242 Mass migration as a weapon of Class War. White working class resentment

Mass migration as a weapon of Class War. White working class resentment

(1) Mass migration "a powerful weapon in the class war" - Shamir
(2) White working class displaced by Bangladeshi immigrants in London's East End
(3) White working class see newcomers leapfrogging over them to join Elite
(4) The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict - Geoff Dench et al

(1) Mass migration "a powerful weapon in the class war" - Shamir
From: Israel Shamir <adam@israelshamir.net> Date: 14.02.2010 02:29 PM
Subject: [shamireaders] Immigration and Race, by Israel Shamir

http://www.israelshamir.net/English/immigration.htm

Winnie the Pooh on Immigration and Race

By Israel Shamir

A couple of Ukrainians are examining some graffiti: Kick a kike and save Russia!

One Ukrainian says to the other “Great idea! But who wants to save Russia?”

This joke popped into my mind while reading the white nationalist calls: Stop immigration and save the White Race. The means are laudable, but the stated end is irrelevant, at best.

You do not have to belong to the White Race to understand the problems caused by movements of populations. You do not even have to believe in the existence of racial classifications to appreciate that mass migrations cause real problems. The racialist reasoning behind opposition to this phenomenon is superfluous and unproductive at best. Mass immigration is a modern phenomenon, while 140-year old racialism is so dated that it hurts.

Opposition to immigration does not require feelings of racial superiority or even racial identity. Readers of Milne probably remember that Winnie the Pooh, Piglet and Rabbit’s reaction to the newest animal – Kanga – in their forest was anything but welcoming: they kidnapped the immigrant baby. The story of course ended with everyone becoming fast friends, but even Milne could not pull off a happy ending if Kangas were to flood the forest by their thousands.

Humans and other animals have defensive mechanisms used to protect their territory and their access to resources. These mechanisms are now deliberately misrepresented as ‘racism’, or as the unleashing of brutal natural tendencies, but the protection of one’s territory is morally defensible.

In the Soviet Russia of my youth, a young man courting a girl from a different neighbourhood had a better than even chance of being beaten up by the local boys. There was no ethnic, racial, religious or even social difference between the two neighbourhoods; the boys from block A did not think they are inherently better than boys from block B; they were simply defending their access to “their own” girls. This protectionism was not extreme: a serious relationship or marriage across an arbitrary territorial border was possible, but the light flirt and easy sex (and sex was quite easy under the socialist regime) was limited to one’s own neighbourhood. Foreigners, that is boys of different ethnicity and origin, were no exception to the locals-only rule. A long-term settler of any stripe would be eventually accepted as a homeboy, but short-term visitors were always ‘foes’ and were treated accordingly. It is reasonable that today’s youngsters act protectively towards ‘their own’ females, or ‘their own’ jobs. They also have to make a living, and the idealistic groups who hand control over to transients die out quickly.

Mass immigration is neatly sandwiched between invasion and slave trade. If the immigrants prosper, it is invasion; if they are kept down, it is slavery. Either way a small slice of the local population will profit: they will be called “compradors” or “slave traders” as the situation develops. In general, wealthy people enjoy the fruits of immigration while poor ones bear the brunt of it. However, not all wealthy people take advantage of the situation to the same degree. Wealthy people, like the rest of us, have different attitudes toward the society that nurtured them: they might be divided into shepherds and predators. The shepherds fleece their sheep while predators will slaughter every last one if the price is right.

The shepherds might be represented by the great Swedish industrialist family of Wallenberg, unobtrusive owners of 30 major Swedish firms, including nine of the country's 15 largest. Altogether, the Wallenberg family owns or controls well over half the Swedish economy. The great and unique achievements of Swedish society were obtained with this powerful bloc working in harmony with the trade unions and the government. The list of predators would start with Carl Icahn, the feared Jewish corporate raider and financier who ruined more companies and people than Wallenberg ever owned. The presence of unfettered predators makes it impossible for shepherds to do what they do best. Furthermore, predators do not shrink from driving their victims toward the slaughterhouse.

... Predators use mass migration like a powerful tool. The immigrants have to live somewhere, so real estate and rents rise – benefiting the wealthy. In Israel, landlords divide their old flats into small units and sublet them to immigrants. In such a way, they double and triple their income, while ordinary local people can't find a decent-sized flat for a reasonable price. The immigrants need credit, so moneylenders have a feast day on them, charging 20% per month. Immigration undermines workers' security, creates surplus of labour.

Mobile labour is less expensive: the workers are here when you need them; and when you do not need them, they just go away. This was one of the reasons why Israel locked up its Palestinian workers and imported Thais and Chinese in their stead. Mass migration is a powerful weapon in the class war. By importing potential workers, the predators-owners undermine the working classes. It is import of labour, and as every import it reduces value of local product, i.e. of native labour.

Predators speak of "creative destruction". The companies that fail under the new regime have no value to them. The companies that survive might be shifted to India with the click of a button. Immigration breaks unions. Even better for the owners, mass immigration opens the second front in the class war, that between the working classes and immigrants.

Immigration inevitably turns into a war for resources: for employment, for women, food and accommodation. The middle classes reap some benefits: they get cheaper housemaids, cheaper drivers, nannies, gardeners, cheaper sex. The middle-class Gay International (a term of Joseph Massad) is on the forefront of support for immigration: one can explain it by their compassion, but one can also explain it by their own interests of having a pool of cheap and available sexual partners. Immigrants do not compete with the middle classes; they do not live in the same areas; they are not likely to take their jobs. The workers are bearing the brunt of this war, and they have no time or strength left for the class war against the owning classes.

Immigration has an additional quality, as Robert Putnam http://www.utoronto.ca/ethnicstudies/Putnam.pdf discovered. This researcher, well known for his pro-immigration stance, was forced to conclude:

As ethnic diversity is increasing, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. In ethnically diverse neighbourhoods, residents of all races tend to 'hunker down'. Trust (even of one's own race) is lower; altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.

In the United States, as well as in Europe, internal heterogeneity is generally associated with lower group cohesion, lower satisfaction and higher turnover. Across countries, greater ethnic heterogeneity seems to be associated with lower social trust and lower investment in public goods.

Putnam considers two mechanisms behind the impact of immigration. The Conflict Theory supposes that "diversity fosters out-group distrust and in-group solidarity. The more we are brought into physical proximity with people of another race or ethnic background, the more we stick to 'our own' and the less we trust the other." The Contact Theory says that "diversity fosters interethnic tolerance and social solidarity. As we have more contact with people who are unlike us, we overcome our initial hesitation and ignorance and come to trust them more."

In reality, the results of Putnam's massive research were more pessimistic than either theory. Under immigration, people fear their old neighbours as much as they fear the newcomers: "Diversity does not produce 'bad race relations' or ethnically-defined group hostility, our findings suggest. Rather, inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television."

This is exactly what the predators want: a broken, atomised, insecure population in a state of perpetual cold civil war with itself. They do not gather and discuss. They do not organize and plan. They huddle unhappily in front of the television. And who are the Masters of Discourse who determine the content of the television programming? They are the servants of the predators, of course. ...

(2) White working class displaced by Bangladeshi immigrants in London's East End

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2006/feb/08/socialexclusion.guardiansocietysupplement

Lost horizons

In a controversial new book, Geoff Dench and Kate Gavron argue that Britain's liberal welfare system has marginalised the white working class and helped fuel years of racial conflict

Geoff Dench and Kate Gavron

The Guardian, Wednesday 8 February 2006

The election of a far-right British National party councillor in the Isle of Dogs in September 1993 still stands as the most graphic justification of what the liberal urban elite has come to hold as an article of faith: that many of the white working-class inhabitants of "cockney" east London are socially regressive and profoundly, irredeemably xenophobic.

That simmering racial tension between the white working class and the large Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets has existed for more than 30 years is indisputable. But while conventional liberal opinion has tended to attribute its causes solely to white racism, the truth is far more complex.

The story of racial conflict in the East End is part economic, part political, part historical. But what is most striking is the sense in which it is the direct, if unintended, consequence of well-meaning welfare policy - particularly in the area of social housing allocation.

Our analysis of the public housing battle in Tower Hamlets, and the way in which it crystalised feelings of political betrayal and exclusion in the white community, is in some ways a piece of local research; but the findings inform the debate about social cohesion elsewhere.

For the past 12 years, we have carried out well over 1,000 interviews with people of all races living in Tower Hamlets. Our aim was to uncover the new East End; to find out what had happened to the white, extended Bethnal Green families whose intricate and overlapping networks of relationships and support had been recorded in Michael Young and Peter Wilmott's 1957 book, Family & Kinship in East London.

We knew much had changed. The City of London had arrived in Tower Hamlets in the form of Canary Wharf and other glittering new office blocks. Prosperous professionals had come to inhabit the expensive apartments in the restored warehouses lining the Thames, and there was now a large and youthful Bangladeshi community, amounting to more than a third of the borough's population in 2001.

We were not surprised to discover that the extended family support found in Bangladeshi families was very like that found in the white Bethnal Green families of the 1950s. They shared many of the same vulnerabilities: very low incomes, job insecurity, ill health.

What was especially remarkable was the level of resentment our white interviewees had towards these families, who seemed to have so much in common with the families of the past. All ethnic groups we spoke to revealed at least some hostility to others. But of the white respondents, a majority expressed a sometimes bitterly negative attitude towards foreign immigrants, particularly Bangladeshis.

There was hostility to real and imagined Bangladeshi customs and personal habits, alleged insularity or un-neighbourly behaviour. But by far the largest number of complaints arose in relation to Bangladeshi claims on the welfare state, their rights and entitlements. Many of these complaints were implausible or involved serious ignorance of how welfare procedures operated; but others were based on a real sense of injustice over the way the allocation of social housing appeared to be slanted preferentially to Bangladeshi needs.

By the early 80s, white and Bangladeshi communities had opposed interests over housing. Both groups felt badly treated. The housing shortage was exacerbated by a right-to-buy policy without a replacement building programme. Bangladeshi families were overcrowded, and many felt that the promises made under the official allocation system were not honoured.

Whites, meanwhile, felt that the system of prioritising housing allocation - once predicated on a waiting list that gave weight to applicants with local and community connections but which now privileged the most "needy" - unduly favoured Bangladeshi families.

Certainly, the sovereign principle of housing allocation from the 70s onwards - that vacancies in public housing should be allocated to those in greatest need - carries moral force. But in a place with such pressure on housing, it also had the effect of breaking up long-established East End family and community links.

One interviewee, Mavis Browning, told us that when she tried to get a flat locally for her daughter, to avoid her having to leave the area, she was advised by officials that the best thing to do would be to turn her out and make her homeless. "The community isn't as close as it used to be," she reflected. "It has broken down. Our children have to move out because there are no flats for them."

Her comments were echoed by others, who found council actions hostile to family life. "I would lay part of the blame for family break-up on council housing," said one respondent. "Children used to live with the parents even after they got married. Now that is not accepted. The parents get left in inner London, while the children have to go out to Essex, and vote Tory."

It is significant that, of all our interviewees, it was typically the granny, the East End "mum" with a busy extended family revolving around her, who turned out to be most hostile to Bangladeshis. It made sense insofar as it is "mum's" life that is diminished if her offspring have moved, or will be forced to move, out of the area.

Anti-racist card

The system has tended to treat with scorn Bethnal Greeners' "irrational" attachment to their locality. Arguably, there has been an "anti-racist card" played against the white working class. The response of planners to white anxieties around housing has been to dismiss the idea of locality, and to expect people to exercise their housing entitlements elsewhere if necessary. When local white residents have objected, their assertions of local commitment have been made to look unreasonable by the suggestion that what they are objecting to really is that the Bangladeshis competing with them are not white.

The hostility of white working-class Bethnal Greeners to Bangladeshis is fundamentally tied up with local history, particularly that of the second world war and its impact on the expectations of the white community. This came up time after time in our interviews. The East End dockers, with the sacrifices they made in the bombing raids of the Blitz, were seen as national saviours. From where they were standing, the benefits of the welfare state were a reward for their effort during the war - a reward they had earned for themselves and their ilk, rather than been given as yet more Victorian-era "charity".

It is, therefore, the family elders above all who remember with bitterness those promises about rebuilding the East End for future generations to enjoy. It may be the memory of broken pledges that moulds the shape of contemporary hostility more than personal pathologies.

While white subjects often accused Bangladeshis of playing the welfare system, there was also a widespread feeling that the system itself, rather than the players, was mainly at fault; that the system was biased towards meeting Bangladeshi needs and that they could leapfrog whites to the front of the queue.

There was also a more general dismay at the way that British society appears to be changing. The evolution of the welfare state had turned it from a mutual aid society writ large into a complex, centralised and bureaucratic system, run by middle-class do-gooders, "those big-hearted ones who've got their own big houses and make these rules", as one interviewee put it. The system, it was felt, gave generously to those who put nothing into the pot, while making ordinary working people who did contribute feel like recipients of charity when drawing their entitlements.

Interestingly, few respondents saw the immigrants themselves as being at fault. Few whites, for example, deny that Bangladeshi families endure greater real poverty than themselves. A number who strongly resented the present welfare system were nevertheless friendly with Bangladeshi neighbours. What they object to is the way this need is allowed to over-ride rights and claims arising out of an earlier, more directly exchange-based welfare state ethic. Respondents hostile to immigrants were no less condemning of white people who they considered to be living off the system.

For if what one gets out of the state is determined solely by need, rather than what one has put into it, then a little dignity has been taken out of citizenship. Dependency is encouraged, the principle of reciprocity has gone, and welfare has simply become a new form of charity.

Such a decline of the old working class is no triumph for the Bangladeshis. They are aware that it has not made their lives easier, not least because of the hostility to which they are consequently exposed. As the long-term underdogs in day-to-day life, the system has tended to support Bangladeshi interests in local conflicts over resources, but such backing cannot be relied upon in the long term. The British welfare system is sympathetic to new and needy groups. But as the groups settle in, and some of their members become incorporated into the ruling class, the solicitude of the elite is liable to move on to more vulnerable groups.

Political instability

This augurs badly for political stability. Preoccupation with the most vulnerable means that parts of all incoming groups, along with the downgraded members of the national majority, will feel that their length of residence in the country does not seem to give them a durable stake in it.

This represents a threat to social democracy. The alienation of parts of the white working class from local and national government that is evident in the East End could happen in urban Britain more generally.

The government has rightly declared a commitment to promoting social cohesion. But some of this has meant that by, understandably, attacking racism more vigorously, there is a failure to carry some parts of the white community with them, thus perpetuating the cycle of resentment. People like our white interviewees have a perception that nothing is being done for them and plenty - too much, even - is being done for others.

This amounts to the unanticipated consequence of well-intentioned welfare policy. So, for example, supporting equal opportunities schemes to address racial discrimination and helping newcomers to access their rights is not enough on its own. It must go hand in hand with addressing the exclusion, poverty and hostility faced by poor white communities.

· Geoff Dench is a professor of sociology at Middlesex University and a fellow at the Young Foundation. Kate Gavron is a fellow at the Young Foundation and a vice-chair of the Runnymede Trust. This article is adapted from the authors' book, The New East End - Kinship, Race and Conflict, co-authored with the late Lord (Michael) Young, and published next week by Profile Books, RRP £15.99. To order a copy for £14 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.

(3) White working class see newcomers leapfrogging over them to join Elite
http://www.newstatesman.com/writers/geoff_dench

NS Essay - 'The white working class see newcomers leapfrogging over them to join the national elite'

Geoff Dench

24 March 2003

New Labour despises old community values and puts meritocracy first. Recent migrants, as well as those who have lived in Britain for generations, feel cheated

Recent migrants, as well as those who have lived in Britain for generations, feel cheated

Haunt of Jack the Ripper, and birthplace of the Kray brothers, London's East End has a long history of exclusion from respectable society. Yet it is intimately tied up with the emergence of capitalism. At its western flank, Bethnal Green and Stepney lie adjacent to the City of London, in symbiotic polarisation. As the City evolved into the centre of capitalism, it exported its more polluting economic activities - leather, clothing, furniture and shipping - to just outside the city walls, where the benefits were still easily available but did not offend the dignity of the City itself. Together the City and the East End became the hub of the British imperial trading system. Commodities were bought and sold in the City, and handled through the docks and warehouses of east London.

By the middle of the 19th century, east London had become the largest working-class domain in the world, morally sealed off from the rest of the country but dependent on income from the City. This included charity dispensed by numerous City foundations, which in turn helped to attract yet more destitute, including rural and Irish migrants and, through the London docks, alien minorities, such as Huguenots and Jews.

This humble corner of London became a favoured stomping ground for reformers, social commentators and visionaries. Geographically, it was conveniently near Britain's centres of power and wealth; socially, it was as distant as it was possible to be. From the two Booths and Mayhew, through the Webbs and Eleanor Rathbone, to Michael Young and his creation, the Institute of Community Studies, those who have wanted to know how the other half lived, and what they desired or needed, were drawn there. The father of the Labour Party, Keir Hardie, built his political heartland in West Ham, just to the east of Bethnal Green; Clement Attlee based his political career in the Stepney docklands, on the river side of Bethnal Green.

It was this identification with dockers that gave Labour a source of nationalist legitimacy in the Second World War. Britain and, indeed, the imperial system as a whole were economically and militarily dependent on supply lines running through the London docks. Almost overnight, dockers and their families became cast as heroic defenders of the homeland and empire. Attlee, by now deputy leader of the war cabinet, toured east London to tell the people that, when the war was over, they would at last be given a fairer share of the nation's wealth. A new East End would be built, and the whole nation would be rewarded with a welfare state that would banish poverty and need and overcome the ancient divisions between classes.

At the end of the war, half a millennium of exclusion, moderated only by demeaning charity, seemed at last to be at an end. In Attlee's Labour administration virtually all the East End MPs held ministerial office, or at least some government responsibility. Yet this was also a defining moment in the birth of a new ruling class, ready to pursue interests of its own as soon as real politics started up again.

This was the meritocracy. The main aim of Attlee's administrations had been to achieve direct control of the economy through Soviet-style state capitalism. But through the 1950s and 1960s, the party emphasis shifted away from public ownership of productive property towards public promotion and control of the knowledge and skills required for effective exploitation of that property. The best way to counter any regressive influence of private ownership and transmission of property - the roots of old class conservatism - was to give more salience to immaterial, non-heritable educational resources and qualifications. The state could hope quite reasonably to manage this new form of individual property on a centralised basis, in the public interest. So Labour turned to the growing numbers of technocrats for its core support. Under Harold Wilson in the 1960s, the state stimulated demand for formal qualifications among employers, centralised and professionalised the management of education and social services, and used the welfare state to maximise individual independence from family and community ties.

All this was supposed to be an attack on the old regime of capitalism. In fact, members of property-owning families lost little, and merely needed to convert some of their assets into personal educational stock. Those whose lives were rooted in communal or collective rights, attached to a locality, lost out. In prewar days, east London, for example, was extremely self-sufficient. Friends and relatives helped to provide or find employment, with many boys following their fathers and uncles into the docks. Local housing rights were in effect hereditary, passing down mainly through the female line: mothers of young couples about to get married would "speak for" them to rent collectors. Local "savings clubs" afforded some degree of personal insurance and reciprocal security.

The welfare state architects understood these mechanisms at the heart of community life. When new housing was built in the East End after the war, municipal landlords recognised the expectations of tenants that their children would want to live in the area. Wilson's government, however, required public housing allocation procedures to take less account of local connection and commitment. Among the first beneficiaries were young (and generally middle-class or upwardly mobile) members of the new urban left - mainly students or former students committed to social modernisation - who wanted somewhere inexpensive to live near city centres, without having to wait for it. Even more ominously for social cohesion, the later beneficiaries were the Bengali immigrants to Bethnal Green and Stepney, now part of the new borough of Tower Hamlets. Wartime promises were betrayed.

The tensions between Labour's high-minded internationalism and its traditional working-class constituency were evident even in the immediate aftermath of the war. The Attlee government's decision to divert food from the British market to starving families on the Continent led to some angry confrontations between MPs and voters in the East End.

In those days, most councillors were locally born, and knew their wards and voters intimately. By the mid-1990s very few Labour councillors in Tower Hamlets counted as true locals. A sizeable minority were now Bangladeshi, mostly born in Bangladesh. Virtually all the rest were middle-class whites, members of the new meritocracy drawn to London from all parts of Britain. And the council's work now consisted almost entirely of applying national policies determined in Whitehall and Westminster and aimed at enhancing meritocracy.

It was then the Conservatives who figured in public consciousness as the class enemy presiding over attacks on the working-class community. But this was to some extent an illusion. Although the centralisation of welfare state administration took effect only gradually, it was in origin an instrument of Labour modernisation. Now that Labour has been back in power for nearly six years it is evident that it is the main proponent of meritocracy, and the most hostile to traditional, local working-class culture. Removal of the Conservative government makes it much harder to uphold the idea that the problems of poor communities, as indeed of minorities themselves, are due to regressive aspects of British society. It obliges us to confront the contradictions produced by the pursuit of meritocracy itself.

Had Labour's sponsorship of minority group interests in the teeth of working-class resentment actually helped them to find a place in British society more easily, then it might be possible to condone the betrayal of ordinary white people. But it does not seem to have done so. Race relations in Britain have been getting worse not better since Labour came back to power. Until recently, it was possible to believe that we were moving in the right direction. Among younger people, attitudes across race and cultural lines seemed tolerant; rates of intermarriage were rising. All but the most recent immigrant groups appeared to be spreading across the occupational and social structure. But violent uprisings among Asians in northern British cities have uncovered discontent among minorities themselves. This has prompted a heart-searching even more profound than 20 years ago after similar rioting by earlier groups of immigrants, especially African Caribbeans. That led to a strengthening of measures to support minority self-esteem, around policies of "multiculturalism". This time the malaise is harder to handle: it is no longer so easy to blame Conservative governments for loss of minority faith in the system. And the main strategy that Labour prescribed for meeting minority anxieties is precisely what it is now seen as failing to deliver. Multiculturalism itself is discredited. New Labour's promises to minorities are starting to look as shallow as those made by old Labour to the white working class during the war.

A large majority of people now believe that Britain has lost a sense of its core values. Diversity, they think, is fine; but it needs to be tied around a shared body of common assumptions, commitments and practices that inform national cohesion. For too long the political class in Britain has prided itself on being global and cosmopolitan, and above attachment to specific identity. Patriotic ideas and celebration of Britishness have been treated as signifiers of low social status, and tantamount to admission of racist inclinations. In David Blunkett we have the first Labour Home Secretary who talks with conviction of the need to ensure that immigrants learn (at least some) English, know the rudiments of British history and the constitution, and (possibly) make some pledge of allegiance before they get full citizenship.

But there are more fundamental problems. It is no accident that recent rioting involved Muslims in the way that 20 years ago it involved African Caribbeans. These groups have been most exposed to the machinations of British meritocrats. African Caribbeans from an ex-slave-turned-peasant background had relatively little orientation towards competing in a market economy. Pakistani and Bangladeshi migrants similarly came from peasant families, and by comparison with the Indian, Chinese or even African migrants who arrived at the same time had little access to investment capital or commercial experience. Like the African Caribbeans before them, they have been highly dependent for security and advancement on links with patrons in the national elite - above all the Labour Party. These groups have listened most attentively to government promises and then become most confused as they failed to materialise.

When Michael Young coined the term meritocracy in the 1950s, while working in Bethnal Green, he did not intend it as an endorsement of the principle it described. On the contrary, he presented it in the context of a satirical novel, pointing out that any serious attempt to create such a system was likely to fail because it divided a society too sharply into winners and losers. Few in Britain have heeded this warning. The new ruling class sees itself more than ever as occupying its position by merit, and Tony Blair repeatedly calls on citizens to help make Britain more of a meritocracy than it already is. This impulse sharpens conflicts both between classes and between cultural and racial groups, and also hinders our understanding of the true position that minorities occupy in Britain.

New Labour's commitment to meritocratic goals certainly produces its most obvious blind spot: its lack of interest in providing proper rewards for menial or low-skilled workers. What the endless celebration of education actually means to ordinary people is not that they all stand a chance of getting on, but that those who do not succeed in getting qualifications must submit to the rule of those who do. Equally, if your job is not interesting or highly paid, this means that you are a failure and do not deserve any better. Such quaint notions as the dignity of labour, or the value to all of the part played by the smallest cog in the machine - which were the essence of old Labour - have disappeared from party manifestos. Even the welfare state no longer represents fraternal mutual insurance; it has become a mechanism for the redistribution of resources from those who are clever and successful and able to look after themselves to those who are not. It is about dependency and indebtedness and above all shame: a return to the Poor Law in all but name.

This is why the morale of many workers, including those in once-proud public services at the heart of national life such as the health service, post office and public transport, is lower than ever. Work for many has lost its intrinsic satisfactions, and is mainly about status - low status. And this, quite literally, is where many immigrants come in. For one reliable way to recruit workers to do the jobs that meritocracy devalues is to bring in people who are not really part of the system.

Meritocracy, however, cannot husband this resource for long. The zealots who insist that free individual competition must drive the system cannot see that their model creates gaping holes. These holes can be filled only by immigrants; yet the meritocrats want to hasten their unambiguous incorporation into the system. Children of newcomers, if not the migrants themselves, are encouraged to demand full opportunities to rise rapidly, and are expected to feel aggrieved if they do not succeed. Yet even without any resistance from the established population, immigrants could not expect to do as well as those whose families have been present for generations. It takes time to learn a system fully and play it. It is not only unreasonable to expect immigrants to rise quickly up the occupational and status ladder: it is contemptuous of community ties, in both minority and majority communities, to insist that individuals demonstrate such a level of detachment or freedom from their existing families and networks.

Labour's leading thinkers urge the country to pay even less attention to the basic relationships on which social cohesion and long-term stability surely depend. Thus Peter Mandelson, for example, argues that we should not worry that the gap between the highest- and lowest-paid is increasing; what is most important for social justice, he insists, is opportunity.

In a socially just society as envisaged by Mandelson, the daughter of a Hartlepool shop assistant would have the same chance of becoming a high court judge as the daughter of a Harley Street doctor. But this reveals an indifference to family life and community relationships that is unlikely to be widely shared in his Hartlepool constituency. For most people, society is not an atomised mass of freely interacting individuals. Family and community ties do matter to them; they are a source of value, inspiration and consolation that are more important to them than are strictly equal educational and job opportunities enabling individuals to compete better with each other.

Like other new Labour luminaries, Mandelson is childless. This may make it harder for him to detect the gaps at the heart of his meritocratic dream, and easier for him both to advocate it and to remain true to it. Not many meritocrats who are parents are happy to contemplate their own children descending the social ladder - which some must do in order to vacate places for talented children from humbler backgrounds.

As it is, new Labour, faced with a collapsing community and occupational structure, continues to reach for more of the same, and to insist that we need even higher levels of immigration. But how long can any minority be allowed to do mainly menial tasks before this counts as a denial of equal opportunities? In some areas, as many as 40 per cent of young Muslims who have grown up in the UK are unemployed. There are low-level jobs if they want them, but having been educated in the UK many do not. And why should they when, unlike their parents, they have learned how little respect ordinary work commands?

Thus continued immigration not only fails to offer any long-term solution to the problem of making low-status occupations more attractive in British society; it also further demotivates and embitters ordinary white people who might be able to find satisfaction in this sort of work. Such people become double losers. To the basic problem of meritocracy - that the chances of social mobility decline as the most ambitious and able of the lower classes get siphoned off - is added the aggravation of seeing much of what does remain enjoyed by members of immigrant minorities. The white working class is not merely inferior now to the national elite, but can see newcomers leapfrogging over them into it. In schools, teachers come under great pressure to help immigrant children do well. This is seen as showing commitment to the values of meritocracy, overcoming "racism", and not least as helping the school to achieve state targets. Parents of white children may see that this sponsorship of newcomers is good for the country but they feel, all the same, that their children pay the price. The opportunities for social mobility are limited. If minorities are to enter the higher levels of society in sufficient numbers to redress communal imbalances and satisfy Cabinet Office scrutineers that "racism" is under control, then it seems bound to be at some cost of upward mobility among "poor white" children. It is almost as if the best thing that the latter can do for the common good is to perform badly at school and stay at the bottom of society.

Many people feel unable to talk about this, for fear of being condemned by the political class as racist. They sense a reversal of the traditional moral ground rule that commitment and loyalty to a system need to be rewarded with a stake in it. Especially since Labour's return to power, people have felt as though the rights of immigrants and potential immigrants - who have yet to enter the system or even to think about doing so - are given greater weight than those of families who have been here for generations. Instead of moving towards the centre of the nation as time passes, and as their families and community make contributions to the collective effort, groups feel pushed away from it. Yesterday's promises by the governing class are over- laid by today's, and these in turn are overshadowed by tomorrow's. So even recently arrived minorities may feel less favoured than those on the threshold. The faster that minorities are incorporated, the sooner they share in this creeping insecurity. As immigrants turn into settled minorities, they discover that they, too, are being sold a dummy.

If taken more than a little way, this argument leads towards exclusion. So it is important not to take it very far. People in minorities should have every chance to enjoy full membership of the nation, and access to the opportunities this entails. It makes no sense, however, to tell them that this will come about instantly. Most immigrants arrive hoping that if they and their families stay they will be able to work their passage over time and incorporate themselves fully into the nation - just as they are aware that in the meantime they may have opportunities elsewhere that are not available to the national majority. It is their willingness to trade between existing and potential advantages that brings newcomers into the nation in the first place and also constitutes their main value.

Most minorities appreciate that it will take time for their communities to get a firm footing in the system, and be in a position to take full advantage of it. It is time for policy-makers also to remember that exercising full, effective membership of a national group takes time, and there will always be groups with members less well integrated than others. A society consists of a great knot of overlapping and interlocking ties, interests and ideas which takes generations to weave itself, which is pulled by a diversity of purposes and values, and which cannot be reshaped or reconstituted at a stroke by a revolutionary elite. Where a nation has room and reason to expand, it may be able to retain its broad structure while rapidly incorporating many new members. But that is not true of Britain: until shortly before the Second World War, when the new class was starting to invent itself, Britain was seen as dangerously overcrowded and was mainly a country of emigration. So perhaps newcomers to Britain should expect to find themselves more, not less, confined within an existing social system and more subject to discrimination than those to other countries.

The postwar British elite has been keen to repudiate tradition and to insist on the purity of its own centralised and progressive mission. In this spirit it has frequently championed the rights of minorities over those of the national majority. I suspect that this strategy has helped to conceal limitations in its own utopian, meritocratic model by recruiting willing losers to prop up the lowest levels of the occupational structure, while compromising as racist protests from the disinherited masses. But a ruling elite cannot operate for long in such a one-sided way. Inclusive and exclusive principles of fairness each have constituencies and a part to play. Both need attention and, to hold a nation together, a political class must learn to balance competing claims. We must be thankful for signs that some in British government are waking up to this.

Geoff Dench works at the Institute of Community Studies in Bethnal Green where, with colleagues, he is researching into race and community. This essay is edited and extracted from the introduction to an updated edition of his Minorities in the Open Society, published this month by Transaction (£24.95)

(4) The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict - Geoff Dench et al

The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict (2006)

by Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron, Michael Young

http://www.amazon.co.uk/New-East-End-Kinship-Conflict/dp/1861979282/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267560323&sr=8-1

East End Ethnic Insights and Conflict, 23 Feb 2009 

By Mr. S. J. Wade "thebardofb6" (United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
    
Despite appearances this is not a proper sociology book. There are plenty of charts and numbers but its really just a collection of opinions and anecdotes dressed up as social science. Despite its lack of credence as a science book it should be essential reading for anyone, who wants to scratch the surface of the UK's thirty-year experiment with multiculturism.

It is the story of how, a small community of a few lascars, from Bangladesh, left over from the East India Company, became a community of 70 000, concentrated around Bethnal Green. It lists the various acts of parliament which facilitates the growth and support of this community and the establishment philosophy which underpins it. The book records the strength of hostility of local indigenous white people and attempts to explain its origins, but it is never morally neutral and the tone is always slightly disapproving about white attitudes, while accepting ethnic foibles rather more graciously. It ends with a poignant tale of East Enders singing, There Will Always Be An England, at the end of the Blitz, and the chilling warning that should the experiment go wrong, Bethnal Green might be the breeding ground for terrorists.

Essential reading for modern times.

A brilliant follow up to the original classic, 16 Jun 2008 

5.0 out of 5 stars

By Post enlightenment "Rationalist" (London, England) - See all my reviewsVery few sociologists have lived to follow an urban group for 50 years and trace the evolution of a community through the second half of the twentieth century, a period of convulsive change. What happened in this instance amounted to complete replacement of one group by another; something archaeologists usually have to infer from changes in pottery style but here studied in the lives of those affected by it. One reviewer refers in scathing terms to Theodore Dalrymple, the brilliant essayist and observer of the underclass, who demonstrates time and again how treating people as individual agents reveals far more about them statistical studies ever can (see his essay- 'How to read a society' in the wonderful collection 'Our culture what's left of it'). Anyone who disparages Dalrymple is no doubt part of the forces of cultural destruction that afflict modern Britain.

I can only recommend reading this book without being put off by the cries of anguish emanating from the politically correct Marxist establishment that dominates present day sociology in Britain.