Nobody could argue that gang rape or child abuse are the preserve of immigrants, but the development of particular types of child-rape gangs revealed – and a subsequent government-commissioned inquiry confirmed6 – specific cultural ideas and attitudes that were clearly held by some immigrants. These include views about women, specifically non-Muslim women, other religions, races and sexual minorities that were pre-medieval. Fear of accusations of ‘racism’ for pointing out such facts, and the small but salutary number of careers like Ray Honeyford’s that had been publicly wrecked for saying far less, meant that it took years even for such facts as these to come out.
This has a terrorising effect far beyond the nation’s television studios, and with far more serious consequences. When these gang-rape cases came to court they did so in spite of local police, councillors and care-workers, many of whom were discovered to have failed to report such crimes involving immigrant gangs for fear of accusations of ‘racism’. The media followed suit, filling their reports with euphemisms as though trying to avoid helping the public to draw any conclusions. So in cases like those in Oxfordshire the gangs were described as ‘Asian’ when they almost solely involved Muslim men of Pakistani origin. The fact that their victims were chosen precisely because they were not Muslims was only occasionally mentioned in the courts and rarely dwelt upon by the press. Instead of carrying out their jobs without fear or favour, police, prosecutors and journalists behaved as though their job was to mediate between the public and the facts.
Naturally none of this ever comes up in any ‘acceptable’ discussion on immigration. Introducing gang rape to a BBC discussion on immigration would be like introducing bestiality to a documentary on sickly pets. Only the good and happy can be dwelt upon, while the bad is ignored. And it is not only the harder edges of the discussion that get lost, but the softer, everyday concerns that people have: not savage denunciations, but simple regret that the society they grew up in has been changed without any care for the views of the majority of the people.
The other thing lost in the cosy, consensual Newsnight style of discussion is any reference to what we used to call ‘our culture’. As ever, amid the endless celebrations of diversity, the greatest irony of all remains that the one thing people cannot bring themselves to celebrate is the culture that encouraged such diversity in the first place. In the whole political and press reaction to the 2011 census one saw once again the various staging-posts of a direction of travel that is profoundly self-annihilating.
One such claim is that even after a period of such extraordinary change as Britain has been through in recent decades, ‘It’s nothing new.’ This argument can be heard across Europe, but in Britain it now most often goes as follows: ‘Britain has always been a melting pot of people of different races and backgrounds. Indeed we are a nation of immigrants.’ This was the claim, for instance, of a well-received book on immigration by Robert Winder that came out during the Blair years and was often used to defend the government’s policies. Among other things the book argued that ‘we are all immigrants: it simply depends how far back you go.’ The book also claimed that Britain has always been ‘a mongrel nation’.7 Here is Barbara Roche making the same claim in a talk in the East End of London in 2011: ‘When we think of immigration or migration it’s very tempting to think that it’s something that happened in the nineteenth century. I’m Jewish. Some of my family came in the late nineteenth century. I’m Sephardi on my mother’s side so some of my family came way before that. But there is a tendency to think that it’s somehow quite recent – if it isn’t nineteenth century then it’s very much something that is a post-war phenomenon. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve always believed that Britain is a country of migrants.’8 Of course Ms Roche is welcome to believe this. But that does not make it true.