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June 2, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
10:27
The Effects of Labour's Mass Immigration Policies
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Actually, I want to get on another issue that Americans sometimes find confusing about British politics.
We have a Conservative Party in power at the moment.
They've been in power for the past three or four years now alone, and before that they were in a coalition, but they've been in power for quite a long time now.
They're called the Conservative Party.
Are they actually Conservative in any way?
They're a Labour Party.
They're alt-labour.
Alt-Labour.
Yes, for any Republicans in the United States, you'll probably know them as rhinos.
In name only.
All they have done is conserved Tony Blair's labour reforms of the British state.
The hate speech laws, various other sort of politically correct things, and the increased labour spending and immigration that was introduced to the country.
I mean, it was Tony Blair who opened the borders.
We currently have 640,000 people coming in with a net of 300,000 a year staying, and we have social services.
I mean, as Milton Friedman says, you can have open borders or you can have social services.
You cannot have both.
And he's completely right.
One will destroy the other because it's basically a pyramid scheme.
We've got 300,000 people who come into the country who have not paid anything into the social services they will then start taking money out of.
So that's a burden on the taxpayer.
And as they stay and start paying tax in their own turn, more people come in and that's a burden on them.
And so it really is a pyramid scheme.
It has to stop somewhere and it will stop with the collapse of the NHS.
And I'm a supporter of the NHS, but I'm also a supporter of a much more stringent immigration system.
So we're not putting so much burden on the taxpayer.
But the Conservatives will just keep throwing money at this without closing the borders because they are preserving the labour-created status quo.
They are not right-wingers, as the Americans understand them.
This sort of gets to the heart of politics at the moment.
It's not so much a divide between left and right as it is a divide between populists of both the left and right.
Neoliberals in left-wing parties and neoconservatives in white-wing parties.
There are still a lot of influential neoconservatives in the Republican Party.
I mean, we can just broadly tell them globalists versus patriots, I think.
People who think that the nation-state is a good idea and should exist, compared to the people who think the nation-state is somehow a problem to the integrated, open-border world that they'd like to create.
I mean, you see Guy Witt Hofstadt, not just on Twitter, but in various interviews, saying, wouldn't it be wonderful to create an African-European Union superstate?
And I'm just sat there thinking, well, A, that's a very imperialistic attitude.
You're looking at other territories and thinking, wouldn't that be good to add to ours?
And B, do we think there'll be no problems if we extend the Schengen zone to Africa?
I mean, honestly, it's just absurd.
And honestly, mildly terrifying, the kind of visions of grandeur that these bureaucrats have in their head.
There seems to be a massive cognitive gap and a lack of understanding of history when it comes to both immigration and these transnational projects.
Because if you look at history, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire, they all collapsed and were destabilized because they tried to unite various very strong national identities.
And not just that, I mean, the Western Roman Empire collapsed because of German immigration.
I mean, the Romans had obviously treated these people terribly, but they did end up allowing all of these tribes into the Roman Empire, and it did end up causing the collapse because these tribes essentially sacked their way across Western Europe.
It's about the respect of the place that you're going to.
For example, there are lots of Indian and Pakistani immigrants who came here in the 60s and 70s, who came here when the immigration allowance was a lot more stringent and more restrictive.
And they came to Britain because they thought, oh, Britain's a good country.
We like this country.
We respect this country.
We respect the people in it.
We respect the history and heritage it has.
And we want to be a part of that.
And they've been welcomed in with open arms.
But now you can see communities in the north who, under the Tony Blair immigration reforms, don't come to this country because they think it's a good thing.
And they come because it's economically advantageous.
But they want to preserve the culture of the place that they've come from.
And I mean, if you look at the culture of Pakistan, you can't help but notice it's very theocratic and patriarchal.
I mean, they have blasphemy laws, and then Twitter, in fact, has to enforce Pakistan's blasphemy laws.
And Majid Nawaz was recently alerted that Twitter had managed to get him in trouble in Pakistan, where he has family.
So now he's actually in danger if he goes back there, because of Twitter alerting the Pakistani authorities to something that Majid had tweeted again, like five years ago, that has come back to bite him.
Well, I'm well aware of how authoritarian Pakistan is.
My own father had to flee the country because it was being ruled by a dictator who didn't like his journalism.
Well, again, the worst part is we treat the most radical versions of Islam as if they're normal in this country.
I mean, many Arab countries ban the full-face burqa because it's extreme.
It's a radical thing for women to wear.
I don't see why we can't take their advice on that regard, because what we're doing is we're essentially saying, yes, it's okay to come over here and be a radical Islamist.
And I really don't think that's a mindset which should be proliferating.
It's always almost like the elites can't really see their own bias here because they live in a world where, you know, people come in from all across the world to Davos, they meet up every year, they mix in this very identity-less, rootless environment, and that's fine if that's what they want to do, but they don't seem to understand ordinary people for whom identity is important.
And also, they don't seem to understand psychology.
So we've known from the 1970s that people will fight over the tiniest things, even like the colour of their shirt or their favourite football team.
If you look at British history, the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish, the English have been fighting forever, and they calm down for a while, then they start fighting again, then they start calm down for a while, they start fighting again because these identities don't go away and they're a source of conflict.
So you and we can say that's not great, that's not good, doesn't lead to good outcomes, but it's how humans are to the reality of the situation.
So it seems to me just totally asking for the trouble to introduce more and more identities, more and more potential sources of conflict.
Even if you admit that even if you believe that everyone's equal, everyone should have equal opportunities.
If you introduce more identities, you will have eventually more conflict.
That seems to be a fact of human nature.
I think it's very good of you to describe it in terms of competing identities, because I really think it is.
And if you think about what an identity is, what it is a package of values that are summed up in a word, you know, certain kinds of values for certain different civilizations.
And when you find people who are very strong in their identity, and these people come into conflict, then what you're actually describing is a conflict of what is the good.
For example, there are going to be many people from Pakistan who believe that submission to Allah is the good.
That's the right way to live your life.
But of course, this totally conflicts with, say, a working-class English person who thinks that freedom and fairness are the good.
And that's just not compatible system of values, that you can't have both.
And so someone has to win and someone has to lose.
You can't simply expect these communities to not have any disagreements.
And really, I think the term multiculturalism is actually very pernicious.
What we are actually talking about is multiracialism.
Because I don't believe that culture comes from race.
I genuinely don't believe that.
And I think that's the same narrative that the Nazis actually have.
Your culture is generated by your innate genes.
Whereas I think it's actually honestly mostly a product of your environment.
And I think, I mean, people like Majin Nawaz are a great example of that.
To me, he's a very English thinker.
He seems like an Englishman in every way other than just his skin colour, which I don't care about.
But conversely, you get someone like John McDonnell, who thinks that England is a horrible place.
And he's a horribly collectivist thinker.
Seems more like a Latin American politician than a British.
Yes, he does, which is why Jeremy Corbyn phoned up Maduro a few years ago and congratulated him on the revolution.
They think in a very foreign way.
And, you know, these things are not confined to race.
So, you know, we should say we're a multiracial country, but we should be a culturally British country because this is Britain.
Well, I would actually go more simplistic than that.
I'd say that people fight over all stupid reasons, all sorts of stupid reasons, because I feel if you take it as too negative view of human nature, you'll eventually get to an authoritarian place.
And that's also one of the things behind tech censorship.
People now have this very negative view of ordinary people.
They'll get deluded by fake news, they'll vote for the wrong people, they'll become racists, and we have to control free speech because of it.
I think people are not perfectly rational, but they also learn over time.
I think they're generally good.
Right.
You don't think they're perfectly rational?
No, they're not.
Right.
Most people are not perfectly rational.
And I think the way that comes out in sort of identities is simply people can get over it.
I think elites have largely gotten over it, but they don't understand that it's still part of human nature.
It does recur, and the more differences you create, the more potential sources of conflict you can create.
Absolutely.
There's no question of it.
And again, it really does come down to the fact that it's different value systems that are coming out of conflict.
We should have a base value system that is the British identity.
And I think that should be promoted to newcomers.
They should be encouraged to become British, become like us.
Because I think we're very accepting of foreigners who are like us and who want to be like us.
I mean, no one ever complains about Sikhs and Hindus and Gurkhas in this country, do they?
No one complains about them because they do appreciate the British system of values and want to integrate into that.
But if you've got a competing system of values that openly rejects them, which is honestly what half of our mosques are controlled by Diabandi Islam, which was a philosophy of Islam that was founded in direct opposition to British liberalism in India by Muslim scholars.
If we allow that to proliferate in our mosques, then we're allowing an actively anti-British version of Islam to become the norm in Britain.
I think that's a dangerous path to go down.
There are lots of other versions of Islam that don't do this.
This was specifically founded to be an anti-British version.
I would much rather, if the British state would take ownership of this and say, well, look, we're going to have to promote a different version of Islam that doesn't actually hate this country.
I feel like free market libertarians often, this is the Koch brothers' argument that people are just economic units, there's nothing else to it.
But I mean, most people would think it would have been mad to say, allow a million hardline Bolsheviks to emigrate during the Cold War, because what do you think would happen?
Yes, exactly.
And it's not about race, it's about ideas.
Totally agree.
I mean, yeah, exactly.
During the height of the Cold War, you'd never accept millions of Russian immigrants.
Well, you might accept Russian refugees, but not isolated by Bolsheviks.
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