Showing posts with label Discrimination. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Discrimination. Show all posts

Sunday, 5 February 2012

The Ethnic Cleansing of Our Streets


The coalition government intends to bring into being a new strategy on Housing Benefits; and these changes are going to crush ethnic minority families and force them out of the cities into ghettos.

I can hear you shouting it’s a little melodramatic – absolutely. However, before you rush to judgement with perverse claims of racism and bigotry, consider this; Her Majesty's Government all but admits it.

On 23rd January 2012 the Conservative MP for Chingford and Woodford Green appeared on all manner of media channels, a junket of sorts, extolling the virtues of the Welfare Reforms which the coalition government is pushing through.

In particular, Mr Duncan Smith was here to do something. Spin the impact assessments which came out that morning. Distraction is always a good political strategy. Mr Duncan Smith went further to say categorically “we don’t believe there will be any increase in child poverty” live that morning on Radio 4’s flagship Today Programme. He utterly refused to accept any of the challenges that were thrown at him. In response of course (and this is why we get the government we deserve) broadcasters get cocker hoop with excitement and blood lust as they strain painfully, diligently but stupidly, to try and pull him up on the figures.

Why not go further by refusing even your own Department of Work and Pension's figures which state up to 100,000 children are going to be affected. Even The Children’s Society say that the proposed cap on benefits will cut support for more than 200,000 children – in fact kids are around nine times more likely than adults to be affected.

But this is all by the by and has been discussed ad nauseam. This article isn’t going to make easy reading and its not the usual mix of libertarianism and blue Labour thinking. It’s about lifting the rock and realising some uncomfortable truths.

What should really interest us is the idea of deflecting from the impact assessments. Why has no one been talking about the impact assessments? If you look at them, they tell you the Government is utterly clueless about impact on race, religion and belief. I believe intentionally so. The figures are there for all to see. The Government wishes to convince us that it cannot breakdown figures any further than race, for example into religion and belief. They would also have us believe that the Welfare Reforms are fair.

Masters of the political distraction, whether forests for sale, or cat deportations, we have to give credit where credit is due; the coalition government is playing us like the suckers we are turning out to be. And so let’s look at one of their latest fastest gun in the West trick, windmill punch and palmed card.

Back to those figures that all the world can see - let’s join the dots.

Number One: Higher priced housing. The government is expressly stating that they wish to move people (large families) out of expensive i.e. London and other cities, higher priced commuter areas, to make way for workers. Hash tag: workers deserve nice houses and the poor should move out and give them their homes.

Number Two: The largest families will be affected the most. We need to be absolutely crystal clear who this means. Asian families, in fact Muslim families at that have the highest age profile. Whilst the average age of the non-Muslim English population is around 46, the average age for British Muslims is nearer 26. The largest demographic slice of the cake for Christianity in the UK is with the over 70 age bracket. With Muslims, it is with the under 4s.

Proportion of large families (3 or more dependent children), by ethnicity
 
(from www.jrf.org.uk)

Number Three. Hitting the poorest. There isn’t much question that the least able, those with the least capacity to absorb change, enter the employment market or to access education (or adequately to higher education), are going to be the hardest hit. The poor. And so who are the benefit based, or low income poor. A recent reportby the Muslim Council of Britain stated that 75% of all Pakistani and Bangladeshi families live on or below the poverty line. This needs to be compared with only 20% of the white British population.

Figures suggest somewhere in the region of between 95% - 98% of the British Pakistani and Bangladeshi population are Muslim. Whether you want to slice the equality cake down lines of Race (a statutory area for impact assessment), or Religion and Belief, we have major matter of disproportionate impact.

Number Four. Those getting hit, are somehow deserving of it (aka the benefit scroungers). Poor is not about income, it is about opportunity, aspiration and capacity.

In 2006, the TUC and MCB issued a joint statement on the fact that 69 per cent classified as poor compared with 22 per cent of the country as a whole. Overall British Muslims are three times more likely to be unemployed than the population as a whole. Islamophobia is a real and present threat, fuelled by misunderstandings, prejudice and the characterisation of whole communities.

Discrimination keeps the poor at arm’s length.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation tell us that more white Muslims than those from other ethnic backgrounds reported they were suffering prejudice. The Report’s co-author Arzu Merali said she believed discrimination had become "normalised" in a backlash after the 11 September attacks. According to the report, Muslims from all backgrounds were now experiencing far higher levels of prejudice than in previous years. In its survey asking people to record their experiences, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, a campaign body, said eight out of 10 respondents said they had suffered discrimination.

Baroness Warsi says Islamophobia has passed the dinner table test. And Tariq Modood, University of Bristol has contended that by most socio-economic measures Asian Muslims are amongst the most disadvantaged of the ethnic minorities.

And the cherry on the cake is that even the Government’s own Home Office Research Study 220, 'Religious discrimination in England and Wales' stated a consistently higher level of unfair treatment was reported by Muslim organisations than by most other religious groups; unfair treatment in every aspect of education, employment, housing, law and order, and in all the local government services covered by the questionnaire. And that was 6 months before 9/11.

The IFS has made it clear, time after time, especially in its report by the Family and Parenting Institute that the child poverty gap between Black and Asian families and white families is going to increase by 2015. Just to be clear, for the poorest in society, for those large families, the white population is going to be come (relatively speaking) less poor, and the ethnic minorities, more poor.

The axe is not going to fall equally on the poor.

Number Five. Location location location. So we have defined those most disproportionately hit. Those with big families, those who are least able to respond, those who struggle to access education, employment, training. Blacks, Asians and Muslims.

So precisely where are all these undesirables meant to go. Enter Sarkozy stage left. The Tories and Sarkozies have been comparing notes on their social engineering experiments for sometime now. We know in France, discrimination in housing and public services has lead to the ghettoisation of Muslims, the unemployed and immigrants, particularly those of North African origins. Steve Connor, the science editor of The Independent wrote in 2010 that Muslims faced "massive discrimination" when applying for jobs, according to the first scientifically validated study of anti-Muslim bias among employers in France. All indications show we have the same in Britian.

What flows eerily naturally too often, is high crime, social disorder and marginalisation from mainstream society. There is no question we are pushing out the great unwashed, the breeding minorities, out-out-out, and into what must, by any definition, be called ghettos. Modern day workhouses where Britain will learn to compete on a levelled global playing field where cheap labour is the new black. Or where black...

As frightening as a thought as it must be, can we afford not to draw parallels with conditions in the 1930s. We saw the treatment of the Jews in Europe in the early part of the 20th century. At that time, the only way the world was able to stimulate its way out of the economic crisis was through extraordinary and extortionate funding for WW2. Every major economist tells us that no federal or governmental stimulus has ever been shown to work in a great systemic economic crisis. Watch out Iran.

But back to our shores, those of perfidious albion. We know the PMs stance on all this equality, lefty, libertarian mumbo jumbo:

“The cap is right and the cap is fair.”

Perhaps we can start by defining ‘right’ and ‘fair’. I can’t help but think that ‘right’ as Mr Cameron defines it means something very insidious, even more than the rhetoric of benefit claimants living the Life of Riley. As for ‘fairness’; a millionaire who has never held down a proper job a day in his life, Eton educated, a Bullingdon Club old boy, a fifth cousin twice removed to our Queen Elizabeth II (making him apparently 13th in line for the throne), would need to wield these terms very carefully indeed.

The claim continues to echo that never in the history of this country, has there been a more out of touch Prime Minister.

And deny it all you want but we have the greatest civil rights crisis this country has ever seen. The Muslim Civil Rights Crisis. And welcome to a new chapter of this crisis

               - the government mandated ethnic cleansing of our streets.


Follow me on Twitter, @MoAnsar