The Curious Case of Being British

 community, cross-cultural, government, politics, prejudice & discrimination, racism, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  7 Responses »
Jan 292010
 

Written by JON TWIGGE

 

I am thrilled to be able to publish another contribution by Jon Twigge, an ardent Spiral Dynamics Integral enthusiast and supporter of the Centre of Human Emergence – UK. Jon wrote the piece for his own blog and has graciously consented to it being published here as well.

Unusually for me this post contains a little bit of my personal history…

Jon

What exactly does it mean to be British?
Well, for most of my life I lived without really knowing what it meant at all.  At least, not consciously.

I have been brought up in a rather sterile environment from the point of race and the world.  I lived most of my young life until I was 18 in a small village in rural Derbyshire in England.  The local village school, that I attended until I was 11, was a Church of England school, nominally at least, and I don’t particularly remember any overt race, cultural or religious content to my first years at school.

I have to admit to having a terrible memory for facts but I don’t recall a single non-white face from my years at infant and junior school.  Perhaps that is not too surprising as the population of the whole village was only around 300 people and the school had a total of about 50 children covering the ages of 5 to 11 years.

My next brave step in the world was to attend a senior school at the age of 11, a giant step which involved a coach trip every day of over 3 miles each way and attending a school of over 1,000 people.  A big, and indeed unnerving, step for a hugely shy and quiet young boy.  But, still I didn’t get to see a lot of non-white faces.  I vaguely remember there may have been one or two in the school over the years but they were certainly not common.

Race was simply not an issue for me at an early age.  I suppose the only exposure to different ethnic groups during these early years was via the great number of TV channels available in Britain at the time (there were 3!).  TV almost certainly did have coloured people on the screen. (Please forgive me if I use the wrong labels, it is people that matter to me, not what colour they are and I am almost certainly not up to date with the latest politically correct names for people of non white origins).  But, if you are familiar with British TV from 25 and more years ago, race was not often talked about.

Anti Racist
So, there I was with very little knowledge of race and ethnicity right up until the age of 18.  And yet funnily enough, or perhaps not so, depending on how you look at it, I was, I suppose, against racism.  I do wonder if perhaps this started when my mother commented one day how terrible it was that 2 people of 2 different colours, black and white, were going to get married.  I was quite surprised by this statement not having heard anything quite like it before.  My immediate reaction was that I thought the best way forward would be that as many people as possible should have mixed marriages so that people would get used to it and so that the cultures should be mixed up so that it would stop mattering any more.

To this day, I can’t see a reason why I should change my beliefs on mixed marriages; but, of course, I should add that i would certainly not be in favour of any compulsion or coercion for mixed marriages but rather that there should be no deliberate obstacles to it.   With my much more recent knowledge of how human values are generally derived from life circumstances and how people behave to protect their individuality and social groups, I would of, course, understand why so many people are racist or uncomfortable with the idea of mixed marriages but that does not mean that I approve or support racism.

A Lack of Identity
But, anyway, other than to illustrate how little awareness of race I had as a child, I have rather wandered off the topic of this post.  What I wanted to do is show how I personally didn’t really have an idea of ‘Britishness’ because i simply had almost no knowledge of other countries or race to define Britishness against. Culturally, I was of, course; very British with a healthy appetite for fish & chips as well as steak & kidney pies; but that is another story that I will almost certainly save for another day sometime in the distant future.

Being a rather introverted child, I suppose i must have spent a lot of time thinking.  Various life circumstances must have conspired to leave me without any particular reason to think of myself as British.  And so, and I really cannot recall how or why it might have happened, I came to the conclusion that I would quite like to be a member of the global human race rather than being British.  It’s not like this was a huge passion or anything; but some years ago I did go so far as to register with one of the groups around the world as a world citizen. I even got a little card back proclaiming my world citizenship.  It was not the most professional certificate in the world and I would not like to have tried getting through immigration with it; but it was something that I identified with.

Perhaps contributing to my personal lack of awareness of Britishness was that both my parents, for differing reasons, did not speak much of the past.  And also, I had only one remaining grandmother when I was born and she died when I was, I think, about 10 years old.  Perhaps all of these circumstances conspired to hide memories of a Great British history of empire and war from me as well. All in all I had a very limited exposure to the past.

A Common State of Affairs
And I woudn’t like to imply that everyone in Britain was so globally minded as I was thinking myself to be.  It was simply that I had hardly anything to hang a sense of Britishness on.  Perhaps my case was somewhat extreme but i think the circumstances that I encountered in my early years must have, in parts, been experienced by others and that, to some extent or other, that they too must have been somewhat lacking in an upbringing into British identity.

I am not alone.  I suspect that many people perhaps under 50 and definitely under 40 share this lack of historical Britishness.  Perhaps Britain collectively avoided discussion of its past of empire and greatness unless you deliberately sought it out in history lessons.

So, my argument is that we have a great number of British citizens alive today who don’t have much sense of a British identity.  If we attempt to define Britishness we will immediately run into this, for many people but certainly not all, a vacuum of historical identity.

So what is Britishness?
What we do find if we look for Britishness is something rather limited to what we find in many other countries.  What many people, of the younger generations at least, might define as their Britishness is a cultural identity with British values but without a historical and geographical belongingness.

If I was to try to list a few words that might give an indication of Britishness, I might use a collection of words something like ‘proud’, ‘strong’, ‘eccentric’, ‘open’, ‘honest’, ‘hard working’, ‘ethical’, ‘judicial’, ‘fair’, ‘successful’, ‘enterprising’ and ‘free’.  I am sure you could add a few words for me as well and please do if you want to comment.

So, for me, I guess that my British identity rests on my being British-like rather than being British geographically.  But, as I have said, that identity has not been very overtly conscious for me.  And that makes me wonder, if many others might agree with my analysis, that that may be why we British have traditionally been so accepting of other cultures, so long as they play fair of course, both in the historical empire and subsequent commonwealth, and in terms of immigration.

So, to lay it out in simple terms, I suspect that Britishness is no longer so dependent on a nationalistic geographic identity with this land but on the values that we British hold dear.

A Worrying Trend
But, at this point, I want to note what is a relatively recent and rather worrying trend.  Britain is a leading exponent of human rights and equality for everyone.  So far, so good.  Our fairness and sense of justice has been combined with a modern global political correctness that means that everyone is equal and has equal rights.

The trouble is, and I better say this rather quietly in case anyone with too strong a sense of justice is listening, this modern PC equality is becoming dominant to the point that it is applied so that everyone is given rights regardless of whether they exhibit modern traditional Britishness.  We are effectively rejecting our own culture and values and inviting in others to replace it.  I would very quickly remind you, before I get into trouble, that I mean Britishness in terms of being fair and upstanding rather than having the right colour skin.

Losing a Sense of British Values
What this means, all rather frighteningly now I think about it like this, is that British culture is now gradually losing its sense of British values on top of already having lost its geographic identity.  And that does not leave much apart from a politically correct idea of equalness for all.

Now I am getting worried.  We are deliberately giving up our sense of identity and we are creating a new wave of British citizens, both born here and through immigration, who lack a thorough sense of, and identification with, Britishness.  This leaves us somewhat open to minority groups and views of other cultures or disaffected groups to provide stronger senses of identity than we have natively.  These new power bases of identity probably don’t see a strong native Britain to hold them at bay and there is a sense of an ever widening open door to our country.

Maybe that last part sounds suspiciously racist.  It really wasn’t meant to.  I see a need for a once again strong British identity so that we, Britain, can be a strong member of an ever more global world in the years to come.  The alternative may well be a fractious British community with growing tensions and problems.

An Inspiring Talk
Early last year I attended a talk by Don Beck, who co-authored the early definitive book on Spiral Dynamics, in which he suggested that Britain may well stand closer to a great change, towards a new kind of society, than anywhere else in the world.  The basis of this claim is that change happens, in individuals and societies, when their life circumstances change and develop causing new problems in their lives that their current value systems are not good at dealing with.

I left that talk with a new sense of being British. And of the importance of being British for both Britain and the world.

A New Way
I would politely suggest, in my best English manner, that the decline in identification with traditional British values brought about by an overly politically correct society is indeed bringing about the circumstances and need for a new kind of change right here in Britain.  And I would suggest that the change that is required is the rise of a new kind of British values that respects and upholds a strong combination of, and respect for, individual expression, social structure and responsibilty, opportunity to succeed and equal rights for all rather than a continual struggle between them.

It is time that we once again become proud to live on this island and to uphold a (new and updated) British way of life so that we can once again stand tall in the world and lead by example.

Is Britain really broken?

 celebrity, community, crime, government, morality, politics, prejudice & discrimination, racism, religion, society, Spiral Dynamics, spirituality  6 Responses »
Jan 222010
 

 As part of his pre-election manoeuvring, Conservative leader David Cameron, according to the BBC, has today accused Labour of ‘moral failure’ and presiding over a country in both economic and social recession.

He has said the UK rewards parents who split up and is a place where professionals are told to follow rules rather than do what is best.

As an example of what he calls ‘broken Britain’, Cameron talked about the case of 2 brothers sentenced today for brutally attacking 2 other boys in South Yorkshire.

The brothers, aged 10 and 11 at the time, attacked their victims in Edlington, Doncaster, last April. They threatened to kill their victims, then aged 9 and 11, stamped on them and attacked them with broken glass, bricks and sticks. The brothers admitted causing grievous bodily harm with intent.

While stressing that the case is not typical, Cameron cited it as a shocking example of what he calls Britain’s broken society, one of the key themes of the party’s campaign but a diagnosis rejected by the Government which said the Doncaster case was “uniquely terrible and extremely rare”.

In a book of interviews with him by GQ editor Dylan Jones, published this week, Cameron is quoted as saying: “I’m going to be as radical a social reformer as Mrs Thatcher was an economic reformer, and radical social reform is what this country needs right now.

“Margaret Thatcher in her time realised that the big challenge was reviving Britain’s economy, and we should recognise that the challenge for the modern Conservatives is reviving our society.

“It’s dealing with the issues of family breakdown, welfare dependency, failing schools, crime, and the problems that we see in too many of our communities.”

In fact, the ‘broken Britain’ theme is not new. Several years ago, Cameron tasked former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith with creating a ‘think tank’ to investigate and report on what was wrong with Britain, with a particular emphasis on social factors. Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice has produced several very interesting reports since and has been using the term ‘broken Britain’ since at least July 2007. The concept began to capture headlines in a big way in February 2009 when Duncan Smith used the outraged headlines around 13-year-old Alfie Patten fathering a child by 15-year-old Chantelle Steadman to hold up the under-aged parenting as prime example of “what’s wrong with broken Britain”.

So is Britain broken?
Well, our kingdom has a hell of a lot of problems – just think:-

  • Struggling to make any sustainable progress out of recession when many other comparable countries are clearly on their way to recovery
  • Saddled with a national debt, the paying  back of which will take decades long-term or, short-term, cripple much of the public sector through severe cuts and/or hamstring the private sector through raised taxes
  • High rates of petty crime, drug addiction and alcoholism compared to the rest of the EU
  • The highest teenage pregnancy rate in the Western world
  • Unsustainably high rates of male unemployment
  • A growing problem with gun crime and knife crime
  • Rising ethnic tensions as multi-culturalism is acknowledged to have failed and the Government fails to deal with high rates of immigration – see the Blog: ‘Is restricting immigration discriminatory?’
  • The gap between rich and poor being acknowledged by the Office of National Statistics to be greater now than it was when Labour came to power in 1997
  • Politicians widely perceived as corrupt for lining their own pockets via the public purse and permitting the bankers to outrightly rape the public purse to pay their own bloated bonuses
  • The very union under attack as the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish campaign for more powers for their devolved governments

But is it worse than it was? It’s interesting to note that in 1996 Tony Blair used the James Bulger case to attack the Conservative government of John Major in a similar way to Cameron attacking Labour today. Blair said: “We hear of crimes so horrific they provoke anger and disbelief in equal proportions … These are the ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name.”

Qualitatively, I doubt that Britain is more ‘broken’ than it was when Blair cited Bulger but quantitatively maybe…. There have always been horrible, shocking crimes against children – just think of Ian Brady, Myra Hindley and the ‘Moors Murders’ back in the early 1960s. There have always been ruthless, brutal criminals – again, think the 1960s and the Kray Twins. Under-age pregnancy and alcoholism are millenniums-old problems and highly-addictive recreational drugs have long been available, if you knew who to ask. And racism, at root, is just a manifestation of tribalism.

2 things, though, have changed dramatically over the past 50-60 years:-

  • Firstly, the sheer scale of these problems across Britain is mind-blowingly larger than it was back in the 1950s. While Britain’s post-war, pre-Americanisation ‘Golden Age’, as depicted so charmingly in the Ealing films of the era, was a manufactured myth, the scale of crime, corruption, substance abuse and teenage pregnancy we experience today would have been unbelievable to most British citizens of the time.
  • The wide-scale spread of these problems – once largely the sinful preserves of the more wealthy classes – has permeated right through the ‘ordinary’ people – what used to be considered traditionally the working and lower middle classes. These ‘salt of the earth’ types generally held higher moral codes than many of their so-called social betters. I’m making huge mythical generalisations, of course; but, as generalisations and allowing for many exceptions, they pretty much hold true. For example, when I was a snobbish middle-class teenager in the late 1960s, my friends and I thought it was ‘cool’ and ‘groovy’ to smoke cannabis. However, our working class peers thought it was disgusting and anything to do with hippies was morally depraved. Nowadays, the use of cannabis amongst working class teenagers is commonplace. Whilst the older brothers of my working class peers considered it good sport to bonk a girl in the alley outside her parents’ house late at night, they thought the middle-class hippie couples living together openly without being married was going to lead to societal meltdown!

Where’s the morality gone?
Back in 1999, when I was involved in putting together the HemsMESH project under the watchful eye of Spiral Dynamics ‘guru’ Don Beck, I remember Don talking about how the British churches didn’t do BLUE any more. In other words, they weren’t projecting strong moral codes on how people ought to live, treat each other and relate to society. In Don’s view, the British churches had become dominated by liberal GREEN thinking, with its motif of whatever fulfils the human spirit and doesn’t overtly harm others is OK.

If that sounds similar to some of the hippie mantras of the 1960s or rave lyrics of the 1980s and 1990s, then you’re hearing the same codes in action. GREEN undermines BLUE disciplines and releases RED to indulge as much as it likes without restraint, aided and abetted by ORANGE technology facilitating unlimited internet gambling and beaming uncensored violence and explicit pornography into your 10-year-old’s bedroom. It seems like an absurdly simple diagnosis of the causes of our ills – and there is, indeed, much detail to fill in – but, as an overview, it’s as simple as that.

Don Beck, from ‘Bible belt’ Texas, would, of course, be highly sensitive to the failings of the British churches; but the United States is generally acknowledged to be a much more religious country than Britain. Of course, the US has many of the same problems we have and often in more extreme versions and concentrated pockets – East Los Angeles makes Brixton look relatively idyllic! However, as percentages of national populations, the problems are on nothing like the same, overwhelming scale as here. The American churches by and large make a good fight against the ‘sin’ – though it’s clear GREEN is starting to undermine BLUE in the controversy over the ordination of gay bishops in the East Coast Anglican Church.

But, in seeking to resolve Britain’s problems, we can’t just re-engineer large-scale religious BLUE and expect it to work.

You only have to look at the opposition to the so-called ‘Islamification’ of Britain. It’s all but impossible, of course, but if you could factor out the extremists and their ideologies and discount the racist antipathy towards Islam simply because most of its practitioners have brown skins… then Islam offers much the same kind of solid BLUE values for living that Christianity traditionally has.

And a very sizeable part of the British people simply don’t want that. The proverbial RED-GREEN harmonic of it’s-good-for-you-to-do-as-you-like is now too embedded in British culture. As an example, for all that The Sun moans and whinges about Britain’s moral decay, it’s not prepared to do away with its page 3 girl or stop publishing photographs of various celebrities in indiscrete poses. Why? Because that’s what a sizeable number of people want, as verified by the paper’s sales and visits to its web site. There’s enough BLUE left in society at large to recognise the mess; but not enough to embrace the disciplines necessary to get out of the mess.

So, what Spiral Dynamics calls a 2nd Tier approach is needed – the ability to look at all the competing codes and their values and take action in the interests of the whole, meeting all needs as far as possible within that paradigm but even being prepared to sacrifice some freedoms to establish the paradigm.

David Cameron is to be praised mightily for putting his party’s emphasis on social factors. But, if he simply wants to bring back certain disciplines, it’s going to mean as little to current British culture as John Major’s (PURPLE-BLUE) ‘back to basics’ campaign did in 1997 against Tony Blair’s (RED-ORANGE) ‘let’s make money and live the good life’ ethos.

Is restricting immigration discriminatory?

 community, cross-cultural, government, Psychology, racism, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  29 Responses »
Jan 072010
 

At last, it’s starting to become OK to talk about immigration. Of course, it’s been a hot topic for the British National Party (BNP) , their British National Front predecessors and the far right for years – in fact, decades really, stretching right back to Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech back in April 1968. The GREEN vMEME’s staunch opposition to anything that could possibly be associated with prejudice and discrimination has inhibited rational discussion of these issues. Now, thanks to the emergence of the cross-party Balanced Migration Group (BMG) , led by Frank Field (Labour) and Nicholas Soames (Conservative), the barriers to acknowledging the problems that immigration is creating for the United Kingdom are at least beginning to crack.

Over the past year, from interacting with Jon Freeman and Rachel Castagne at June’s ‘A Regent’s Summit on the Future of the UK’ to dialogue with staunch BNP supporter Man of the Woods in the comments on ‘Should the BNP appear on the Beeb?’, I’ve come to have much more of an appreciation of how a number of people feel really passionately about this kingdom…as Man of the Woods calls it, ‘my ancestral land’. The real eye-opener for me, though, with regard to how attitudes are changing towards immigration, was Matthew Kalman’s contribution to that Blog. Matthew, someone I’ve long thought of as a self-challenging visionary more than capable of 2nd Tier thinking, appeared at first glance to be reflecting BNP concepts. Then I realised Matthew was reflecting the fears, concerns and aspirations of those he deals with and that this was leading him on something of a journey to question the GREEN-sponsored multi-culturalism which has led to ethnic minority identities being celebrated more than national identities over the past decade or so.

In terms of what the BNP wants set against the general consensus of the mainstream political establishment, acknowledging some simplification of the issues, this can be reduced basically to a values conflict – between the PURPLE tribalism espoused by the BNP and the GREEN egalitarianism of the political establishment. The earlier half-hearted and cack-handed attempts of the Government to develop policies on citizenship and immigration and now the emergence of the Balanced Migration Group are slowly but surely beginning to move us beyond GREEN’s presupposition that, if you want to restrict people of a different ethnic origin from entering this country, then you are prejudiced. As a kingdom, we are heading (hopefully!) towards being able to debate these issues rationally.

With it being said that that one new immigrant arrives in Britain every minute, a new British passport is issued to an immigrant every 3 minutes and every 6 minutes a new home needs to be built for an immigrant, clearly immigration is exerting substantial pressures on both the physical and sociopsychological infrastructures of the United Kingdom. In that context, it’s hard not to empathise with the BMG’s declaration yesterday urging the parties to make policy statements in their manifestos for the upcoming General Election to prevent the British population reaching the projected level of 70 million-plus by 2029. (The bulk of this anticipated population explosion is anticipated to come directly from new immigrants and indirectly from the children of immigrants being born in this country.)

A population of 70 million-plus and continuing to rise would almost certainly make the UK the most crowded member of the European Union.

So we have 3 pressures of concern regarding these issues:-

  • the seemingly-unstoppable rise in immigration
  • the increased support for the BNP and the far right emanating from the real fears and concerns about this amongst the ‘indigenous peoples’ of the UK
  • the effect of BNP and far right hostility towards ethnic groups stimulating some members of those groups towards anti-social behaviour – eg: the Anti-Nazi League and, far more worryingly, radical Islamic fundamentalism

Is it always wrong to discriminate?
That it is wrong to discriminate – because that means not everyone is treated equally – is one of the GREEN vMEME’s presuppositions.

But, from a 2nd Tier perspective, could it sometimes be in the interests of the whole to discriminate against a part?

And is discrimination inevitable anyway?

Simply to categorise people  - eg: into ‘British citizens’ and ‘residential non-British citizens’, ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘Lancastrians’ and ‘Yorkies’, ‘English’ and ‘Scots’ – invites discrimination, according to Henri Tajfel & John Turner’s Social Identity Theory (1979). Categorisation leads to identification with your own ‘in-group’, absorbing its values and norms, while demonising the out-groups via derogatory stereotypes. In Integrated SocioPsychology terms, this is the PURPLE vMEME’s building of the tribal identity. Then, because RED finds its self-esteem invested in the in-group, it pushes the in-group to be superior to the ‘out-groups’.

As Muzafer Sherif et al (1961) showed in the classic Robber’s Cave Experiment, competition increases in-group/out-group rivalry substantially. Moreover, Marilyn Brewer & Donald Campbell, in their 1976 study of East African tribes, found that competition over basic resources such as land and water, really ramps up the hostility.

As its population threatens to mushroom completely out of control, the UK is faced with an enormous debt problem that means, whichever party wins the election, we shall see the promised ‘swingeing cuts’ in public services. With the UK economy showing few signs of emerging from recession, the cuts are likely to be long and deep. Thus, as standards of living fall in real terms, rivalry – even outright hostility – will grow as in-groups look to target out-groups for the blame. Differences in names, language, colour of skin and ethnic origin make it easier to tell who’s not in your in-group. It’s not racism per se because racism is really just a manifestation of tribalism. And tribalism, by default, is ethnocentric. It’s perhaps no surprise that Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, in his support for the BMG declaration, is talking about ‘Christian heritage’ and that immigration policy should have “a bias towards Christian values”. Obviously as a churchman, it’s Carey’s job to promote Christianity; but he’s also making the point that Christianity traditionally is the religion of the ‘indigenous peoples’ of the UK. It’s a sort of other-side-of-the-coin to the English Defence League’s stance against the perceived ‘Muslimisation’ of England. Unfortunately it all too easily slips into a kind of pastiche of the neo-Christian white ‘indigenous’ Briton vs the Muslim Asian immigrant.

Underneath the rhetoric and bluster, if we use the Spiral Dynamics map, we can see RED-driven firebrands like Nick Griffin and some of the more radical imams manipulating the PURPLE anxieties of their communities and using sheens of BLUE nationaliism and religion to do so.

Of course, if we’re to going to follow the BNP down the ‘race route and judge the priority or superiority of one group of people over another group of people by the colour of their skin and their ethnic origin, then the ‘whities’ had better be careful. For 40 years overt racists have used the lower IQ scores of Afro-Americans on Stanford-Binet tests – first brought to prominence by Arthur Jensen (1969) – to justify discrimination by whites (average: 100) against blacks (average: 85). The problem with this is that we now know Asians score higher than whites – especially East Asians (average: 106 – J Philippe Rushton & Arthur Jensen, 2005)!

Heck, not only do they breed faster than us – but they’re smarter too!

There are, of course, huge controversies around both the concept of race and the concept of intelligence – and neither concept may turn out to be as valid as claims make them out to be. Nonetheless, the higher IQ scores of Asians on white-originated IQ tests certainly knock claims by whitey to be superior.

So, on what other basis can there then be discrimination? If you go down Man of the Woods’ route that these are our ‘ancestral lands’; then, while I’ve got a lot of empathy with that concept…if a land really does belong to its ‘indigenous people’, then what the hell were the Europeans doing during the ‘Age of Empires’, invading other peoples’ lands and subjugating them – if not outrightly enslaving them?!?!?

(NB: I’ve put ‘indigenous people’ here in inverted commas because the English are, of course, one of the most bastardised peoples in the world in terms of racial stock, counting Celts, Picts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Normans and Jews amongst our distant ancestors. Who exactly were the original ’indigenous peoples’? Smallish waves of Poles, Slavs and more Jews came to these shores as refugees during World War II – and that’s before the docking of the Windrush in 1948 started the trickle that became a flood of Afro-Caribbean, African and Asian immigarants!)

From a 2nd Tier perspective, we have to say that, if there is to be discrimination – which seems to natural to all the 1st Tier vMEMES until the emergence of GREEN – it should be primarily in the interests of the majority and the health of the kingdom as a whole. Therefore, if imposing a cap on immigration – as the BMG is urging – is discriminatory, then so be it. There are far more people in this kingdom who primarily espouse PURPLE values than espouse GREEN values. So keeping the kingdom safe for the majority of its people and ensuring they have the resources to feel safe and secure is important. Allowing our population to grow beyond the 70-plus million will inhibit those vital measures. So a cap or other similar restriction is necessary.

The opportunities an immigration restriction measure will create
In a sense we have the BNP to thank for forcing this debate upon a reluctant, GREEN-led political establishment. The BNP has acted like a lightning rod for all the seething discontentment amongst the PURPLE-dominated traditional white working classes; and the party has channelled that discontentment into a significant electoral force.

However, from a 2nd Tier perspective, we know that all life has value – that all humans have value and that GREEN is basically right in its drive to create equal opportunities for all. What GREEN doesn’t get is that, while everyone might be ‘equal in the eyes of God’, not everybody is equal in practicality; therefore, there need to be multiple opportunities tailored to different needs. What GREEN also doesn’t get is that the lower vMEMES don’t see the world its way. Which is why we need 2nd Tier thinking to create and manage precarious and shifting balances between the competing needs and values of different vMEMES.

An immigration cap and/or other restrictions might be said to discriminate against those who want to come to this kingdom; it might also be said to discriminate against those who are already settled in this kingdom and wish to see other people from their country of ethnic origin settle here. Interestingly, however, it should be noted that increasingly pollsters are claiming support for restrictions on immigration amongst the ethnic minorities.

A substantial reduction in immigration would give us the breathing space to deal with the effects of 50-plus years of large-scale immigration. In 2004, in the wake of reports on race riots in Oldham, Bradford, Leeds and Burnley during 2001, Trevor Phillips, then head of the Commission for Racial Equality, declared multi-culturalism dead. “We need to assert there is a core of Britishness,” he stated.

If the vision of multi-culturalism – distinct plural cultures living side by side in harmony – is indeed dead, then what kind of Britain should we aim for in our multi-ethnic land…and what role would the assertion of ‘a core of Britishness’ play in it?

It was to address these sorts of issues that the Centre for Human Emergence UK was set up last June. However, time is not on our side. As the BMG acknowledge, it will take several years to get immigration back down to manageable levels. In the meantime PURPLE’s need for stability and security is being ravaged by the recession, with the rate of job losses and house repossessions only decreasing very slowly. These ingredients mixed together have the potential to create a social powder keg – which could be ignited by some pretty short fuses!