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Inequality Matters - Forbes

There are two familiar responses to the problem of human need.
Conservatives say that the problem is poverty, and the answer is
to create wealth. Liberals say that the problem is inequality, and
that the answer is to confiscate wealth. Conservatives say that by
confiscating wealth, socialist and communist systems of
government throughout the 20th century raised no one out of
poverty, but lowered quite a lot of people into it. Liberals retort
that wealth-creation always benefits the owners of capital more
than it benefits those who live from wages, and therefore the
long-term effect of the free economy is to transfer property from
the poor to the rich. How, they ask, can this be a benefit to the
poor, and in any case how are we to persuade the poor to accept
it?
The liberal position has received an enormous boost from the
publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by the French
left-wing economist, Thomas Piketty, an academic who is also an
advisor to French socialist politicians, notably to Sgolne
Royale. The book has been ecstatically received by American
liberals such as Paul Krugman of the New York Times, since it
argues that the free economy and the pursuit of wealth are just as
dangerous as liberals say they are. Roughly put, Piketty argues
that capitalism is advancing inexorably towards the kind of crisis
foretold by Marx, as wealth is drained from the economy and
piled up in a useless hoard of gold.
Of course, you might wonder why this hasnt already happened,
and Piketty gives various roundabout explanations of this. He also
gives many statistics and graphs purporting to show that it is in
fact happening. The rich, he tells us, are getting richer at the
expense of the poor, and if nothing is done about it we shall enter
a time of violent revolution, as the blatant inequalities become too
much for the impoverished to bear.

Piketty bases his argument on two premises, one a priori, the

other empirical. The first is the well-known law that the rate of
return on capital tends to exceed the rate of growth of the
economy: for if it did not, there would be no motive for
investment. This law, that r > g, is, with certain qualifications,
widely accepted, not as the whole truth about a modern economy
but as a principle governing the rational disposition of capital.
The second of Pikettys arguments is empirical, and based on a
detailed analysis of tax returns and other evidence, to show that
the growth in income among wage earners has in recent times
been significantly less than the growth of the returns to investors.
In other words, r > g is not just an a priori speculation, but an
empirical truth.
Of course there are wars and revolutions, which lead to massive
redistributions of resources, usually to those who did nothing to
earn them. But by and large, and given sufficient global stability,
wealth will go on passing in a one-way traffic from poor to
rich. Joseph Stiglitz has argued the same point, on slightly
different grounds (The Price of Inequality, 2012). And these
speculations feed into the lefts zero-sum way of thinking,
according to which every benefit achieved by one person must be
a cost inflicted on another. If the rich are rich, it is because the
poor are poor; and believing this, you can nurture all those old
resentments against the people who are better off than you are, on
the grounds that they have stolen what was rightfully yours.
Pikettys arguments have been pretty well exploded, and by no
one
more
effectively
than Jonah
Goldberg,
writing
in Commentary Magazine. Most telling, perhaps, is Pikettys
examination of the Forbes list of the worlds wealthiest people, in
order to establish that the largest fortunes grew much more
rapidly than average wealth during the period 1987 to 2010. The
data seem to show that the wealth of the Forbes list grew during
that period by an inflation-adjusted 7% even higher than the 45% return implied by the r > g argument. So the rich really are
getting richer at our expense, and by quite a lot! However, Piketty
neglects to mention that the people on the Forbes list today are

almost all completely different from those on the list in 1987. In

other words, the data show that capital is not accumulating in the
hands of those who already possess it, but moving around in just
the way that social mobility and growing wealth require.
Two questions are raised by Pikettys argument. First, why is
inequality so bad? And secondly, if it is so, what is the remedy?
Piketty suggests that inequalities breed revolutions, and that as
the transfers from poor to rich continue the situation becomes
ever more explosive. But, even if that is so in France, it is not so
in America. Research suggests that Americans live happily with
inequality, provided they can see the way to bettering their lot. If
it is really poverty that we object to, then we should tolerate
whatever is needed to lift people out of it, inequality included. A
poll in January conducted byMcLaughlin & Associates (for the
YG Network) found that Americans by a margin of 2:1 (64
percent to 33 percent) prefer expanding economic growth to
narrowing the gap between rich and poor. In 1990, Gallup

Cochin, India (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

asked Americans whether the country benefits from having a class
of rich people. Sixty-two percent said yes. In 2012, 63 percent
said yes.
It seems, therefore, that most Americans do not think in the zerosum way of French left-wing economists. They do not believe
that the rich are rich because the poor are poor. They dont want
to confiscate wealth from the wealthy, but to create wealth for
themselves.

That is not Pikettys solution. For him inequality is the prime evil,
and it is to be overcome by the constant confiscation of capital.
He proposes achieving this by a tax on wealth, and by a marginal

tax-rate of 80% on the highest incomes in other words, by the

kind of policies that French socialist governments have been
introducing into Europes unhappiest country.
Piketty does not ask what then happens to this confiscated wealth.
Who holds it, for what purpose, and with what effect? The answer
is clear: wealth confiscated from the wealthy is held for political
purposes. Instead of being translated into goods and services
according to the desires of freely associating citizens it is retained
in the form of political power the power of the socialist
politicians and their advisors over the people whom they tax. In
this society of massive confiscation there will be just as many
accumulations as in the old market economy. But they will not be
accumulations of goods that are constantly dispersed and
redistributed by our free agreements. They will be accumulations
of power in the hands of the expert advisors in other words in
the hands of people like Piketty. And in this case there really will
be a one-way traffic in assets, since all power that accumulates in
the state is stolen from the rest of us.
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Air Strikes Are Not Enough To Defeat ISIS
Explosives dropped from the air are among the most terrifying
by-products of modern warfare. The destruction that they cause
comes from nowhere and unpredictably. And it is compounded by
the falling buildings and the fires. People subjected to aerial
bombardment will therefore quickly lose heart and sue for peace.
So Hitler thought, when he sent the Luftwaffe night after night
over London, in order to break the morale of the British people.
The result, however, was a determination to sit out the ordeal, a
remarkable ingenuity in adapting to it, and a fierce desire for
revenge. When that revenge took place a few years later, the
German cities were destroyed and thousands killed, many

horribly incinerated as at Dresden. But this did little or nothing to

hasten the end of the war.
Of course troops who can summon air strikes from the ground
have a decided advantage in combat. But they have this advantage
only if they are there, on the ground, able to confront the enemy
and force him into the open. In the absence of an effective
opponent troops can adapt to bombardment from the air, and
regroup after every assault, all the more determined to triumph.
This is what we are seeing in the battle for Kobane.
Throughout the crisis caused by the rise of the Islamic State
President Obama has stuck to his policy of not sending in
American troops. And if the Americans dont go in, probably no
one else will go in either, although the feeling in Britain,
following the recent despicable murder of civilian hostages, is
now leaning towards a fight. In any case there is no other way of
winning the war, which means that Obama has decided that, on
balance, it is a war that America can afford to lose. Is this true? I
dont think so. The Islamic State will not become a peaceful
member of the community of nations. Having established itself by
violence and genocide it will continue in the same way, for fear of
reprisals and from the natural suspicion of its neighbours.
The Islamic State is a collection of god-intoxicated enthusiasts,
enjoying stolen assets and ruling over a subdued and frightened
population whose loyalty they cannot guarantee. Like the original
Islamic empire, the Islamic State has been established by
conquest, and will always need further conquests in order to
confirm its legitimacy. Syria and Iraq will be in no position to
resist IS, once it has repaired its infrastructure and organized itself
as a police state. For it can be resisted only by forces with a rival
loyalty, and animated by a national idea. Unlike the Kurds, who
fight for their nation and from an ancient claim to territory, the
Iraqis and Syrians have little or no national attachment. Faced
with invasion they will always be tempted, as they have been
tempted at every stage in the present conflict, to lay down their
arms and flee to their villages.

If the IS is not defeated in the present conflict, therefore, we will

have to accept the presence of an inflamed and paranoid police
state in the heart of the Middle East, one whose leaders are
hardened by warfare, indifferent to the sufferings of minorities
and full of a visceral hatred towards the West and its jahilliya.
The new state will almost certainly begin to take an interest in
Turkey, encouraging Islamic extremism there, and reaching out to
those young people who are captivated by the jihadist idea.
President Erdogan of Turkey has played a double game so far,
claiming to be part of the coalition against IS, while watching the
destruction of Kobane and resolutely preventing weapons and
reinforcements from reaching the Kurds who are fighting there.
His own Sunnite religion, and his desire to restore what he can of
the Turkish Caliphate, naturally leads to a certain sympathy
towards IS, even if he would never tolerate the new state as a
partner in an eventual bid for imperial power. One way or
another, Erdogan is looking for a result from which Turkey can
emerge with real gains and an enhanced Islamic identity. The
defeat of IS would not be not such a result on the contrary, it
would leave him with a renewed Kurdish nationalism both inside
and outside his borders.
The Islamic State, once it has asserted control within defined
borders, will not be a democracy. It will be a police state in the
hands of hardened warriors. It will not be accepted by the
international community and will have only one thing on which to
call in order to establish its legitimacy, and that is the Sunni faith.
Once the infidels within the state have been converted or killed,
the jihad against the infidel will have to continue. IS will actively
foment terrorism abroad, and will almost certainly seek to obtain
nuclear and biological weapons. In a worst-case scenario, in
which the Taliban regain power in Afghanistan, and a network of
sympathy in Pakistan, those weapons will be not so difficult to
obtain.
Can America afford this scenario? Surely not. Of course, we can
sympathize with the Presidents reluctance to get involved. The

problem is of far greater importance to Europe than to the United

States, and the Europeans seem determined to do nothing, in the
absurd belief that nice people have nothing to fear from nasty
ones. (See my previous post on Soft Power.) And it is undeniable
that the rise of the European Union as a soft bureaucracy,
disarming and debilitating the will of the European nations, has
undermined the Western alliance, with the result that America is
reluctant to be seen to take a leading role.
Still, America will be as much threatened by a victorious IS as the
Middle East and Europe will be. The impact will not be confined
to the economic sphere. America will have to confront continuous
threats to its security and a steady loss of influence across the
Islamic world. Whether Muslim countries accept the Islamic State
as a legitimate partner, or whether Turkey takes advantage of the
situation once again to spread its power to the East, the entire
status of the West, and of America as its moral and political
representative, will suffer a seismic blow. The future of Israel will
again be in doubt, and young people all across the Middle East
will be looking for a new order of solutions, one that might
promise an end to conflicts that have continued to spread from
country to country and have so far never arrived at a destination.
* *

A YOUTUBE link showing a song and message entitled To Our

Countries from two young women, to fighters in the Middle East,
that may be of interest to anyone who read my previous post on
Too many young men and no women.

That is not Pikettys solution. For him inequality is the prime evil,
and it is to be overcome by the constant confiscation of capital.
He proposes achieving this by a tax on wealth, and by a marginal
tax-rate of 80% on the highest incomes in other words, by the
kind of policies that French socialist governments have been
introducing into Europes unhappiest country.

Piketty does not ask what then happens to this confiscated wealth.
Who holds it, for what purpose, and with what effect? The answer
is clear: wealth confiscated from the wealthy is held for political
purposes. Instead of being translated into goods and services
according to the desires of freely associating citizens it is retained
in the form of political power the power of the socialist
politicians and their advisors over the people whom they tax. In
this society of massive confiscation there will be just as many
accumulations as in the old market economy. But they will not be
accumulations of goods that are constantly dispersed and
redistributed by our free agreements. They will be accumulations
of power in the hands of the expert advisors in other words in
the hands of people like Piketty. And in this case there really will
be a one-way traffic in assets, since all power that accumulates in
the state is stolen from the rest of us.
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Why Is The Middle East Failing? Because There Are Too
Many Young Men, And No Women
Explosives dropped from the air are among the most terrifying
by-products of modern warfare. The destruction that they cause
comes from nowhere and unpredictably. And it is compounded by
the falling buildings and the fires. People subjected to aerial
bombardment will therefore quickly lose heart and sue for peace.
So Hitler thought, when he sent the Luftwaffe night after night
over London, in order to break the morale of the British people.
The result, however, was a determination to sit out the ordeal, a
remarkable ingenuity in adapting to it, and a fierce desire for
revenge. When that revenge took place a few years later, the
German cities were destroyed and thousands killed, many
horribly incinerated as at Dresden. But this did little or nothing to
hasten the end of the war.

Of course troops who can summon air strikes from the ground
have a decided advantage in combat. But they have this advantage
only if they are there, on the ground, able to confront the enemy
and force him into the open. In the absence of an effective
opponent troops can adapt to bombardment from the air, and
regroup after every assault, all the more determined to triumph.
This is what we are seeing in the battle for Kobane.
Throughout the crisis caused by the rise of the Islamic State
President Obama has stuck to his policy of not sending in
American troops. And if the Americans dont go in, probably no
one else will go in either, although the feeling in Britain,
following the recent despicable murder of civilian hostages, is
now leaning towards a fight. In any case there is no other way of
winning the war, which means that Obama has decided that, on
balance, it is a war that America can afford to lose. Is this true? I
dont think so. The Islamic State will not become a peaceful
member of the community of nations. Having established itself by
violence and genocide it will continue in the same way, for fear of
reprisals and from the natural suspicion of its neighbours.
The Islamic State is a collection of god-intoxicated enthusiasts,
enjoying stolen assets and ruling over a subdued and frightened
population whose loyalty they cannot guarantee. Like the original
Islamic empire, the Islamic State has been established by
conquest, and will always need further conquests in order to
confirm its legitimacy. Syria and Iraq will be in no position to
resist IS, once it has repaired its infrastructure and organized itself
as a police state. For it can be resisted only by forces with a rival
loyalty, and animated by a national idea. Unlike the Kurds, who
fight for their nation and from an ancient claim to territory, the
Iraqis and Syrians have little or no national attachment. Faced
with invasion they will always be tempted, as they have been
tempted at every stage in the present conflict, to lay down their
arms and flee to their villages.
If the IS is not defeated in the present conflict, therefore, we will
have to accept the presence of an inflamed and paranoid police

state in the heart of the Middle East, one whose leaders are
hardened by warfare, indifferent to the sufferings of minorities
and full of a visceral hatred towards the West and its jahilliya.
The new state will almost certainly begin to take an interest in
Turkey, encouraging Islamic extremism there, and reaching out to
those young people who are captivated by the jihadist idea.
President Erdogan of Turkey has played a double game so far,
claiming to be part of the coalition against IS, while watching the
destruction of Kobane and resolutely preventing weapons and
reinforcements from reaching the Kurds who are fighting there.
His own Sunnite religion, and his desire to restore what he can of
the Turkish Caliphate, naturally leads to a certain sympathy
towards IS, even if he would never tolerate the new state as a
partner in an eventual bid for imperial power. One way or
another, Erdogan is looking for a result from which Turkey can
emerge with real gains and an enhanced Islamic identity. The
defeat of IS would not be not such a result on the contrary, it
would leave him with a renewed Kurdish nationalism both inside
and outside his borders.
The Islamic State, once it has asserted control within defined
borders, will not be a democracy. It will be a police state in the
hands of hardened warriors. It will not be accepted by the
international community and will have only one thing on which to
call in order to establish its legitimacy, and that is the Sunni faith.
Once the infidels within the state have been converted or killed,
the jihad against the infidel will have to continue. IS will actively
foment terrorism abroad, and will almost certainly seek to obtain
nuclear and biological weapons. In a worst-case scenario, in
which the Taliban regain power in Afghanistan, and a network of
sympathy in Pakistan, those weapons will be not so difficult to
obtain.
Can America afford this scenario? Surely not. Of course, we can
sympathize with the Presidents reluctance to get involved. The
problem is of far greater importance to Europe than to the United
States, and the Europeans seem determined to do nothing, in the

absurd belief that nice people have nothing to fear from nasty
ones. (See my previous post on Soft Power.) And it is undeniable
that the rise of the European Union as a soft bureaucracy,
disarming and debilitating the will of the European nations, has
undermined the Western alliance, with the result that America is
reluctant to be seen to take a leading role.
Still, America will be as much threatened by a victorious IS as the
Middle East and Europe will be. The impact will not be confined
to the economic sphere. America will have to confront continuous
threats to its security and a steady loss of influence across the
Islamic world. Whether Muslim countries accept the Islamic State
as a legitimate partner, or whether Turkey takes advantage of the
situation once again to spread its power to the East, the entire
status of the West, and of America as its moral and political
representative, will suffer a seismic blow. The future of Israel will
again be in doubt, and young people all across the Middle East
will be looking for a new order of solutions, one that might
promise an end to conflicts that have continued to spread from
country to country and have so far never arrived at a destination.
* *

A YOUTUBE link showing a song and message entitled To Our

Countries from two young women, to fighters in the Middle East,
that may be of interest to anyone who read my previous post on
Too many young men and no women.

That is not Pikettys solution. For him inequality is the prime evil,
and it is to be overcome by the constant confiscation of capital.
He proposes achieving this by a tax on wealth, and by a marginal
tax-rate of 80% on the highest incomes in other words, by the
kind of policies that French socialist governments have been
introducing into Europes unhappiest country.
Piketty does not ask what then happens to this confiscated wealth.
Who holds it, for what purpose, and with what effect? The answer

is clear: wealth confiscated from the wealthy is held for political

purposes. Instead of being translated into goods and services
according to the desires of freely associating citizens it is retained
in the form of political power the power of the socialist
politicians and their advisors over the people whom they tax. In
this society of massive confiscation there will be just as many
accumulations as in the old market economy. But they will not be
accumulations of goods that are constantly dispersed and
redistributed by our free agreements. They will be accumulations
of power in the hands of the expert advisors in other words in
the hands of people like Piketty. And in this case there really will
be a one-way traffic in assets, since all power that accumulates in
the state is stolen from the rest of us.
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Why Did British Police Ignore Pakistani Gangs Abusing 1,400
Rotherham Children? Political Correctness
A story of rampant child abuseignored and abetted by the
policeis emerging out of the British town of Rotherham. Until
now, its scale and scope would have been inconceivable in a
civilized country.
Imagine the following case. A fourteen-year old girl is taken into
care by the social services unit of the town where she lives,
because her parents are drug-addicted, and she has been neglected
and is not turning up in school. She is one of many, for that is the
way in Britain today. And local government entitiesCouncils
can be ordered by the courts to stand in for parents of neglected
children. The Council places the girl in a home, where she is kept
with others under supervision from the social services
department. The home is regularly visited by young men who try
to entice the girls into their cars, so as to give them drugs and
alcohol, and then coerce them into sex.

The girl, who is lonely and uncared for, meets a man outside the
home, who promises a trip to the cinema and a party with children
of her age. She falls into the trap. After she has been raped by a
group of five men she is told that, if she says a word to anyone,
she will be taken from the home and beaten. When, after the
episode is repeated, she threatens to go to the police, she is taken
into the countryside, doused in petrol, and told that she is going to
be set alight, unless she promises to tell no one of the ordeal.
Social

workers

tell

girls

they

cannot

help

them

Meanwhile she must accept weekly abuse, in return for drugs and
alcohol. Soon she finds herself being taken to other towns in the
area, and hired out for sexual purposes to other men. She is
distraught and depressed, and at the point when she can stand it
no longer, she goes to the police. She can only stutter a few
words, and cannot bring herself to accuse anyone in particular.
Her complaint is dismissed on the grounds that any sex involved
must have been consensual. The social worker in charge of her
case listens to her complaint, but tells her that she cannot act
unless the girl identifies her abusers. But when the girl describes
them the social worker switches off with a shrug and says that she
can do nothing. Her father, his drug habit notwithstanding, has
tried to keep contact with his daughter and suspects what is
happening. But when he goes to the police, he is arrested for
obstruction and charged with wasting police time.
Over the two years of her ordeal the girl makes several attempts
on her own life, and eventually ends up abandoned and homeless,
without an education and with no prospect of a normal life.
Impossible, you will say, that such a thing could happen in
Britain. In fact it is only one of over 1,400 cases, all arising
during the course of the last fifteen years in the South Yorkshire
town of Rotherham, all involving vulnerable girls either in
Council care or inadequately protected by their families from
gangs of sexual predators. Almost no arrests have been made, no
social workers or police officers have been reprimanded, and until

recently the matter was dismissed by all those responsible as a

matter of no real significance. Increasing public awareness of the
problem, however, led to complaints, triggering a series of official
reports. The latest report, from Professor Alexis Jay, former chief
inspector of social work in Scotland, gives the truth for the first
time, in 153 disturbing pages. One fact stands out above all the
horrors detailed in the document, which is that the girl victims
were white, and their abusers Pakistani.
Sociologists convinced government that the police are racist
Fifteen years ago, when these crimes were just beginning,
the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry into the conduct of the British
police was made by Sir William Macpherson a High Court judge.
The immediate occasion had been a murder in which the victim
was black, the perpetrators white, and the behaviour of the
investigating police lax and possibly prejudiced. The report
accused the police not just those involved in the case, but the
entire police force of the country of institutionalised racism.
This piece of sociological newspeak was, at the time, very
popular with leftist sociologists. For it made an accusation which
could not be refuted by anyone who had the misfortune to be
accused of it.
However well you behaved, however scrupulously you treated
people of different races and without regard to their ethnic
identity or the colour of their skin, you would be guilty of
institutionalised racism, simply on account of the institution to
which you belonged and on behalf of which you were acting. Not
surprisingly, sociologists and social workers, the vast majority of
whom are professionally disposed to believe that middle class
society is incurably racist, latched on to the expression.
MacPherson too climbed onto the bandwagon since, at the time, it
was the easiest and safest way to wash your hands in public, to
say that I, at least, am not guilty of the only crime that is
universally recognised and everywhere in evidence.
Police more concerned with political correctness than crime

The result of this has been that police forces lean over backwards
to avoid the accusation of racism, while social workers will
hesitate to intervene in any case in which they could be accused
of discriminating against ethnic minorities. Matters are made
worse by the rise of militant Islam, which has added to the old
crime of racism the new crime of Islamophobia. No social
worker today will risk being accused of this crime. In Rotherham
a social worker would be mad, and a police officer barely less so,
to set out to investigate cases of suspected sexual abuse, when the
perpetrators are Asian Muslims and the victims ethnically
English. Best to sweep it under the carpet, find ways of accusing
the victims or their parents or the surrounding culture of
institutionalised racism, and attending to more urgent matters
such as the housing needs of recent immigrants, or the traffic
offences committed by those racist middle classes.
Americans too are familiar with this syndrome. Political
correctness among sociologists comes from socialist convictions
and the tired old theories that produce them. But among ordinary
people it comes from fear. The people of Rotherham know that it
is unsafe for a girl to take a taxi-ride from someone with Asian
features; they know that Pakistani Muslims often do not treat
white girls with the respect that they treat girls from their own
community. They know, and have known over fifteen years, that
there are gangs of predators on the look-out for vulnerable girls,
and that the gangs are for the most part Asian young men who see
English society not as the community to which they belong, but as
a sexual hunting ground. But they dare not express this
knowledge, in either words or deed. Still less do they dare to do
so if their job is that of social worker or police officer. Let slip the
mere hint that Pakistani Muslims are more likely than indigenous
Englishmen to commit sexual crimes and you will be branded as a
racist and an Islamophobe, to be ostracised in the workplace and
put henceforth under observation.

Rotherham Town Hall. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No

one

will

be

fired

This would matter less if fear had no consequences. Unfortunately

political correctness causes people not merely to disguise their
beliefs but to refuse to act on them, to accuse others who confess
to them, and in general to go along with policies that have been
forced on the British people by minority groups of activists. The
intention of the activists is to disrupt and dismantle the old forms
of social order. They believe that our society is not just racist, but
far too comfortable, far too unequal, far too bound up with fuddyduddy old ways that are experienced by people at the bottom of
society the working classes, the immigrants, the homeless, the
illegals as oppressive and demeaning. They enthusiastically
propagate the doctrines of political correctness as a way of taking
revenge on a social order from which they feel alienated.
Ordinary people are so intimidated by this that they repeat the
doctrines, like religious mantras which they hope will keep them
safe in hostile territory. Hence people in Britain have accepted
without resistance the huge transformations that have been
inflicted on them over the last thirty years, largely by activists

working through the Labour Party. They have accepted

immigration policies that have filled our cities with disaffected
Muslims, many of whom have now gone to fight against us in
Syria and Iraq. They have accepted the growth of Islamic schools
in which children are taught to prepare themselves for jihad
against the surrounding social order. They have accepted the
constant denigration of their country, its institutions and its
inherited religion, for the simple reason that these things
aretheirs and therefore tainted with forbidden loyalties.
And when the truth is expressed at last, nobody is fired, no arrests
are made, and the elected Police and Communities Commissioner
for Rotherham, although forced to resign from the Labour
Party,refuses to resign from his job. After a few weeks all will
have been swept under the carpet, and the work of destruction can
resume.

Nevertheless the effect of the campaign has been to awaken in

both the Scots and the English the sense that they are no longer
united, whatever the outcome of the vote. Neither will feel
obliged to pay for the mistakes or services the debts of the other,
and all transfers of assets, all movements of populations, all
distributions of expertise and authority will be challenged and
made into topics of resentment.
And the great question facing the English namely, when can we
have a Parliament of our own, like the Scots, the Welsh and the
Northern Irish? will press continually for an answer. Once that
Parliament has been granted, what then remains of the Union,
other than the name, and the existence of an increasingly helpless
Monarch appointed by history to sit on a movable throne?
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The Culture Of Soft Power

A story of rampant child abuseignored and abetted by the
policeis emerging out of the British town of Rotherham. Until
now, its scale and scope would have been inconceivable in a
civilized country.
Imagine the following case. A fourteen-year old girl is taken into
care by the social services unit of the town where she lives,
because her parents are drug-addicted, and she has been neglected
and is not turning up in school. She is one of many, for that is the
way in Britain today. And local government entitiesCouncils
can be ordered by the courts to stand in for parents of neglected
children. The Council places the girl in a home, where she is kept
with others under supervision from the social services
department. The home is regularly visited by young men who try
to entice the girls into their cars, so as to give them drugs and
alcohol, and then coerce them into sex.
The girl, who is lonely and uncared for, meets a man outside the
home, who promises a trip to the cinema and a party with children
of her age. She falls into the trap. After she has been raped by a
group of five men she is told that, if she says a word to anyone,
she will be taken from the home and beaten. When, after the
episode is repeated, she threatens to go to the police, she is taken
into the countryside, doused in petrol, and told that she is going to
be set alight, unless she promises to tell no one of the ordeal.
Social

workers

tell

girls

they

cannot

help

them

Meanwhile she must accept weekly abuse, in return for drugs and
alcohol. Soon she finds herself being taken to other towns in the
area, and hired out for sexual purposes to other men. She is
distraught and depressed, and at the point when she can stand it
no longer, she goes to the police. She can only stutter a few
words, and cannot bring herself to accuse anyone in particular.
Her complaint is dismissed on the grounds that any sex involved
must have been consensual. The social worker in charge of her

case listens to her complaint, but tells her that she cannot act
unless the girl identifies her abusers. But when the girl describes
them the social worker switches off with a shrug and says that she
can do nothing. Her father, his drug habit notwithstanding, has
tried to keep contact with his daughter and suspects what is
happening. But when he goes to the police, he is arrested for
obstruction and charged with wasting police time.
Over the two years of her ordeal the girl makes several attempts
on her own life, and eventually ends up abandoned and homeless,
without an education and with no prospect of a normal life.
Impossible, you will say, that such a thing could happen in
Britain. In fact it is only one of over 1,400 cases, all arising
during the course of the last fifteen years in the South Yorkshire
town of Rotherham, all involving vulnerable girls either in
Council care or inadequately protected by their families from
gangs of sexual predators. Almost no arrests have been made, no
social workers or police officers have been reprimanded, and until
recently the matter was dismissed by all those responsible as a
matter of no real significance. Increasing public awareness of the
problem, however, led to complaints, triggering a series of official
reports. The latest report, from Professor Alexis Jay, former chief
inspector of social work in Scotland, gives the truth for the first
time, in 153 disturbing pages. One fact stands out above all the
horrors detailed in the document, which is that the girl victims
were white, and their abusers Pakistani.
Sociologists convinced government that the police are racist
Fifteen years ago, when these crimes were just beginning,
the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry into the conduct of the British
police was made by Sir William Macpherson a High Court judge.
The immediate occasion had been a murder in which the victim
was black, the perpetrators white, and the behaviour of the
investigating police lax and possibly prejudiced. The report
accused the police not just those involved in the case, but the
entire police force of the country of institutionalised racism.

This piece of sociological newspeak was, at the time, very

popular with leftist sociologists. For it made an accusation which
could not be refuted by anyone who had the misfortune to be
accused of it.
However well you behaved, however scrupulously you treated
people of different races and without regard to their ethnic
identity or the colour of their skin, you would be guilty of
institutionalised racism, simply on account of the institution to
which you belonged and on behalf of which you were acting. Not
surprisingly, sociologists and social workers, the vast majority of
whom are professionally disposed to believe that middle class
society is incurably racist, latched on to the expression.
MacPherson too climbed onto the bandwagon since, at the time, it
was the easiest and safest way to wash your hands in public, to
say that I, at least, am not guilty of the only crime that is
universally recognised and everywhere in evidence.
Police more concerned with political correctness than crime
The result of this has been that police forces lean over backwards
to avoid the accusation of racism, while social workers will
hesitate to intervene in any case in which they could be accused
of discriminating against ethnic minorities. Matters are made
worse by the rise of militant Islam, which has added to the old
crime of racism the new crime of Islamophobia. No social
worker today will risk being accused of this crime. In Rotherham
a social worker would be mad, and a police officer barely less so,
to set out to investigate cases of suspected sexual abuse, when the
perpetrators are Asian Muslims and the victims ethnically
English. Best to sweep it under the carpet, find ways of accusing
the victims or their parents or the surrounding culture of
institutionalised racism, and attending to more urgent matters
such as the housing needs of recent immigrants, or the traffic
offences committed by those racist middle classes.
Americans too are familiar with this syndrome. Political
correctness among sociologists comes from socialist convictions
and the tired old theories that produce them. But among ordinary

people it comes from fear. The people of Rotherham know that it

is unsafe for a girl to take a taxi-ride from someone with Asian
features; they know that Pakistani Muslims often do not treat
white girls with the respect that they treat girls from their own
community. They know, and have known over fifteen years, that
there are gangs of predators on the look-out for vulnerable girls,
and that the gangs are for the most part Asian young men who see
English society not as the community to which they belong, but as
a sexual hunting ground. But they dare not express this
knowledge, in either words or deed. Still less do they dare to do
so if their job is that of social worker or police officer. Let slip the
mere hint that Pakistani Muslims are more likely than indigenous
Englishmen to commit sexual crimes and you will be branded as a
racist and an Islamophobe, to be ostracised in the workplace and
put henceforth under observation.

Rotherham Town Hall. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No

one

will

be

fired

This would matter less if fear had no consequences. Unfortunately

political correctness causes people not merely to disguise their
beliefs but to refuse to act on them, to accuse others who confess

to them, and in general to go along with policies that have been

forced on the British people by minority groups of activists. The
intention of the activists is to disrupt and dismantle the old forms
of social order. They believe that our society is not just racist, but
far too comfortable, far too unequal, far too bound up with fuddyduddy old ways that are experienced by people at the bottom of
society the working classes, the immigrants, the homeless, the
illegals as oppressive and demeaning. They enthusiastically
propagate the doctrines of political correctness as a way of taking
revenge on a social order from which they feel alienated.
Ordinary people are so intimidated by this that they repeat the
doctrines, like religious mantras which they hope will keep them
safe in hostile territory. Hence people in Britain have accepted
without resistance the huge transformations that have been
inflicted on them over the last thirty years, largely by activists
working through the Labour Party. They have accepted
immigration policies that have filled our cities with disaffected
Muslims, many of whom have now gone to fight against us in
Syria and Iraq. They have accepted the growth of Islamic schools
in which children are taught to prepare themselves for jihad
against the surrounding social order. They have accepted the
constant denigration of their country, its institutions and its
inherited religion, for the simple reason that these things
aretheirs and therefore tainted with forbidden loyalties.
And when the truth is expressed at last, nobody is fired, no arrests
are made, and the elected Police and Communities Commissioner
for Rotherham, although forced to resign from the Labour
Party,refuses to resign from his job. After a few weeks all will
have been swept under the carpet, and the work of destruction can
resume.

Nevertheless the effect of the campaign has been to awaken in

both the Scots and the English the sense that they are no longer
united, whatever the outcome of the vote. Neither will feel
obliged to pay for the mistakes or services the debts of the other,

and all transfers of assets, all movements of populations, all

distributions of expertise and authority will be challenged and
made into topics of resentment.
And the great question facing the English namely, when can we
have a Parliament of our own, like the Scots, the Welsh and the
Northern Irish? will press continually for an answer. Once that
Parliament has been granted, what then remains of the Union,
other than the name, and the existence of an increasingly helpless
Monarch appointed by history to sit on a movable throne?
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