Badenoch's ahistorical blunder
At the Conservative annual conference yesterday, Badenoch claimed that (Muslim) ghettos are eroding the integration of migrants into British public life. According to the Times, she hit out at those who are “recreating the place that they came from.” She also said that while citizenship was not “race-based”, the norms and expectations that underpin “British culture” were being ignored by too many people moving to the country.Very interesting, and one Conservative MP criticised "the settlement of large aggregations .... in a Christian land" and said that "east of Aldgate one walks into a foreign town" with the development of a separate community, "a solid and permanently distinct block - a race apart, as it were, in an enduring island of extraneous thought and custom."But it wasn't a recent Tory MP, it was William Evans-Gordon, MP for Poplar at the beginning of the 20th century, who described Jewish immigrants as "foreign invaders" and blamed them for driving up rent prices and displacing local British workers, amongst other claims. Sound familiar?And were his claims borne out by how it developed subsequently? Of course not, the very idea is absurd, as the Jewish community became completely a part, and a valued part, of our identity, just as other waves of immigrants had done in the past.My reason for posting this is not to provide someone with the chance, sneeringly, to “thank” me for the history lesson, but to point out that Badenoch is profoundly wrong, and worse, is using the issue to curry (sorry!) favour with the right wing xenophobes in and to the right of her party.
Richard Carter ● 24d22 Comments ● 20d