(24/10/20)
In the seventh of a series of short posts on immigration, our branch member Ian Cooper considers the bias of the liberal elite against the white majority population in favour of ethnic minorities. The views of the author are his and not necessarily representative of the branch.

In the previous post on immigration, The Future – A White Minority damaging, the academic Eric Kaufmann was mentioned as expressing concern that the liberal elite in the media and the universities, were unsympathetic to the ethnic majority, the white British, on immigration. He felt that the indigenous population’s reasonable anxieties about immigration and national identity weren’t being properly addressed and that the elite’s bias in favour of ethnic minorities would have damaging consequences.

A disturbing example of this is reported in the September 2020 issue of a new heavy weight magazine called The Critic. There the writer Michael Collins, who also wrote, The Likes of Us: A biography of the white working class, describes the difference between the attention given to the murder of the young black teenager, Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and the young white teenager, Richard Everitt in 1994. Both tragic killings in London were completely unprovoked, the former by whites, the latter by Asians and were both clearly racist murders.

But the Lawrence case soon became the national icon of anti-racism, while the Everitt case sank without trace. Part of the reason was the appalling handling of the Lawrence case by the police which led to the Macpherson Report and the police accused of ‘institutional racism.’ But Stephen’s mother – she campaigned for justice for her son – became a baroness, an establishment figure, while Richard’s parents had to move to the north of England for their safety.

Now some will express surprise at the claim of a double standard and bias against the white British and insist it’s been the other way round - and in the early days of immigration it was. But tough anti-racist laws were brought in and as a result, the position of the ethnic majorities greatly improved, not least as their numbers increased. Why a bias against the white British emerged amongst the liberal elite is something we’ll explore in a separate blog on Woke Culture but suffice it to say that this is all part of a major realignment in British culture and political thinking. The old left / right divisions on class and economics have changed and we are now experiencing ‘culture wars’.

One very significant commentator on this political realignment is David Goodhart, who wrote the seminal book, The Road to Somewhere: The populist revolt and the future of politics. It came out in 2017 in response to Brexit and to Trump. In it he argues that the new political divide is between the ‘Anywheres’ – the degree educated, international minded, more successful, liberal metropolitans and the ‘Somewheres’ – the less educated, more rooted, less successful, conservative provincials.

The context of a knowledge economy, both digital and global, requiring mobility and high skills helps to explain the new landscape. The ‘Anywheres’ do well out of it and tend to look down on the ‘Somewheres’. Openness to immigration on the one hand, and Brexit on the other, are key dividing factors but there are other tensions. It all helps to explain why so many traditional Labour ‘Redwall’ seats voted Tory in the 2019 election. The ‘Somewheres’ had had enough.

For UKIP there seem to be two obvious implications of all the above. First expose the liberal bias against the white British for the nonsense it is and insist that concerns about immigration are addressed. Second, champion the ‘Somewheres’, their more local interests, their more rooted sense of national identity, their more traditional businesses and their more socially conservative tastes.

Read Part 8 - A Conversation with the Ethnic Minorities.