Saturday, October 14, 2006

Multicultural failure in Britain

An east London teenager who became a drug dealer and a knife-wielding member of a street gang lays the blame on the transformation of his neighbourhood into an ethnic minority "ghetto" where turf warfare flourishes. "I fell in with the wrong crowd," said Syed Miah, 19, who regrets his life of crime. "Before, it was mixed and you would get to know other people, but now no one meets anyone. You grow up with this mentality that `we're Bangladeshis, whites are whites and blacks are blacks'." Miah became a full-time gangster when he was expelled from school for holding a knife to his teacher's throat. He says he eventually earned up to 960 pounds a week dealing heroin before being sentenced to 18 months in jail.

Miah's account of the failure of multiculturalism encapsulates the growing debate over how ethnic minorities should be integrated into society. At last week's Conservative conference, David Cameron, the party leader, warned that in some cities "we have allowed ghettos to develop - whole neighbourhoods cut off from the rest of society". He spoke of "parallel lives", citing "communities where people from different backgrounds never meet, never talk, never go into each other's homes". There are ethnic gang fights in Manchester and Birmingham and last week they spread to Windsor, where rioting erupted around an Asian-owned dairy and nearby prayer centre.

Last weekend, Stevens Nyembo-Ya-Muteba, 40, a maths and finance student, was stabbed to death in his block of flats in Hackney, east London. It later emerged he and his wife Veronique, who came to Britain 10 years ago as refugees from the Congo, had asked the authorities to improve security on their building because they were worried about loitering youths.

Nowhere is the ethnic basis of gangs more evident than in London, where the cultural patchwork is the most complicated in Britain. According to new figures, in the borough of Brent there is an 85% chance that any two people chosen at random would belong to different ethnic groups. Bangladeshis, Somalis, Pakistanis, Afro-Caribbeans and Turks have all formed their own gangs who are as likely to fight each other as they are to attack or be attacked by white thugs.

Last year Lee Jasper, a policing adviser to Ken Livingstone, the London mayor, warned that one south London gang, the Muslim Boys, was the "most serious criminal threat" the black community had ever faced. It was accused of shooting a man, execution-style, after he refused to convert to Islam, and has been implicated in dozens of other muggings and attempted murders.

Tower Hamlets, Miah's home borough, is one of the most ethnically diverse in Britain, with whites comprising just 51% of the population. It has been portrayed in books such as Brick Lane by Monica Ali as an area where there is tension, but communities manage to coexist. However, there is now strong evidence of the extent of segregation in the area. A recent report by Bristol University found 40% of Bangladeshi children went to schools where at least 90% of the pupils were Bangladeshi, while 60% of whites attended overwhelmingly white schools. The report described education in Tower Hamlets as "highly segregated".

Abdi Hassan, a representative of the local Somali community, recently complained to the council that segregation was fuelling violence. "There are many groups here, Moroccans, Irish and Algerians, but nobody mixes with anybody," said Hassan. "Why do we have community ghettos? Why shouldn't people want to interact with each other?"

Some local gangs were set up to resist racist attacks but turned to crime. In one incident in 1994, a Pakistani was left with severe brain damage after an attack by eight white thugs on Whitechapel Road. Emdad Rahman, 39, one of his friends, said: "The whole community was enraged. I remember a lot of my peers thinking, `Right, if they're going out Paki-bashing, we basically need to go out honky-bashing now'."

Often the gangs fight over territory merely for the sake of it. One seven-year feud in the area began with a row over who would get the last doughnut at school and ended with men in their twenties beating, blinding and stabbing each other. Miah's story of growing up amid segregated gang violence suggests such divisions are now entrenched. He used to live on the Solander Gardens estate where he was a member of the 70-strong Shadwell Massive gang. He now has an antisocial behaviour order that bars him from the area after 9pm.

Source



RACE-OBSESSED BRITAIN

State schools should introduce ethnic quotas into admissions criteria to break down the extreme segregation of pupils along cultural and religious lines, the head of the Local Government Association said yesterday. In remarks that sparked an immediate debate about the state of social cohesion in Britain, Lord Bruce-Lockhart said that Britain would never achieve integration and full social cohesion while neighbouring schools were divided along ethnic lines. It was unacceptable that non-white pupils should form 90 per cent of the population of one school, when white pupils formed 90 per cent of a neighbouring school down the road.

One solution, he suggested, would be for schools in areas with high concentrations of minority ethnic groups to incorporate some kind of ethnicity quota into admissions policies. Although reluctant to specify a quota, Lord Bruce-Lockhart, the former Conservative leader of Kent County Council, said other experts had suggested that schools should offer at least 25 per cent of their places to those from other ethnic groups.

Lord Bruce-Lockhart's comments drew a mixed reaction. Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, agreed that urgent action was needed but was sceptical about the use of quotas. "I'm open to discussion, but I would not have said this is the first place we need to go," he told the Commons Education Select Committee. He warned MPs that school segregation had now become a "settled pattern" in many towns, often with disastrous effects. "The information we get from the front line . . . is that (segregation) contributes to conflict among young people. Gangs form at school and the ethnicisation of gang culture is part of that," he said.

Twinning agreements between schools and summer camps where children from different backgrounds mix would be more workable, he said. Tahir Alam, education spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, said that ethnic quotas had been shown to be unworkable in the US, where the problem of pupil segregation was far more extreme. "You cannot tell a parent that they cannot send their child to the school of their choice because it has met its racial quota. The right of parents to send their children to the school they want is a fundamental right in this country," he said.

Sir Dexter Hutt, executive director of the Ninestiles federation in Birmingham, who has dealt with the problem of segregated schools at first hand, said that if quotas were to be used, the level would have to be set closer to 40 than 25 per cent. Although he was sceptical about how practical quotas would be, he accepted that urgent action was needed. "Children learn by rubbing shoulders with each other and by having arguments with each other in a restrained situation like a school. A multiracial school population would be far more likely to lead to social cohesion," he said.

Lord Bruce-Lockhart accepted that such policies would be difficult to put into practice, but said the most important thing was that a debate on school segregation should take place. "Proactive admissions policies could be used to establish a better ethnic balance in schools. In towns where the totality of the minority ethnic population is 15 per cent of the whole, we should consider the use of numbers in admissions policies. "We have to get to a situation where people regard the total ethnicity of a town as being represented in schools, otherwise we are never going to be properly integrated," he told The Times. "Children start off being colour-blind and this is a wonderful thing. But if you have schools where the children are being educated in different ethnic groups you are going to lose that and you are simply not going to have integration. "If we are to have stable communities and to prevent the rise of the far Right, our job now is to put all these issues on the table and open a public debate," he said.

He added that pairing, or twinning schemes, where predominantly white schools link up with predominantly non-white schools for sports and drama activities, were another way forward. So too were federations of white and non-white schools that brought the management of the two institutions together under a single leadership.

Lord Bruce-Lockhart's comments follow new research published by Simon Burgess, Professor of Economics at the University of Bristol. Entitled Sleepwalking towards Segregation, it reports that ethnic segregation in schools is now fully entrenched in areas where the minority ethnic population is above the 8 per cent national average. In Bradford, 62 per cent of secondary schools are predominantly white, while 21 per cent are predominantly non-white. In the London borough of Tower Hamlets 47 per cent of secondary schools are described as "exclusively non-white", while 33 per cent have a white majority.

Source



Welcome to America's new Prohibition

Sportingbet and Leisure & Gaming have received approaches for their US-facing businesses. This should have come as no surprise. In the wake of the decision by the US Government to ban online gambling transactions, the industry was adamant that, far from stopping internet gambling, the move would simply drive the business underground. As one senior executive said at the time: “The happiest person about this ban will be Don Corleone.”

By the time that President Bush signs off the ban on Friday lunchtime and it becomes law, it is a fair bet that every publicly quoted internet gambling company will have sold or closed down its US-facing operation. Those businesses that are being sold will fetch little or no money, but at least the vendors will have saved jobs and, by implication, redundancy costs.

Yet if Senator Bill Frist thought that, by forcing the Bill through, he would be protecting his fellow Tennesseans from the evils of internet gambling, yesterday’s news shows how mistaken he was. Instead of being able to play poker or have a bet on a college football game on a website owned by a public company adhering to strict standards of conduct and financial probity, his constituents will be entrusting their money to faceless private companies based in offshore locations such as the British Virgin Islands.

If the new generation of internet gambling companies refuse to pay out winnings, there is nothing that American punters will be able to do about it. More importantly, because their ownership structures will be opaque, they will have no reputations to protect and there will be nothing to prevent them preying on the young and the vulnerable — the very people that the likes of Senator Frist have cited in their lobbying ahead for the controversial Bill.

Some have suggested that the new law has been cleverly designed in that it targets the banks, credit companies and other financial institutions. It is true that American corporations will make every effort to avoid having anything to do with internet gambling transactions. But foreign banks are not all going to be so compliant. And there are computer engineers developing software that will fool a bank into thinking that a US bet has been placed on a computer located overseas.

The national prohibition of alcohol in 1920s America — the “noble experiment” — was designed to reduce crime and corruption, solve social problems and improve health and hygiene in America. Instead, American thirsts were slaked and the Mob prospered.

Jim Leach, the Iowa Republican, championed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. “Religious leaders of all denominations and faiths are seeing gambling problems erode family values,” he said. Once again in America, it seems that God is helping Mammon: Mr Leach’s law promises to spawn another underground industry to serve Americans living under the new Prohibition.

Source



"Anti-capitalist" ignoramuses

Comment from Australia by Andrew Bolt

Here's a test for those protesters - backed by churchmen, academics, Age journalists and the dad's-cash rich - who are planning next month's big Melbourne rally against capitalism. Check this picture of North Korea by night, deep in darkness. And see also, just below, the lights of South Korea blazing so warmly. Question: Which of those two Korean countries do you think decided to follow America and go capitalist?



And which do you think decided to follow advice of people just like you-yes, you in the Che Guevara T-shirt? As the satellite picture shows, bright ideas can have black consequences. Communist North Korea might be able to build a nuclear bomb, but its people are now so poor and starved that many are reportedly driven to eat the bark off trees. Here is a reminder that some ideas are so dopey that those pushing them should not be encouraged-and especially not by people who should well know how we got so rich and free. And well-lit.

So, how lucky are the protesters of the StopG20 collective, then-anti-capitalists kept afloat by fawning newspaper stories, handouts from retailers and grants from our most famous capitalist families? StopG20 is a hold-hands of radicals drawn from the usual far-Left groups, many of which helped to turn the streets outside the World Economic Forum meeting at Crown on September 11, 2000, into a battlefield on which dozens of police were hurt. They include the inevitable socialist factions, as well as student unions, the Baptist Church's Urban Seed and Friends of the Earth, and their next great idea is to try to stop next month's meeting in Melbourne of the G20 group of nations.

You see, they are furious-in that typically gentle way of the Left-that the treasurers and reserve bank governors from 19 of the world's most powerful economies, as well as the European Union, are coming here to talk about ways to make capitalism work even better.

You might wonder what exactly these mega-capitalists will be plotting, and I have a scoop for you. They plan to talk about better ways to keep you in work and make sure your own lights keep shining. And so, the meeting-chaired by Treasurer Peter Costello, will try making trade a bit easier, for instance, and the competition for energy less nasty. The United States, Japan, Britain and Germany will be at the table, of course, but also developing countries such as China, Indonesia and Mexico. Fast-growing India will be there to see what more can be done to get rich, and South Korea will turn up, too, having done just that-thanks to capitalism.

Ah, capitalism. That very word will have the neo-barbarians behind the police lines outside screaming with rage. Those StopG20 protesters won't want more capitalism of the kind that made South Koreans rich. They seem to much prefer the kind of policies that have made North Koreans starve. You think I'm being unfair? Then check the StopG20 collective's website, kindly publicised twice already by The Age, which is so helpful to the protesters (despite being propped up by ads placed by capitalists) that it has one of Urban Seeds' veteran protesters working on its G20 supplement, claims Urban Seed itself.

So what does StopG20 want? Well, here's a test. PICK which of the following two plans for running an economy is taken from North Korea's official websites and which from StopG20's. Plan A: Citizens should reject "imperialism which has state monopoly capitalism as its political and economic basis" and say no to foreign trade and private property rights. Such "neo-colonialism" is "falling into decay and ruin", anyway. So leaders should instead let citizens practise "self reliance" in collectives, which solve "all problems . . . with one's own efforts". Hey, an "all-people drive to plant fruit trees" would be nice.

Plan B: Citizens should reject "imperialism" of Western powers, with their "fat cats' wet dream" of global trade and property rights. The "colonialism" of the West's "global order" is "inherently unsustainable", anyway and "breeds militarisation, war-driven competition and police states". What's more, "capitalism has always enslaved children", who are "in danger of growing up . . . ignorant about how to grow carrots" (sic). So leaders should let citizens turn instead to "solidarity economies" and "community food gardens", where they can practise "relocalisation, self-determination and regional self-reliance".

I know, one plan actually sounds much like the other-with that same freedom-fearing desire to go back to the womb, back to the cave, back to the tribe. That same desire that Islamists and greens feel, too. Nevertheless, you might still forgive the StopG20 collective if they were just students, too young to know how schemes like their Plan B have worked in practice. But not all the protest leaders who meet in the student union offices of RMIT University (official RMIT spokesman: International Socialist leader David Glanz) have youth to excuse them. And the people helping them out with cash most surely don't. I'm thinking here of ministers of the Baptist Church, officials of the Melbourne City Council-and especially trustees of the Myer Foundation and Ian Potter Foundation.

I single out those last because one of the "non-violence workshops" for StopG20 protesters is being run by Urban Seed, a charity created by the Collins St Baptist Church and run by a long-time minister, Mark Pierson. Brent Lyons-Lee, another Baptist minister, is one of several Urban Seed members who have helped to publicise the StopG20 rally. These clerics sure don't do irony. Their group is helping to protest against capitalism, yet have taken tens of thousands of dollars in donations from foundations created by two of the state's leading capitalists-retailer Sidney Myer and stockbroker Sir Ian Potter. And they've grabbed help from the Lord Mayor's Charitable Fund, too, courtesy of cash from retailers.

Just what are the trustees of the Myer Foundation doing? Are they trying to apologise for grandad getting so rich by, er, selling stuff? Being a capitalist? I should point out that none of these donations was for-or is being spent on-the StopG20 rally. But I'm not sure people with such a contempt for capitalism need quite so much encouragement from capitalists. Shouldn't they cadge their donations from Kim Jong-il instead? Or at least Cuba? Ditto for Friends of the Earth, which is also behind StopG20. I'd have thought it had enough of a toehold in our culture, with one of its leaders an associate professor at Adelaide University, without the Myer Foundation having to help it, too.

How odd this all is. We now have undeniable proof of what the ideas of the radical Left mean when some country is cursed enough to try them-check that picture again-yet the same kind of salvation-seekers never lose their fascination for the politics that enslave. Just what will make those lights go on?

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