literacy
and arithmetic in youngsters, so that it is hard to see how it will
be able to get across sophisticated ethical concepts like the brotherhood
of man. And in any case, as I have noted above, it is not certain
that race has much to do with it. Visitors to England since at least
Chaucer's time have noted that the English simply do not much like
foreigners.
There is, of
course, nothing that can be done now. England has become a multicultural
society, though no large number of English people ever wanted it
to be. Through the folly, arrogance, and sentimentality of their
well-insulated ruling class, and by their own inattention, deference,
disorganization, and reluctance to appear unkind, the English have
given up large tracts of their country to foreigners, whom they
dislike and who dislike them right back. The English have created
their very own race problem from scratch — possibly the greatest
act of self-destructive folly perpetrated by any civilized nation
in the twentieth century.
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