Thursday, January 08, 2015



Boris attacks 'multi-culti balkanisation' of British society which means thousands of people do not speak English

Boris Johnson today attacked the ‘multi-culti balkanisation’ of British society which means thousands of people do not speak English.  The London Mayor insisted people who come to the UK should learn the language, stressing it is ‘is unbelievably easy to get the hang of’.

He condemned the ‘disastrous approach’ of teaching children in other languages and the ‘nonsense’ of offering translated versions of official documents.

Census figures from 2011 show there were 138,000 people in England and Wales who could not speak any English.

Mr Johnson said it was ‘huge wasted opportunity’ for those people who are not able to ‘participate’ in the UK economy.

Speaking on LBC radio, he said: ‘I think everybody in London, everybody who comes to work in our economy should be able to speak English.’

In an apparent attack on the last Labour government he went on: ‘We went through a long period in Britain of having kind of multi-culti balkanisation of our society and we thought it was a very good idea to teach kids in their own language in primary school classes in London.  ‘I think that’s a disastrous approach, they should be in English.

‘As far as the mayoralty is concerned, we have dropped a lot of those ‘we’ll offer to translate our document into umpteen languages’. I think its complete nonsense.’

He said it was a ‘great shame’ that the last Labour government cut funding for teaching English.  ‘We whacked some dosh back in from city hall because I think it’s an absolute priority.’

He said that in many parts of the capital whole communities do not speak English.

‘You go out into Tower Hamlets, places like that, you can find people who have been then there several generations who still don’t speak English.

‘One of the reasons is the media is so massive now but so disparate, so diffuse, that people can be tuned to their own communities and not fell the need to learn the common language of this city, of this country.  ‘I think that is a great, great shame, it’s a huge wasted opportunity for them.

‘I think everybody in this country, particularly people working in our public services, should speak English.’

Boris Johnson insisted learning English was easy.  He told LBC: 'It is not a difficult language. The great thing about English is it has so many, very short simple words. 'Our grammar is unbelievably simple, we have about twice as many words as French or German.  'English is unbelievably easy to get the hang of. Look at the way I can string these sentences together with barely a verb...'

His remarks come after Ukip leader Nigel Farage suggested doctors who cannot speak 'very good English' should be banned from practising in the UK.

The Ukip leader said it was 'scandalous' that not enough doctors and nurses were being trained in Britain, meaning thousands are brought in from overseas.

However, he appeared unaware that two years ago the General Medical Council announced new checks to be carried out on the language skills of medical staff. All NHS doctors have to pass a language test.

Mr Johnson added: ‘I’m amazed by reports that people cannot make themselves understood in English in this country to people working in the NHS. That is completely wrong.

‘I’m sure that the NHS will be taking steps to sort it out. I think that we should have a culture in this country that if you come here, you do as the Romans do and you learn English, you speak English.

‘I don’t mean this by the way in a sort of punitive sense. I’m not saying that everybody should be punished if they fail, this is a wasted opportunity for these companies. They are not able to participate.

‘This is a country where English has been spoken for many centuries.

‘I don’t want to be hostile towards speakers of other languages, other languages are beautiful things, but this is a country that happens to speak English and the way to participate in the London economy, to make a success of your life, my message to everybody whose English is a bit rusty, is go out, find a course for English speakers of another language, they are available.

‘I think that it is completely right that as part of the citizenship test that we have now in British is you should have a pretty good mastery of English.  ‘I think everybody should be trying to get up to that standard.’

SOURCE







One chart that shows Boris and Nigel Farage are right about immigrants speaking English

Boris agrees with Nigel.  Mr Johnson, the Mayor of London, has energetically backed the Ukip leader on the need for people living in Britain to speak English.

Public bodies like councils have made it too easy for some people to live in the UK without mastering English, Mr Johnson said.

How many people are we talking about here? How many people are in Britain unable to speak English fully?

According to the 2011 Census, there are 41.8 million adults in the UK who speak English as their main language. That's 92 per cent of the population.

There are another 2.9 million who are considered "proficient" in English, 6 per cent of the country. And finally, the group that Mr Johnson and Mr Farage are really talking about, the "non-proficient" number 785,000, just under 2 per cent of Britain.

What difference does this make? Perhaps the biggest is in employment. Unsurprisingly, people who don't speak English are much less likely to be in work than those who do.

People who were "non-proficient" have an employment rate of just 48.3 per cent, compared with 65.4 per cent for those who were proficient and 71.9 per cent for those whose main language was English.

Break those figures down by sex, as in the chart below, and the differences become even more stark. Only 34.3 per cent of women who don't speak English are in work.



Now, there may be lots of reasons for that. Some of those women may be from more traditional backgrounds, families that are happy for women not to do paid work. But it seems reasonable to guess that some of those women who are not in work would like to be in work. Speaking English would remove one of the (numerous) obstacles they face.

And just in case it needs saying, working is almost always better than not working. People in paid employment are richer, happier and healthier than those who are not. Oh, and they generally pay more tax too.

So yes, people living in the UK should speak English. Because it's good for them.

SOURCE






Racial double standards

Last week's column focused on the ways liberals use blacks in pursuit of their leftist agenda, plus their demeaning attitudes toward black people. Most demeaning are their double standards.

It was recently reported that Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the House majority whip, spoke at a 2002 gathering hosted by white supremacist leaders when he was a Louisiana state representative. Some are calling on Scalise to step down or for House Speaker John Boehner to fire him. There's no claim that Scalise made racist statements.

Hardly anyone blinks an eye at the Rev. Al Sharpton's racist statements, such as: "White folks was in the caves while we (blacks) was building empires. ... We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was. ... We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it."

Sharpton again: "So (if) some cracker come and tell you, 'Well, my mother and father blood go back to the Mayflower,' you better hold your pocket. That ain't nothing to be proud of. That means their forefathers was crooks." Sharpton also offered, "If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house."

Despite such racism, President Barack Obama has made Sharpton his go-to guy on matters of race. But not to worry. Obama himself spent 20 years listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's anti-Semitic and racist sermons. The news media and intellectual elite don't condemn Sharpton or Obama, because they have two standards of behavior: one for whites and a lower one for blacks.

The news media's narrative about the police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, is that a white cop shot and killed an unarmed black man who was holding his hands up. Their New York City narrative is that a white cop used a chokehold that killed a black man. The news media people and their liberal allies know the facts, but they need to promote the appearance of injustice to keep black people in a state of grievance.

During grand jury testimony about the Ferguson incident, seven black witnesses testified that Michael Brown was charging the policeman when he was shot. 

The autopsies, performed by three sets of forensic experts, including one representing Brown's family, confirmed Officer Darren Wilson's version of the event. The news media's narrative of Eric Garner's death in New York is that he died because a chokehold had stopped his breathing. He actually died later, in an ambulance, where his heart stopped while being taken to a hospital. The chokehold was instrumental in triggering Garner's pre-existing health problems of acute and chronic bronchial asthma, obesity and heart disease, but he was not choked to death as claimed by the media.

Both Brown and Garner would be alive today if they had not resisted arrest. But pointing that out would not serve the purpose of keeping blacks in a perpetual state of grievance.

I'm old enough to remember the racist lynching mentality of yesteryear. Regardless of the evidence, if a white woman merely accused a black man of raping her, the man was all but dead. Emmett Till, a Chicago teenager visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, during the summer of 1955, was accused of flirting with a white woman. Klansmen took him to a barn. They beat him and gouged out one of his eyes. Then they shot him in the head and tossed his body in the Tallahatchie River.

The New York Times published the street name on which Officer Wilson lived. Had the frenzied mob caught up with him, regardless of evidence, he might have suffered the same fate as Till.

Multiethnic societies are inherently unstable, and how we handle matters of race is contributing to that instability. Decent Americans should see the dangers posed by America's race hustlers, who are stacking up piles of combustible racial kindling, ready for a racial arsonist to set it ablaze.

SOURCE






Domestic violence an equal opportunity killer

For me the most tragic image of 2014 was watching a father break down crying "My babies, my babies" at a memorial service for his children, two of eight child victims of a Cairns domestic house of horrors. The alleged killer was mother to seven of the children, and the aunt of another.

In Brisbane, another woman was charged in December over the deaths of two children, and the attempted murder of two others.

And we must not forget the mother who attempted to kill her newborn baby in Sydney just weeks before by dumping him down a stormwater drain. Fortunately he survived for six days before being discovered and rescued.

If something is to be learned from all of these incredibly sad cases, it is that domestic violence is an equal opportunity killer. Women are just as capable of killing in domestic circumstances as men, especially when children are involved.

This is borne out by the latest statistics from the Australian Institute of Criminology. These show that between 2008 and 2010, in family related murders of children, more than 45 per cent of the killers were the mother.

Last year, when I wrote about domestic violence against men, I was contacted by a solicitor friend who was keen to discuss the matter. He had been a police prosecutor for 10 years before going into practice for himself. He ruefully admitted that in those ten years he had never charged a woman with domestic violence, notwithstanding the fact over one third of domestic violence victims are men.

Upon reflection, he agreed there was an inherent bias in the way police treated female perpetrators of domestic violence.  They usually get a free pass.

The problem with this is that we know people who commit acts of domestic violence are likely to escalate their crimes over time, unless they are brought in check. It follows that every time Queensland Police give a woman a free pass on domestic violence, because she is a woman, they may be creating a future domestic killer.

Unfortunately, while our enlightenment about the dangers of domestic violence is growing, it is not matched by an equal enlightenment about who might actually commit that domestic violence.

Dr Elizabeth Celi, a psychologist and author on men's health, has some interesting insights into the issue. She says public awareness of domestic violence often falls short of portraying the whole story.

"Decades of rightly raising public awareness for female victims of domestic violence, have simultaneously lacked in accurate public education that women can also be abusive and violent, toward other women, men and children," she says.

She also points out that turning a blind eye to women who commit domestic violence puts children at risk.

"Children are affected by abusive and violent behaviour regardless of the perpetrator's gender. Our children don't deserve to be put at risk by overlooking women's abuse and violence."

It is time to admit that all domestic violence is to be deplored, irrespective of who commits it, or who is the victim.

It is also time for Queensland Police to change their ways. They have no right to effectively condone domestic violence against men and children by refusing to charge offenders if they are women. If the police are happy to charge women with armed robbery, drug trafficking or extortion, why are they not equally willing to charge them with domestic and interpersonal violence?

Equal opportunity for women must also mean equal responsibility for their actions, including their crimes.

Domestic violence is not a gender battleground, or at least it shouldn't be. It is about keeping people safe, especially children.

How many more children must suffer or die before we learn this lesson?

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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1 comment:

C. S. P. Schofield said...

The things about the Garner case that bother me are;

1) The laws against selling loose cigarettes are asinine. In their absence maybe he would have found some OTHER grey market to exploit, but still…

2) AS I UNDERSTAND IT (and if I'm wrong, please say so) the choke hold Garner was placed under was banned by department policy. Now, were I on a job (other than policeman), under such a policy, and I choked a man who subsequently died, I would probably not be indicted for any degree of murder. What I WOULD be is unemployed.

That said, the protesters who are latching on to the Garner case are doing one DANDY job of alienating the people they should want to convince.