Saturday, 25 May 2013

"The Utopian boats of a multicultural success story"

It makes a change from mumbling on about "banana boats" I suppose:

My latest blogpost: "The Utopian boats of a multicultural success story"Tweet this! Posted by Mark Wadsworth at 08:32

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17 comments:

Physiocrat said...

Viking boats, perhaps? Sweden has an extraordinary number of boats per head of population. You will not spend more than a couple of days in the country without going on some boat or other.

Sweden prices its young and unskilled out of work through its ludicrous tax system which penalises legal economic activity and fines employers for taking on staff. Though whether the much needed tax reform would stop this kind of thing is another question.

25 May 2013 at 09:29
Kj said...

Phys: the consequences of the insane 31% employers NI are pretty clear, yes. Apparently they've reduced them for younger workers, those born after 1986 is 15%. Do you know if this is permanent, so that it'll not go up as these workers get older?

25 May 2013 at 09:55
Ian Hills said...

Sweden has only ever been a multicultural success story to the Swedish establishment, which likes cheap labour. Everyone else has suffered from it.

25 May 2013 at 19:35
Mark Wadsworth said...

Amazingly, they haven't corrected the headline yet.

Ph, LVT will solve most of our economic and social problems, but it will not solve "Islamism". Actually going to work is not really tradition in Islamic society, so lack of jobs is not the problem.

IH, yes, if you let people in (Vietnamese) who like working then at least you are getting cheap labour*. But what's the point of letting people in who have no intention of working? Who'll just claim their bennies and then start rioting?

* Either you can slag off immigrants for "taking our jobs" or you can slag them off for "taking our benefits" but not both, surely?

26 May 2013 at 08:20
Bayard said...

"Actually going to work is not really tradition in Islamic society"

What is your evidence for this assertion?

26 May 2013 at 11:49
Mark Wadsworth said...

B, statistics, numbers, facts, comparisons between employment levels in different "communities" in the UK, relative unemployment figures for Islamic and non-Islamic countries etc.

26 May 2013 at 12:29
Ralph Musgrave said...

What’s significant about this story is that the pro multi culti British elite kept VERY QUIET about it for the first 3 or 4 days of the riots (I learned about the riots from the Wall Street Journal and the Russian TV channel “Russia Today”).

I’d guess the reason is that the two butchers of Woolwich can be written off to the idiosyncratic behaviour of two nutters. So that doesn’t cast doubt on the alleged wonders of multiculturalism or Islam. In contrast, it is more legitimate to draw conclusions about Islam when several hundred Muslims go on the rampage in Stockholm.

So the BBC, the Grauniad, etc kept quiet about it. And when the Grauniad couldn’t ignore the story any longer, they described the miscreants as “youths”. Gosh: Swedish youths? Danish youths? I think not.

I never thought I’d regard a Russian news channel as being more reliable than the BBC or Grauniad, but that’s what it’s come to.

26 May 2013 at 12:55
Mark Wadsworth said...

RM, yes, that is very noticeable and a fair conclusion.

But I'm a fair minded chap. It is also a fact that the unemployment rate among recent immigrants generally is only half that of established UK residents.

26 May 2013 at 13:57
Anonymous said...

"More profoundly, in the words of the 2004 Arab Human Development Report, by "implant[ing] submission, parasitic dependence and compliance in return for protection and benefits," clannism destroys "personal independence, intellectual daring, and the flowering of a unique and authentic human entity.""

Quoted from Foreign Policy magazine. The report is here, I haven't read it.

http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/regionalreports/arabstates/name,3278,en.html

26 May 2013 at 16:23
Anonymous said...

Im in a shopping centre mucking about on a samsung galaxy mw

26 May 2013 at 17:06
Bayard said...

Well, unless, your "facts" include evidence of a tradition of "not going to work", all the other evidence you cite is meaningless. Employment statistics, especially when applied to whole countries, are a relection, more of the availability of work, than the willingness to work and you yourself admit that recent immigrants are more likely to be employed than the native British. I'd say there was more a tradition of "not going to work" amoungst certain sections of native British society. What colour was the skin of the hero of "Only Fools and Horses"?

27 May 2013 at 13:10
Bayard said...

"I’d guess the reason is that the two butchers of Woolwich can be written off to the idiosyncratic behaviour of two nutters."

Or it could be because it was just the idiosyncratic behaviour of two nutters. People get killed, even in broad daylight and in public and it is not really news. What made this news was that the killers were Muslims, and that the victim was a soldier. If it had been the other way round, it might just have been news and if the killers hadn't been anyone in particular it wouldn't have been news at all.

27 May 2013 at 13:14
Mark Wadsworth said...

B, I don't think that TV series are reliable evidence here and I refer you to RA's comment.

And yes, there are plenty of lazy Brits and criminal Brits too, I don't really see the relevance of that. Those are OUR lazy people and OUR criminals and we have to live with them.

I don't like the way you say "you yourself admit" as if that somehow weakens my position. If the stats showed that Muslims are more likely to be in work than other recent immigrants or other non-Muslim Brits then I would say so. But the stats say the opposite. You can't pick and choose.

27 May 2013 at 13:17
Bayard said...

" I don't think that TV series are reliable evidence here"

When you are talking about culture, then I would say that TV series are probably more reliable evidence than statistics. If there is a tradition of "not going to work" amoungst immigrant Muslims and a similar tradition amoungst the native British, that rather suggests that all cultures have a lazy and feckless element within them, except possibly the Germans, although the statistic you quote about immigrants being less likely to be unemployed than the native, does tend to suggest that either the lazy tend to stay in their native land or that the immigrating culture is less lazy and feckless overall. Or are you saying that Muslims are so lazy that even though they make up a large proportion of recent immigrants, they are actually less likely to be employed than the native British? If you are lumping all Muslims together, whether first, or third generation immigrants, then have you allowed for the fact that huge numbers of them were brought over to work in industries that have largely vanished and therefore the areas with the highest proportion of Muslims in the population are the areas with the highest unemployment, not because Muslims have a tradition of "not going to work", but because they have been hit proportionally harder by the loss of employment in the areas where they live?

27 May 2013 at 13:55
Mark Wadsworth said...

B: "have you allowed for the fact that huge numbers of them were brought over to work in industries that have largely vanished and therefore the areas with the highest proportion of Muslims in the population are the areas with the highest unemployment"

No, how can I? There are no official stat's on this. All your other points are sort-of-valid, but for everyone there is an equal and opposite counter argument.

27 May 2013 at 14:06
Kj said...

B: It's not especially controversial that identifiable cultural groups can have common, observable characteristics in diaspora countries they are in. And that political and social factors in those countries strongly affect that. For example that Somali's in Scandinavia have abysmal labour market participitation rates, compared to other groups, while in the US, they do allright compared to Scandinavia, but comparably worse than other immigrant groups in the US again. Religion may or may not be a determing factor, but religion has other issues as well, and I'll get back to that certain

The really racist thing being uttered here is your explanation that "they" came here for a certain kind of work, what, soon three generations ago, and can as a group not be expected to move on like their british counterparts?

As to the comforting notion of the Woolwich f***s being just two retards. That's all very nice and well, they probably were. It's not very nice and well being jewish, or gay, in certain cities in Sweden, Denmark and France especially, and it's not because of a couple of nutters. It is a development that is in the extreme, opposite end of what European cultural values are about, by any sorry standards. That's not ok.

27 May 2013 at 19:21
Bayard said...

"The really racist thing being uttered here is your explanation that "they" came here for a certain kind of work, what, soon three generations ago, and can as a group not be expected to move on like their british counterparts"

I think you misunderstand me: I was not saying that the high unemployment amoungst immigrants is due to their not "moving on", I was saying that it is due to the fact that towns and cities with a high proportion of immigrants have often been hardest hit by unemployment because the industries they came to work in are no longer there. Everyone in these places, of whatever racial origin faces the same problem: where do you move on to when all the big employers have gone? Immigrants also face the additional problem of racism amoungst potential employers.

Also, I never said that the Muslim diaspora didn't share common observable characteristics, because that would obviously be wrong, I was just querying whether the lack of a work ethic was one of them. The are societies in the world where, traditionally, the women do all the work and the men sit around doing nothing apart from occasionally fighting their neighbours, but generally not amoungst the societies from which the majority of Britain's Muslim immigrants are drawn from, AFAIK.

27 May 2013 at 22:03

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