According to John Henley, Guardian Europe correspondent, there is mounting concern across Europe that the EU’s much vaunted asylum and migration pack is under threat as governments under ‘intense political pressure from far-right parties’ compete to introduce tough new anti-immigration measures. Whether this is a matter for concern is questionable, to say the least, yet the article is valuable because it reveals the parallel universe inhabited by the post-Marxist bourgeois liberal elite.
Marcus Engler, of the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research, we hear, objects that the new restrictions are ‘clearly driven by electoral logic’ as the influence of ‘far-right’ governments and parties reaches ‘a critical point’. But it seems to have escaped him that democracy might entail implementing the will of the people.
In Germany, writes Henley, the socialist-led coalition government’s volte face on migration in response to a series of knife attacks by asylum seekers, and the gathering electoral threat of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), ‘has been widely denounced as politically motivated’. Yet it is apparently beyond his comprehension that people would draw a natural link between knife attacks by asylum seekers and migration. Surely migrants are as entitled as the rest of the population to go out and knife people. It is their human right.
Even ‘once-welcoming’ Sweden has succumbed under the pressure of the ‘far-right’ Sweden Democrats, and now pays migrants to return home. Yet Henley passes over the most likely explanatory factor: that urban areas of once-peaceful Sweden have been turned into no-go zones riven by immigrant drug gangs, women are scared to go out at night, violent crime is endemic, and parts of Malmo now form parallel societies.
France’s new right-wing government includes Bruno Retailleau, the ‘hardline’ interior minister, who has declared that the French people ‘want more order: order in the streets, order at the borders’. We are supposed to recoil at this. Yet Henley makes no mention of the brutal murder last week of a 19-year-old student perpetrated in Paris by a Moroccan migrant under order of deportation for a previous rape – an event that has convulsed France. Nor does he mention that far-left students are disrupting tributes led by fellow students because they judge them to be instrumentalising the murder and demonising migrants. After all, anyone could have committed the crime. The possibility that migrants might issue from cultures whose attitudes towards women make it difficult for them to integrate into secular Western societies is a subject that is, of course, taboo.
As for the unspeakable Hungary, its government is simply ‘nativist’.
Most revealing of all is Engler’s concern that the idea of the EU as ‘a space of free movement and human rights’, the work of a generation of enlightened politicians and officials, stands to be torn down. For bourgeois liberals, Europe has no indigenous peoples or cultures, or at least none worth preserving. There is no such thing as European civilisation – or if there is, it must urgently be deconstructed for it is the product of colonial oppression, imperialism, Eurocentrism, Christianity, white racism and white privilege. Europe is merely a space, a vacant lot, for the construction of an inclusive and diverse global community, a new utopia purged of colonial oppression and whiteness, in which minority and marginalised groups can live in harmony.
Meanwhile, the bourgeois liberal elite can bathe in the virtue of their cosmopolitan luxury values, while living conveniently apart in segregated homogenous communities, the privileged beneficiaries of our European cultural and civilisational inheritance, enjoying the benefits of cheap migrant labour, frictionless travel to their summer villas, and that sweet sense of being part of a likeminded global community, an international jet set, who manage the global market and international capital flows in their own interest.
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Taking the author’s argument further, Muslim men make up 15 per cent of our prison population and anything up to an unbelievable half of the French prison population.
Are these statistics trying to tell us something?
The final paragraph is key, the UK’s new liberal leaders do not represent the true working class anymore; they are a niche well educated elite safely ensconced in their own middle-class villages or city suburbs – the neo-champagne socialists.
They no longer feel the pain of their constituents, who face longer waiting times for the NHS, with the appalling state of our state schools who have many classes which are both overcrowded and have a majority of students who speak English as a second language (if at all) all avoided through the use of private provision – or worse, supporting public provision but buying houses near the local grammar school or top-performing comprehensive.
Similarly, these liberals remain isolated from the appalling levels of crime and depravation forced upon the poorest in society under the pretext of integration of immigrants. Living in Doncaster, I have invited Rosie Winterton (ex. MP Doncaster Central) and Ed Milliband (MP Doncaster North and awkward Bacon Buttie eater) to walk the streets in Doncaster at night where the immigrants have been housed……where the police now no longer go unless double-crewed due to Romanian gypsy feuds where bricks are regularly thrown in the streets…….needless to say I have yet to get a response.
The aspirational working class voters who found a home under Boris Johnson and Thatcher (and to a lesser extent Cameron), were left bereft of a political home at the recent election, recognising Labour did not represent them but having to choose Reform as a protest against the stagnation of a Conservative Government after 14 years in power. I only hope that whoever replaces Rishi Sunak, has the ability to articulate the conservative proposition that resonates with both the party’s traditional voters and the whatever the new “Mondeo man” is called (EV-Evan maybe?) who works hard and aspires for a better future for their family.
My wife, who is a French national, was speaking to one of her sisters in France yesterday.
We happened to be walking in the middle of nowhere where we live, as darkness fell and, got told to ‘shush-it’ with loud laughter from me in being told, the present PM of France getting harassed by the leftie brigade in France in where, he put ‘submerged’ in a sentence regarding multiculturalism.