The old home in 1987
In 1955, with 8-year-old Derb and sister
10/27/2023
[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusivelyon VDARE.com]
Over in Europe, there have been some glimmers of sense on the issue of mass immigration:
The SVP actually has an explicit population policy, as every political party everywhere should have but very few do. The SVP’s population policy: to keep Switzerland’s 8.7 million-strong population below 10 million.
SVP actually placed first in the popular vote with 28 percent. This is a multiparty system, though; no fewer than ten parties won seats in the Swiss parliament. It’s also a complicated system; it’s not clear to me how the SVP’s triumph will translate into national policy, but they seem hopeful. From the London Guardian:
The leader of the populist, rightwing Swiss People’s party (SVP) has promised more pragmatism and “less political correctness” after it won Sunday’s election with an improved vote share of 28 percent.
Switzerland’s populists promise ‘less political correctness’ after election win, by Jon Henley, October 23, 2023
Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who usually shows up in news reports prefixed with the epithet “center-left,” told his country’s parliament on October 19th that Germany needs to start deporting, “on a large scale,” migrants who don’t have the right to stay in the country [Scholz says that Germany needs to expand deportations of rejected asylum-seekers, AP, October 20, 2023].
Chancellor Olaf Scholz is of course hearing the hoofbeats of AfD, the Alternative for Germany Party, riding to rescue Germany from the immigration catastrophe unleashed by his predecessor Angela Merkel eight years ago.
AfD has been polling well recently, at the expense of Scholz’s coalition.
As an ex-Brit, I’d like to tell you that there have been similar stirrings of good sense in the U.K.
Alas, I can’t. The place is too far gone.
Just reading about events in the old country makes my blood boil. Here for example is the always-reliable Ed West, writing at his Substack account recently. The topic is public housing in Britain, although nowadays the euphemism “social housing” is preferred.
An odd thing about housing in London is that some of the nicest, most expensive districts have a lot of this “social housing” scattered among the mansions of the upper-middle-classes.
A much odder thing is that a lot of this social housing in tony, pricey neighborhoods is inhabited by immigrants of the least-desirable kind — front men for Middle Eastern terrorist outfits, for instance. Ed writes:
Many people might be surprised to learn that social housing disproportionately favors people from abroad. Across the UK, 16 per cent of British citizens live in government housing, compared to 17 per cent of foreign nationals; in London, 30 per cent of people born in the Middle East live in government housing, and 40 per cent of sub-Saharan Africans (this rises to close to three-quarters for those born in Somalia).
Large numbers of people who arrived even in the last ten years occupy social housing in London, often in its most expensive parts. Indeed, a major driver of low-skilled immigration is needs-based access to social housing, without which it would not be possible for people to move here.
Homes for Hamas — How social housing funds extremism, Wrong Side of History, October 24, 2023
Ed offers us some lurid examples. Here for example is Muhammad Qassem Sawalha, a leading fundraiser for Hamas — yes, that Hamas. The authorities in Barnet, a very pleasant — and very expensive — borough of northwest London, housed Sawalha in a two-story house with a garden and garage back in 2003, all at a very modest rent. In 2021 the borough sold him the house at a 26 percent discount on the market value.
Hamas fugitive buys UK-funded home in most Jewish part of Britain https://t.co/667DFA9yT1 pic.twitter.com/Jnu2ahMx21
— New York Post (@nypost) October 22, 2023
Ed notes: “It is worth remembering that, in 2008, Barnet had the longest council waiting list in Britain.”
In other words there were many, many legacy British hoping to get social housing in the borough, the kind of house that this known terrorist front man had been given…
Mention of being on the waiting list for public housing conjures up one of my earliest memories. It’s of Monday, May 24th, 1948, ten days short of my third birthday.
I’d spent the first three years of my life living with my parents and sister in some rented rooms in a poor part of Northampton, England. They were on a waiting list for public housing, but prospects of getting it seemed years away.
Title to that house where they were renting belonged to a young man who was killed in the war. When the will was settled, Mum and Dad had to move out. They were in serious peril of becoming homeless.
Britain had acquired a socialist government in 1945, though, and that government had embarked on a big program of building public housing. At the last minute — in May 1948 — our number came up on the waiting list. That day — May 24th, 1948 — we moved to a brand-new house in a better neighborhood, rent nineteen shillings a week — less than four dollars.
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The old home in 1987 |
In 1955, with 8-year-old Derb and sister |
That was public housing then, for the British working class. If you had told people back then that foreigners could jump the queue for public housing on account of their “need,” you’d have been laughed out of the room.
The boss here, Peter Brimelow, is another former Brit of approximately the same age as myself. He once remarked, and still occasionally re-remarks, in reference to Britain’s demographic catastrophe, that ”People Should Be Hung From Lampposts, They Should Be Burned Alive, For What They’ve Done To Britain.”
That of course sends Progressives to the fainting couch; but those of us who remember Britain when she was Britain, before the Great Replacement, all agree with him.
We understand, though, that it was suicide, not murder. There is something pitiful, something yielding, in the modern British character that allowed it to happen.
The suicidal impulse is not universal. There’s always been some resistance. When it mattered, though, the Yielders were always more numerous than the Resisters, and won the day.
There was a little tableau illustrating those two parties, Yielders and Resisters, in this news coverage of Muslim protests in London recently.
Two young white Englishmen were there counterprotesting. They carried between them a large English flag — that is, the cross of St George in red on a white background;
not to be confused with the more complicated Union Jack flag of the U.K.
An officer of the Metropolitan Police — another young white Englishman — confronted and warned them against doing or saying anything racist.
Nice to know the British police know who to really go after: pic.twitter.com/X3765n00YH
— Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray) October 22, 2023
His assumption must be that legacy English people flaunting an English flag on English soil in England’s capital city are hovering on the edge of racism.
There you see them: two Resisters and a Yielder.
The Yielder is the one clothed in governmental authority.
John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
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