Ready, Set, Discriminate!

It's clear to me from a brief glance at the BBC Have Your Say discussion on ethnic minorities that Britain is doomed. It is a possibility that the BBC just attracts the idiots and the nutjobs, and this is probably more consistent with my experience of actual people out in the world. But then I move in quite restricted circles, some might say, and the briefest glance at the Daily Mail, the Sun, BNP forums or any other place the British public can express itself seems to tip the scales towards the far more damaging possibility - that Britain is full of idiots, idiots who genuinely think that somehow single, middle class, British white men have become the most disadvantaged group in the UK.

The sheer lunacy of such a belief baffles me. Unless there has been a massive upheaval in the 9 years since the 2001 census, Britain is roughly 92% white. 92%. How can a group that is so overwhelmingly the majority be truly disadvantaged? If nothing else, a group that size would be capable of a serious and bloody revolution, or at least of voting out any government that so discriminated against them. That this probably will happen at the next election is not proof, however, of such discrimination - that would most definitely be a case of affirming the consequent.

As I said before, even in my limited experience, I have never heard any middle class white man say to me that they feel disadvantaged. Of course, some might say that me and my friends are precisely the problem, like the human batteries in the Matrix, happily swallowing down our spoon-fed lies as we float ignorant to the world around us, that we have bought into the myth of the hard-working immigrant. True, if you have 6 Polish mates living in a flat sending money back home, they can afford to undercut the wages of a British worker trying to support a family of 4. But this is a product (or problem) of globalisation, not directly the fault of the government, though they have, quite rightly, encouraged the UK to be a global market force.

Employers have the right to hire who they like - if they can get legal labour cheaper to do the same quality of job, then you cannot blame them for doing so without launching into a Marxist or Hegelian argument about the employer's responsibility to the employee. The harder a job is to do, or the more skill it requires, the more it should be paid. So if a lot of people in the UK became builders, and building is a relatively easy job, then competition is bound to be fierce. Obviously immigration of the level we have seen was broadly unexpected and unpredictable, so there is no doubt sympathy and understanding is due to these people who have now found themselves in a situation where they cannot compete. But using this to justify opposition to immigration totally, or the UK's membership of or interaction with the EU, is decrepit. Shutting Britain out of the EU is not the answer, and it will not help anyone in the long run.

If there is more global supply than demand for builders, the builders who demand the most will suffer. This is why the government offers extensive retraining programmes, for those who find themselves stuck in professions where their future is insecure. It happened with miners and ship-builders, and it can happen with construction workers too. The advantage to low-skill professions is that they are similarly easy to get on to - taxi drivers, shop assistants, waiters. The learning curve for these is pretty easy, and thus competition is high.

But people suffer from a kind of hysteresis, that is to say, a resistance to change. Marx pointed out that when people start to define themselves by their job, they lose control over themselves, because they become totally reliant on external forces for the determination of their self-worth. The fact is that most immigrants come over here because they can do some jobs better than us, or work harder than us. But the street goes both ways - there are plenty of UK ex-pats around the world enjoying the benefit of skills locals don't have and jobs locals can't get.

To bring it back more specifically to race let me state that I am absolutely no supporter of Affirmative Action. And amongst the spurious rhetoric and farcical self-justification for racist or xenophobic attitudes, a few sensible arguments rear their heads. One could argue that the labour government has, on occasion, coddled some minority interests and neglected their original core supporter group, the white working class. The UK is nominally a multi-cultural society, but there are a lot of ways to run such a system, and some of Labour's failings are in the desire to not offend, to over-protect, to placate those who do not need or deserve to be placated.

Obviously the Daily Mail's horror stories of "Sharia Law for the UK in 10 years" are beyond nonsense, but I do hold that people coming to this country should be of benefit to it. That means being able to speak English (or learn pretty quickly). It means abiding by our laws and, where appropriate, our customs - honour killings may be as statistically inconsequential as terrorism, but they are still symptomatic of a belief that religious or personal law somehow trumps the law of the land. Anyone holding that belief does not deserve to be here.

Such legitimate concerns, however, are easily twisted in the hands of the demagogues and, quite frankly, cunts who make up the shit-stirring elite. The Daily Mail, the BNP, Fox News, the neo-cons, the Islamic extremist recruiters - even in fighting one another, they share a methodology, that of preying on people's fears and blowing them out of proportion until they seem all-consuming. They are the single-issue parties, the ones who forsake debate for argument, logic for emotion, compassion for combat. They appeal to the greed of the individual, the desperation of survival, or, as Obama so eloquently put it, the politics of division - essentially, us and them.

And division is where they get their power: Osama, Griffin, Cheney, Limbaugh, and anyone else who picks a target and says "You are under attack here, you are the disadvantaged, the under-priveleged. They hate you, so hate them back, I'll show you how." What the BBC forum posters and the suicide bombers and the BNP members need to realise is that they are the ones in the Matrix, being spoon-fed the bullshit. And until they wake up, and start thinking for themselves, the politics of division will simply live on...