BY MELANIE PHILLIPS, Daily Mail, 29 September 2008
On the eve of the Tory Party conference, the shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve issued a blunt warning.
In the name of multiculturalism, he said, Britain had done something terrible to itself. It had downplayed British cultural identity, leaving long-standing inhabitants fearful and new immigrants alienated, creating a vacuum ripe for exploitation by extremists.
His warning could not be more timely or appropriate. Multiculturalism and its allied doctrines of human rights and anti-discrimination are acting as a kind of corrosive acid eating away at our institutions, values and national identity.
What’s more, they are also actively preventing us from defending our own country. Just look what happened when the Army said it wanted to put a 15 per cent cap on the number of recruits it takes from overseas.
The decision was taken because it believes that any more foreign soldiers would dilute the British Army’s cultural identity. No less troubling, there is also the risk that foreign soldiers in British ranks might be banned by their own governments from taking part in certain conflicts, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So much, you might have thought, is obvious. But not to the Equality Commission, which says the move would fall foul of the Race Relations Act by treating foreigners less favourably than British citizens.
Really, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It surely doesn’t need to be said that to defend Britain, the armed forces must reflect and share the culture and values of British society — which means their members have to remain predominantly British.
This is not a matter of treating foreigners less favourably — simply that a country has to be defended by those who are, overwhelmingly, part of it and thus loyal to it. It is because they identify with their country that they are prepared to lay down their lives for it.
For sure, there have always been foreign nationals who perform exemplary duty in our armed forces and have made the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf. But if there is no longer a critical mass of soldiers whose first loyalty is to Britain because they are not British, then that sense of a common struggle must dissipate.
This obvious truth cuts no ice, however, with those ideologues who believe we should no longer identify with a nation because we are part of it, but must owe our allegiance instead to some nebulous, utopian fantasy supra-nation to which all cultures and creeds around the world apparently belong.
The head of the Equality Commission, Trevor Phillips, objects to the Army’s proposal on the grounds that it ‘raises large issues of principle’. You bet it does: the largest is the principle of citizenship itself, at the very heart of which lies the duty to fight for one’s country. It is that principle which the Equality Commission now wishes to destroy.
On Planet Equality, it seems it is racist to have an Army consisting of Britons committed to defending their own country. That’s because multiculturalism holds that no one culture can lay claim to be the custodian of this nation’s values. Mass immigration is regarded, instead, as the means to transform this green and pleasant land into the nursery slope of the brotherhood of man.
As a result, the country is increasingly resembling some kind of mass transit camp, in which fewer and fewer inhabitants have any permanent attachment or identification with Britain. That’s why almost two-thirds of all applicants wanting to join the Army in London are now foreign nationals — hence the Army’s concern.
This attempt to change the very nature of our country is now also affecting the most fundamental of our institutions. The Government is considering proposals to amend the 307-year-old Act of Settlement because it breaches human rights and sex discrimination law by not allowing a Catholic on the throne and by giving male heirs priority over older sisters.
But Catholics aren’t barred because of some nasty prejudice. The monarch is defender of the Protestant faith. Britain is a Protestant country.
Protestantism infuses its institutions, culture and history. It is inseparable from British identity. Allowing Catholics onto the throne is tantamount to tearing up that identity. CONTINUE
For the record, I support the Act of Settlement. Through it, England was able to preserve its national identity without sacrificing religious freedom. At that time, the American colonies (the future USA) were part of England; thus, we inherited the benefits of that Act.
I was pleased to read Ms. Phillips’s piece, as it addresses some of the issues we have in America as well. We are not yet at a place where we need citizenship quotas in our military: that whole idea seems rather strange to me, suggesting that perhaps the problem isn’t too many foreign applicants, but instead too few Brits wanting to fight for their own country. We do have troubles with “multiculturalism”, though; and I imagine “baby boomers” like myself are largely responsible for it (but see below).
We were once a Protestant Christian country, secure enough in our identity as a nation, to be able to provide a haven of refuge for others unlike us. Then the Catholics came, in large numbers, and the Jews — immigration peaking around 1907. Congress saw a problem coming, and enacted tough immigration laws. These laws were responsible, to a large degree, for the fact that the US refused to admit more Jews than it did in the years before World War II.
More recently, we have received a large influx of “Hispanics”, mostly Mexicans. There is some concern about this, mainly in that we have accomodated them so much in providing services in Spanish, that English-speaking Americans are becoming increasingly disadvantaged. I wouldn’t be surprized, if our history textbooks are increasingly teaching about “American Patriots” such as Cortez and Bolivar, as though they were the real “fathers of our country”. That’s not a pleasant thought, seeing that it consigns my New England and New York Dutch ancestors, who really DID found the United States, to the garbage heap of historical oblivion. Still, the Spanish were at least Europeans, and the Aztecs do share some extremely ancient connection with my Iroquois forebears; and they do share with my forebears a rather ancient Catholic connection. Besides, try as we may, the Mexicans really seem to be more interested in their becoming American than in our becoming Mexican. A large percentage of them, after all, aren’t even Catholic but Pentecostal; and they intermarry with Anglos and have English-speaking children.
What bothers me isn’t so much that I have to wait twice as long when trying to get information on the telephone, while I hear unintelligible instructions in Spanish, but the fact that this is only the foot in the door — that when I buy my furniture at the store, it comes “assembly required”, with an instruction manual in 27 languages and the “English” is undecipherable. I can’t blame the Mexicans for that: it’s all part of “globalization”, which is just the Marxian doomsday scenario of the death throes of capitalism (with some minor revisions).
This leads one to consider the roots of the “multicultural” problem, which is economics: Americans are lazy, and would rather have a Mexican pick their lettuce, do their laundry and yes, serve in their military so their own sons and daughters can go on to become physicists, managers, lawyers, etc. I see lots of Americans complaining about Mexican competition, but I don’t hear too many of them saying they want to become lettuce pickers and laundry workers. The Brits have a similar problem, as did the Romans before them. The Western Roman Empire never actually “fell”. It simply was re-named the Kingdom of Italy, in recognition of the fact that it had become simply the province of a local military ruler — a GERMAN military ruler, since the military had a hundred years earlier become mostly Germans, because Romans no longer wanted to fight.
“Multiculturalism” seems to have come of its own in my generation, propagated in the “Free Love” days of a Hippie culture that was disproportionately Jewish. Those Jews were of the self-hating variety, of course, and passed on their value system to their goy fellow communards; hence, “multiculturalism”. But that’s a cheap shot, blaming foreigners for America’s problems. At the heart of it all, is the fact that we’re lazy; and so are the Brits: We have chosen comfort over national survival. Hitler saw the same thing coming in Germany, and tried to forge a reich built upon a spartan ethic of hard work, clean living and no Jews. He lost; and, as most here probably know, there were some problems with his ideas — like millions of people getting slaughtered.
In a way, Hitler was a “last gasp” attempt to preserve uniculturalism. Immediately after his fall, the great world-wide European empires began crumbling, one after another. The UN soon ceased to be a European club. Truman integrated the US military; then came the Civil Rights movement (with tremendous Jewish participation), U Thant, Kofi Annan, Michael Jackson and now Barak Obama. We used to be bright Red, Blue, Yellow, Black and Green; and now we’re all a Mauvy Olive Gray — with some swirls and specks of different shades that we call “multiculturalism”.
The Brits have a problem, and I sympathize with them; but I don’t have an answer. Maybe Yamit, Shy Guy, Elvis and the rest think a racially and religiously pure Jewish “master race” can address the world’s problems, better than a “multicultural” fellow like myself, with my European-Jewish-Native American ancestry and Chinese grandchildren. As I said, Uniculturalism went out with the Brown Shirts; but perhaps it can make a revival. Either way, I see problems ahead.