Poland has generously allowed in over a million Ukrainian refugees, who can stay for 18 months. The British government are allowing the latest refugees in for three years, with all state benefits. They are asking cash strapped councils to provide, ‘Wrap around support.’ Charities, faith groups, named sponsors and communities will assist with access to benefits, registering with GPs and schools.
Their future looks rosy – but doesn’t accord convincingly with the country many of us know. News bulletins often show what looks like a Russian attack on pets. When they reach the UK clutching their cats, dogs and hamsters, refugees might be disappointed to find that in famously animal loving Britain, vets are now on a par with the most expensive private doctors, and most pet owners are now forced to take out insurance to cover the costs. If they need help with their own health, officially you get ten minutes with a GP, but many now only treat emergencies, by referral, and most consultations are by phone. Some of us have not seen a doctor since before the start of the pandemic. They will find that British dentistry is by no means a gleaming success, more on a par with the old Soviet style which involved using plaster repair filler at home or facing a pair of plyers. For wealthier customers dentists will go to extreme lengths to preserve a tooth, charging eye watering amounts of money; elderly women being particularly targeted. A friend recently told me that when she looked surprised at the amount her dentist was demanding for one implant, he said, ‘What are you worried about. You’ve got lots of money haven’t you?’
Refugees should perhaps not be too optimistic when they find a school place. The comprehensive school system is based on neighbourhood, as in the US. If you do not land in a leafy suburb your education may suffer, or worse. People should avoid the ‘Damilola Taylor Delusion,’ a mistaken and outdated optimism about UK state education. In August 2000 Damilola’s parents brought him here from Nigeria to get his sister treated for epilepsy on the NHS. They sent him to school in Peckham, south London, and three months later, ten days before his eleventh birthday, he was stabbed to death by children aged twelve and thirteen.
The first trial was dismissed as the judge was reluctant to convict. The police kept the case open and at a retrial in 2006, brothers, Danny and Ricky Preddie, of Peckham, were convicted of manslaughter. Both had been accused of committing multiple robberies. They were released after serving four and five years. (In February 2020 Ricky Preddie was jailed for driving his car at a police officer leaving her with serious injuries. He pleaded guilty to causing serious injury by dangerous driving; driving whilst disqualified; failing to stop; and driving without insurance. For that little lot, he got four years.)
Last year, Damilola’s father Richard, 73, appealed for Boris Johnson to ‘Get a grip’ on teenage knife crime after thirty fatal stabbings in London. Ukrainian citizens, used to walking about their streets safely should realise that Boris has no intention of doing any such thing. Following his independent ‘Inclusive Britain,’ report last year, attacked by the Left and the BBC for not finding ‘Institutional Racism’ in Britain, the govt is behaving as if it had. They’re about to ‘increase scrutiny’ of Stop & Search because it overly annoys the black community. Mrs May did the same in 2014 after a sharp drop in recorded knife crime for the previous four years. The move immediately led to a sharp rise in violent offences in England and Wales, especially in knife crime, which rose 21 per cent to 37,443 incidents. Some refugees will find if unfathomable that a government will put the ‘cultural sensitivities,’ or the desire to bear arms of a small group above public safety.
Even if the refugee family is not put into a multiracial high crime area, they may find what schools teach and don’t teach, baffling. In an effort to end the racial inequality and racism not identified in its recent report, an updated History curriculum is coming in. Instead of just the Tudors and World War II, children will be able to learn about Britain’s colonial past. A patriotic Ukrainian might find it odd to hear people eviscerating their own country and culture, doing obeisance to immigrants from failing states and oppressive cultures who have chosen to live here. East Europe has a painfully poor attitude to racism in football and as Michael Gove’s fantasy of once again teaching children about, ‘Our Island Story,’ they will be perplexed to see educational ideas being led by Birmingham City footballer Troy Deeney who in February demanded the national curriculum included more history and experiences of black, Asian and ethnic minorities.
Deeney, a driving force behind Premier League players’ decision to take the knee before matches, commissioned a YouGov survey which found the majority of British teachers think the school system has a racial bias. The past no matter how distant must now be taught from the view point of present- day multiculturalism. British education as a whole will be astonishing for many hopeful refugee parents. ‘Jane, when do British children start to learn?’ A Polish friend once asked plaintively. Her daughter, arriving here aged twelve was quite pleased to find she was five years ahead of her class-mates at maths.
After their long journey, many migrants may no longer wish to travel much, which may be fortunate. The old religious festivals in the UK are now mainly ‘family times,’ for socialising which are gradually merging into one, but not successful if you need to travel to reach your loved ones. The railway system persistently and without penalty uses peak holidays to pack up its passenger services and get down to serious maintenance. This Easter five hundred and thirty engineering projects are due to be carried out with numerous train cancellations, leading to the kind of queues and platform crowding the new arrivals recently left behind. And those feisty freedom fighting Ukrainians may find the British unexpectedly cowed and supine in the face of public services which do not meet their needs.
Our new guests might do better to take to the roads where they’ll be surprised to see so many women drivers. A commentator from Ukraine recently explained that while men stayed to fight women had to leave, but found it difficult to do so as, ‘They needed someone to drive them.’ One woman got her fourteen-year-old son behind the wheel, all the way to Poland. In Ukraine men are still proudly masculine and no one sees it as toxic, as they head families which they are expected to rule and support.
Over a hundred thousand good woke folk have offered to welcome the new visitors into their homes and may find something that they recognise; their grandparents; conservative, well educated, religiously devout people who believe that white Christians are superior to any other group, not that they have seen many other varieties. Brought up to study and work hard, marry for life and strictly control their children. How their hosts are going to deal with that is unknown. It will be an enormous challenge and they’ll earn every penny trying to cope.
A lady at church told me that she was seriously worried about her two sons’ future in this country, and had specifically talked to them about this.
Seems that illegals of colour are coming in faster and in greater numbers than refugees not of colour. See MigrationWatch-UK online.
@ Joe (2)
Semantics.
The nature and purpose of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is fully explained by Lenin.
Stalin’s deference to the Politburo is a myth like his democratic Constitution.
I do not believe Putin is just like Stalin or Hitler except in that they all had popular support at certain times; and I have said that 2022 is not like 1940 or 1950. I have publicly supported Russian control of Crimea and warm-water access, and criticised the “whitewash of Zelensky”. I did not and do not support the US invasion of Iraq &c. We can all engage in Whataboutery from Tigray to Tibet.
I have known Ukrainians all my political life and have liked many of them, but I also suggested partition as a possible negotiated settlement. Meanwhile, “they create a desert and call it sovereignty”.
Try to be more accurate and less wildly abusive in your comments – especially while innocent children are being killed – by “macho man”.
Sorry David but there is nothing in anything Joe says that this reasonable observer could possibly describe as ‘abusive’. Being straight forward with someone and ‘to the point’ is not a form of abuse. And the ‘won’t someone please think of the children’ appeal to emotion may well signify a heightened sense of moral virtue and shame its intended target, but that is all it does…it is of no help to the children at all.
It is unjustified to suggest I have only “ridiculous” arguments or imagine that I “wave a Ukrainian flag” around. No, of course it does not help the murdered children sarcastically to agree that the murderer poses as a macho guy. I have read Putin’s main statement in full on Info Wars, and can see that Russia has a case of sorts, which is why I earlier suggested partition whereby Moscow retains control of the Crimea and predominantly Russian-speaking areas in the east. If all that Putin really wants is to protect Donbass and a NATO disengagement, that could possiby be negotiated in a neutral capital like New Delhi. But a lot of damage would need to be dealt with. What would YOU suggest?
If we have to rely on outsiders to save us, who are under even greater stress than we are, then we have already lost.
Outsiders have been relied on since 1942 to “save us” from the needless folly of declaring impractical war over the German city of Danzig, while unprepared adequately to protect this island from possible Nazi retaliation and its then Soviet assistance. The Empire which had provided a possibility of insulated self-sufficiency was then thrown away, the present “Commonwealth” of Rwanda, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Mozambique being its antithesis.
Outsiders have since increasingly “unsaved” us by population changes, foreign ownerships, alien finance and international regulations. Now the so-called “Church” of what-was “England” has a second-in-command who said the “Son of God” was a “Black” person “born in a pub outhouse” and is now inviting a gradual takeover of its remnants by “People of Global Majority” to address the “dominance” (sic) of “white [sic] voices” (sick); see “The Spectator”, 26 March 2022, p.11.
I think the UK has officially died.
Secretary Nadhim Zahawi (sounds very English), when speaking of Tim Hayward, said: “universities who challenge the official narrative will be investigated and professors punished”.
“Punished”! And precisely what does that mean? Reeducation? Gulags? Sounds a lot like the old USSR!
Has it occurred to anyone else that in 2022, our government might actually be the bad guys?
Do you feel “free”?
Zahawi is a rich Kurd from Bagdhdad.
The Academics for Academic Freedom website is worth perusal.
No. We are not free. We are under occupation. That’s how I feel anyway. These days feelings trump facts so I know I’m right.
Quite frankly I prefer the idea of admitting many white people of traditional cultural outlook, even though a bit of vetting for rogues may be needed, to the settlement of people, legal or illegal, of alien cultural backgrounds and, yes, who do not (as the BLM complainers say) “look like us” native-born English. If this is “racist”, so what? India prefers the settlement of people of Indian heritage, and you might care to look at the percentage of non-Chinese “refugees” in China.
I have seen my native homeland of Waltham Forest rapidly wrecked by de-anglicisation. The leftist agitprop “Institute of Race Relations” Briefing Paper No 5 admitted over the reality behind the knife-crime “debate”, a large majority of those killed in Greater London were Black or Asian, “as were their attackers”, a third of them “refugees or newly arrived migrants” from the “DR”C, Somalia, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Vietnam, Jamaica, Morocco and Mauritius. Anecdotally, Somalis can be especially sadistic.
Researcher John Pitts (online) found that “evidence for the over-representation of Black young people in street gangs is compelling” and considered the role of drugs business in gang formation and gangsta culture (e.g. “music”), plus the “involvement of growing numbers” of young Blacks in County Line dope dealing.
See the TV review by Ellen E. Jones in “The Guardian”, 19 March 2022, for just one example of how this criminal subculture is shamelessly celebrated by the metropolitan left.
If Ukrainians can exert a beneficial effect on our society, and even “breed” into it, that would be a welcome alternative to Afro-replacement or Russian oligarchy.
Well said, but it’s far, far too late. An English caller to a radio phone-in programme this morning actually said that if he had the chance he would rather live in a dictatorship in Russia than stay here. Quite an extreme view but it’s understandable why a white Englishman woukd be driven to such despair by the complete domination of our cities and some towns by thousands of lawless invaders invited here by successive governments and just about every one who is allowed access to broadcasting it seems.
Since when is Russia a dictatorship? This is the type of weird rhetoric I continue to hear from the old baby boomers. How many years until we can finally remove the anti-russian hate and anti-russian hysteria from the babyboomer mind? It really is hysteria.
The Soviet Union were communist thugs, not a dictatorship. Russia hasn’t lived under a dictatorship since 1917.
Russia has been a democracy for thirty years. It’s an imperfect democracy. And yeah, yeah, Putin is a bad guy. Nevertheless, Russians vote for him. And they do so overwhelmingly. He’s not winning by small margins! And if you randomly took votes outside the kremlin you’d find that 7 out of 10 support him. He is not forcing people to cast their votes for him.
@ Joe
After 1917-20 the “dictatorship of the proletariat” i.e. the Communist Party.
From 1929-1953 the “cult of personality”, i.e. dictatorship by Stalin.
See e.g. Alexander N. Yakovlev, “A Century of Violence in the Soviet Union” (2012); Oleg V.Khlevniuk, “Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator” (2017); & “Russian Oppression in Ukraine” (1962).
Stalin like Hitler and Mussolini had considerable support from sections of the population, during various periods assisted by controlled propaganda machinery.
Putin had a deceptive attraction for many inside and beyond Russia for a long time but the mask is slipping regrettably at human cost.
Communism is a mode of production, not a dictatorship. Stalin was not a dictator. He answered to the politburo, which was the communist part of Russia, and yes it was a totalitarian party that killed millions. But totalitarianism can come in many forms. Totalitarianism isn’t always a dictatorship, so equating the two is not smart. In fact, we know that the majority can be totalitarian. The Framers of the U.S. constitution were very aware that the majority could be a problem, hence the checks and balances, the strong bill of rights, and the decentralization (states).
Furthermore, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is not a “dictatorship”. You can call yourself anything you want, but it doesn’t make it true. Indeed, the communist party of China calls themselves “communist”, but they are more capitalist than the U.K. China is a one party, totalitarian state, using capitalism as its mode of production.
Putin is not “deceptively attractive”. He’s explicitly attractive because he’s “moderate”. Putin is not stalin. He’s not hitler. You are living in a fantasy world of propaganda if you believe in that nonsense.
Saying Putin is corrupt is true. Saying he’s a liar is also true. And? So is Johnson. So is Biden. Saying he’s a killer is true. And? George Bush is also a war criminal. What are your other compliants? He controls the media? No, actually he doesn’t. That is fake news. He doesn’t control RT. They criticize him all the time.
What else? He likes to pretend he’s macho? And? So do must guys! I like to pretend I’m macho too. Maybe it’s because I’m just average height.
What else? He invaded in Crimea? Actually, no. He didn’t. That is very nice propaganda, but that never happened. He invaded Georgia. Yes, true. He did. And he shouldn’t have.
He invaded Ukraine. Yes, but for what reason? If your answer is the Donbass bombings you are correct. But is it justified? Maybe. If you say he attacks and imprisons his opposition, then you are correct. And? So does Ukraine! The first thing Zelensky did was imprison his opposition.
What other ridiciluous arguments are you going to make? I hope you aren’t going to defend sanctions, which destroys the middle class, or wave your Ukrainian flag around knowing that Ukraine is also a totalitarian state. What else?