Witnessing the live birth of gangland

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100102284/witnessing-the-live-birth-of-gangland/

>It’s difficult to write the words “live births to non-UK women” without sounding like a member of the English Defence League, and God knows what would happen if anyone used the phrase on Newsnight. So let me quickly point out that it comes from the Office for National Statistics, and features in the Government press release that landed on my desk on Thursday morning. “Disconcerting” is the word I’d use to describe the information it contained. Others come to mind, but this is a supremely touchy subject, so forgive me if I play safe.

I love this little disclaimer - You are a journalist writing for a newspaper and you still have to worble about this and that because by god your trendy left wing media elite buddies might compare you to the EDL! Things like this are incriminating, you might as well ask to be led away in chains.

Keep on the offensive - stay consistant, point out the contradictions. The rest of the article does this, pay attention to how it attacks accepted left wing myths and sacred cows. repeat repeat, that way you make your point.

In 2010, a quarter of births were to mothers born outside the UK, according to the ONS. The same set of statistics also showed that immigration added 239,000 to our population – a number which proves that this Government has no more control over our borders than the last one. The public instinctively senses this, but immigration figures are sufficiently complex that the BBC has no difficulty in finding liberal lobby groups to obscure their meaning. Not so those “live births”.

If a quarter of all babies born in England and Wales are to foreign mothers, then we’re experiencing the biggest change in our demographic identity since the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the fifth century. Future historians will regard this as the major development in early 21st-century British history, more important even than the loss of our sovereignty to the EU, which I’m beginning to think may be reversed one day, thanks to the slapstick collapse of the euro. Demographic change, in contrast, can’t be undone by happy accidents.

Nothing like this has happened before. Please pay no attention next time a Left-wing historian pops up on TV to romanticise the arrival of the Normans, Huguenots, Eastern European Jews etc. These were significant influxes, but Great Britain has never been “a nation of immigrants”. Even cosmopolitan London has witnessed nothing remotely comparable to the population shift recorded by the ONS statistics. More than half of all babies born in the capital in 2010 were to foreign mothers; in the borough of Newham more than three quarters of all new mothers were born abroad.

Another statistic that jumps out of the ONS findings relates to Poles. In 2001, there were 896 babies born to Polish mothers in England and Wales; in 2010, there were 19,762. Meanwhile, births to Middle Eastern, African and Asian mothers amounted to 14.7 per cent – that’s twice the proportion of non-British European mothers. Add that 14.7 per cent to children born to non-white British mothers and within a few years, a quarter of young Britons will be black, Asian or of mixed race. In the capital, the total will be well over 50 per cent.

The colour of people’s skins isn’t the problem, of course. The danger lies in a clash of ethnic and religious cultures against a background of broken families. London is already well on the way to turning into a US city, with sprawling black ghettos and a semi-invisible network of foreign white gangs: organised crime from Eastern Europe, one of the most powerful forces in the world today, has only just begun to flex its muscles in Britain.

Alas, as the riots proved, we don’t have a clue how to police this emerging landscape – and, let’s face it, with Theresa May as Home Secretary, Ken Clarke as “Justice Secretary” and the ultra-wimpish Liberal Democrats as Coalition partners, we’re not about to find out. So watch this space, but from a safe distance.

Beheading a statue of a dictator is obviously a Middle Eastern tradition: this week, Col Gaddafi’s image received the same treatment as Saddam Hussein’s. Admittedly, we don’t have dictators and even our most conceited public figures don’t erect statues of themselves. Which is a shame, because think of the bracing pleasure afforded by pulling down a statue of Gordon Brown. Or lesser but equally grand figures, such as Peter Mandelson. Or – my personal choice – the Chancellor of Oxford University and chairman of the BBC Trust. Just imagine the great patronising thunk! made by a statue of Lord Patten of Barnes as it bounces off the pavement…

The Guardian certainly knows how to sweeten the pill for its readers. A report on plummeting US crime rates – the result of locking up more people – suggested that the inspiring example of Barack Obama may have persuaded a generation of inner-city youths to mend their ways. Bless.

But we shouldn’t dismiss the idea that a role model can change the course of someone’s life. Talitha Lewis, a 16-year-old from a rough part of north London, thought she was destined to become a typical “baby-mum” until Michelle Obama visited her school in Islington. This week she got 10 GCSEs, including three As. Could a lecture from Mrs Obama do that? I think so. Michelle is much less weedy than her husband. She’s a splendid First Lady; we’ll miss her after next year.

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.” That quote from Steve Jobs tells you a lot about why Apple succeeded. And it reads powerfully today, at the end of a week in which he has been forced to step down as CEO by serious illness.

Some people find the quasi-religious overtones of Jobs’s messages a bit creepy. But ask yourself: what would English Christianity look like if the Archbishops of Canterbury or Westminster had an ounce of Jobs’s famous “ferocious perfectionism”? Dr Rowan Williams’s labyrinthine musings are everything that an Apple product is not: difficult to understand and launched at the wrong moment. Vincent Nichols, meanwhile, presides over the clumsiest bureaucracy outside Albania.

Thank God neither of them ended up running Apple: personal computers would still look like the console of William Hartnell’s Tardis.

It’s hard to keep a straight face reading the letter from 100 academics ticking off the Beeb for referring to Dr David Starkey as a “historian”. Basically, it’s a Lefty whinge, arguing that Starkey is ill-suited to pontificate on matters of race. I did wonder if he was the author of this stunt, so comically flatulent is the prose, but it’s the real thing. That makes it even funnier. The signatories include PhD and MSc “candidates” who didn’t wait to graduate before directing their High Table pomposity at Starkey. Still, there’s no doubting the credentials of Paul Gilroy, “Anthony Giddens professor of social theory” at the LSE. Not a title I’d boast about this week, given Giddens’s brown-nosing of Gaddafi, but there you go.