Rioters attack an asylum hotel in Rotherham (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
In order to understand what I want to say here, there are two things you need to know about me.
The first is that, last year, I was in a catastrophic rock-climbing accident in which I broke my neck. The result is that I am now tetraplegic, one of the most severe disabilities it is possible to acquire. Some highlights include having no sensation, or motor control, from around my nipples down. That doesn’t just mean I will have to use a wheelchair for the rest of my life; it also means I am doubly incontinent. Instead of peeing out of my penis into a toilet, my urine drains directly out of my guts into a plastic bag strapped to my leg. Not only am I liable to shit myself without warning; I have no control over when I do or don’t go. This means every morning I am treated to the delights of “manual evacuation”, where a trained care worker sticks suppositories up my arse, before fingering me until I defecate. While still in bed.
I need them to do this because tetraplegia means that I have lost around 95% of the use of my hands. Just like I also need somebody to wash me, dress me, and cook for me — none of which I can do for myself anymore. (I am writing this using voice dictation software.) On top of that, my broken neck means I am at risk of a unique medical condition called autonomic dysreflexia, which basically means that my body is liable to begin a deadly feedback loop, which if untreated culminates in agonising pain, strokes and death. For these reasons, I now require 24-hour care. In fact, this list only scratches the surface — but you get the idea. It is not exactly how I planned to spend my 30s.
The second thing you need to know about me is that I was born and raised in Southport. Both my parents still live there, in the house where I grew up. Many of my friends also still live there, though thankfully none of their families were victims in last week’s horrendous events.
These two things ought to have nothing in common with each other. And until last Monday, they didn’t. What changed this was finding out that the far-Right activists who have been causing havoc across the UK for the past week were planning to bring their “protests” close to my home. And not just my original home of Southport, which they’d already desecrated on the ludicrous pretext of “avenging” the awful stabbings that took place there. But my current home of Walthamstow, in London. And incredibly, not just my borough — but literally my street, urging their followers to “mask up” at 8pm on Wednesday outside the Waltham Forest Immigration Bureau, which I can practically see from my bedroom window.
Now, this generates some quite serious practical safety problems. Not for me personally, because I can just sit safely inside my flat, away from the idiots. The problem is for my care team. By and large, the person who looks after me in the day swaps over with somebody else at 8pm. Then at 9pm, a second person arrives to assist with the rigmarole of putting me to bed. Thus, three people are faced with the prospect of negotiating an EDL “protest” that may well have turned into a race riot. This would be bad enough, but gets considerably worse when you factor in that one of them is Nigerian, and two of them are Pakistani.
In a way, this is just a practical problem. As it will not be safe for them to be on the street outside my flat given the kinds of people who are going to be around, we need to work out some different arrangements in terms of who comes and goes, and at what times. To some extent, this is just a logistical pain. Much worse than that is the shame I feel in having to look them in the eye and discuss the fact that white English people (like me) are threatening to have a riot on the street outside, because of a hatred for people like them.
Let’s unpack that.
On the one hand, my carers turn up every day to do things like wipe my arse, drain my piss, wash my genitals, dress me, feed me, put me back to bed for scrubbing when I’ve shit myself, and so on. On top of that, they also have to deal with me. The truth is I would be lying if I said I had come to terms with how I must live now. I am riddled with depression and anxiety, and while most days I manage to keep a lid on it, some days I just don’t. I live in a permanent state of frustration, which means I’m often just rude (which I then hate myself for). At my worst, I have near-psychotic breakdowns. Like last week, when I started hitting myself in the head as hard as I could and begging the staff to kill me, promising to give them the contents of my ISA in exchange. In other words, caring for me is no picnic.
And yet I’ve never once heard them complain, or get frustrated with me, or show me anything other than patience and kindness. And it is not like they are doing this for great monetary reward. They are employed not by the NHS, but by a private care agency that gets its funding through the NHS. I don’t know exactly what that means in terms of staff wages, mostly because I’m too embarrassed to ask. But we all know it’s not going to be the stuff of envy.
Nor is it some strange coincidence that my care staff are immigrants from much poorer countries. This is just the norm, as I’ve come to learn over the past year. When it comes to basic care work — i.e. the stuff that nurses are too qualified to sensibly be assigned to do, but which absolutely needs to be done to stop people dying, to keep them clean, to ensure they eat, and so on — the fact is that English people just won’t do it in anything like sufficient numbers to meet the demands of the indigenous population. The only people willing to do this shit work, for crap pay, are those who come from countries so poor, with economic prospects so bad, that moving to the UK seems worth it. And now that they are here, the self-appointed “defenders” of England tell them that they are not wanted, and threaten them with violence.
After my accident, I spent the first eight months in different hospitals. As an estimate, I would say that 85% of the people involved in my care — from top surgeons all the way through to cleaners and kitchen staff — were non-white. To some extent, this was skewed by the fact that I spent most of my time in London. And quite a few of those people were second or third-generation immigrants (although that is offset by the fact that a lot of the white staff were Eastern Europeans). For four months after that, I had to live in a residential nursing home while independent living arrangements could be secured for me. One of the care staff there was referred to as “the English girl”. Because she was, literally, the only one.
So, when I hear “patriots” bemoaning immigration, while claiming to love the NHS, I roll my eyes. Perhaps they could try breaking their necks, and seeing what I’ve seen. I think they might change their minds. It is not just the NHS that would collapse if the EDL got its way; the entirety of social care in this country would disintegrate overnight.
In many ways, it is a strange irony that an explosion of racial tensions should emanate from my hometown, of all places. My memories of growing up there, nearly 20 years ago, are of it being basically an Anglo-Saxon ghetto. I think there was one black person in my high school. The only Asian was my mate Pricey. I remember hearing that there was a synagogue somewhere, but I didn’t meet a Jewish person until I went to university. Clearly, things must have changed to some extent: last week, I was genuinely surprised to learn that Southport even has a mosque. But still, of all the places in Britain where a second-generation Rwandan immigrant born in Cardiff might perpetrate an act of unspeakable horror, Southport would have seemed one of the most unlikely candidates, at least before tragedy struck. At any rate, trying to invoke Southport, of all places, as the emblem of anti-immigration sentiment, will be patently ridiculous to anybody who’s ever actually been there.
But those are facts, and as we know in this age of social media lies, encouraged by vile opportunists like Nigel Farage, the facts don’t matter anymore. So, forget about the facts, I want to say something different to the yobs planning to “protest” on my street this week. On behalf of Southport, on behalf of my carers, on behalf of myself, and on behalf of all decent Britons: will you please just fuck off?
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SubscribeSorry to hear about your very unfortunate condition, but to extrapolate from that to “these self-styled patriots don’t care about Britain” is an extrapolation far too far (to put it mildly!)
Yes, I get your point about your carers, but there are one or two issues that I would put to you:
Firstly, how did we manage in the days before mass immigration? We managed because local people did that sort of work because it was decently paid. The opening of the borders, with unlimited availability of cheap third world labour has enabled employers to dispense with British carers. We could go back to paying decent wages again.
Secondly, if we must have cheap foreign labour- in this or any other area – the visas should be TEMPORARY (for a period of two or three years), as in most sensible countries, not PERMANENT as now.
We could go back to paying decent wages again but is anyone willing to?
Raising wages in the care sector and other service industries dependant on mass migration increases costs for the users of them. Old age care costs, already high and rising, would only get worse if we were to increase the cost of labour in the sector, not to mention that without imported labour from abroad they would have to be pulled from other industries, which would have a knock on effect on their costs.
Governments have learnt through experience that as long as we have cheap goods and cheap labour the public will pretty much look the other way on any issue, be it catastrophic foreign wars, constitutional vandalism or socially destabilising mass migration. No matter how much we claim we don’t want something we will still vote for the party which sustains our illusion of prosperity, usually by stacking another few hundred billion on the national debt, and then promising to sort it out in the next parliament before being voted out and promising to spend more to get back in again.
Ultimately this is how politicians have got away for so long with breaking their promises on immigration because the one thing the we the public will absolutely not do to end mass migration, is live within our means and maybe even have our own children to staff our healthcare sector, instead of outsourcing procreation to the developing world on the cheap, like we have so many of our industries. Until we are willing to accept this and I doubt enough people ever will, then mass migration is here to stay.
First of all, what the author is going through puts problems into perspective.
That said, your explanation that we absolutely need ‘more people’ to maintain living standards is the mainstream explanation, but I think it is fundamentally flawed. During the lockdowns we were able to keep post-industrial societies running with only a handful of “essential workers”. This begs te question, do we really need the rest or is David Graeber correct: are all those managerial legions in advanced economies simply a bunch of bullshit jobs? Dig a little deeper and the problem is rarely that we don’t have enough workers for goods and services: we reached the capacity to over-produce a 100 years ago. The problem is that we need enough demand, that is why we need people. We need to consume, even if it is senseless consumption, otherwise we do not have growth. An irrational problem that only depletes our resources faster.
The national debt is also a non-issue. Our quest to cut public spending by selling off state assets and offshoring only made things worse. Since 2008 the economy simply doesn’t work without central banks constantly stimulating it using quantitative easing – that is, sneaky public spending through the back door to endlessly push up asset prices. Finally, recently some research was published showing empirical evidence that states with population decline did not see many of the problems mainstream economists anticipated. Many of these states even had much more GDP growth (especially per capita) than the dogma’s predicted.
We should stop listening to abstract models and just look at the real world with some common sense.
I accept that there is much waste in the modern economy but during lockdown the economy was running at an enormous deficit, we had to borrow 400 billion to enact it, it’s doesn’t prove the economies over abundance, quite the opposite.
I’d be interested to see which economies grew during population decline but I have a feeling that it was during periods of rapid technological change which massively boosted productivity offsetting the decline in population. That’s not what is happening now. Sustained low birth rates, combined with increased longevity means that the ratio of dependents to workers is rising and this can only be counted by either increasing productivity, ( perhaps possible with technologies such as AI but we are still left with the issue that AI cannot care for the old or disabled, that requires human labour), reducing expenditure or increasing taxation, essentially lowering living standards (impossible to get through at the ballot box) shorter and less generous retirements (same problem) or mass migration.
We are for the most part only at the cusp the damage that a declining and more dependant population will cause. Even countries like Japan who are ahead of us have only experienced a fraction of the shock to date and have been stagnant for decades. There are no easy fixes to this his problem but to refuse to acknowledge it exists will only make it harder to solve.
Your statement about the pandemic proves my point. You say we ran deficits (and we did even more QE by the way). Sure, but what does this actually mean in de real physical world? Here’s what: nothing really. It is simply a computer telling us there is more money. It was the virtual fuel that told factories and hospitals to keep running. And that appeared to be much of what was really needed. Yet, the economy also grew a lot somehow. Why? Because much of our speculative economy simply isn’t real and productive. Perhaps even something of giant Ponzi. For the part that is real we have more than enough people – it is not a problem of supply. And capitalist have known this for a long time as even back in the 1930s they found that we needed to switch capitalism from a needs to a desires system. Because needs were already satisfied. Today that is beyond obvious. China has an enormous overcapacity to produce, despite a shrinking population. Demand is their big problem and by extension the capitalist world. The only thing that really is a problem is limited resources/energy and commodities, something economists structurally ignore. So far it were indeed innovations that have helped us sustain an ever larger population but for the past 50 years we have not seen much of these big innovations anymore. It’s more about improving what is already there. Technically what you really want is GDP growth for less energy, more people aren’t doing that.
Now, conventional ‘wisdom’ tells us that with public debt future generations have to pay for it. But this makes no sense unless the debt is owned in foreign currencies. During the pandemic we collectively started printing money, nothing real is owed to anyone. As Bertrand Russell once said about this economic thinking: it is as if we can eat bread that has yet to be baked. It is only a problem because we make it a problem.
The underlying issue is probably also a class thing. To keep things working, allow good salaries, cut BS jobs for productive ones and probably even reduce work weeks we need to transfer the enormous wealth accumulated by big capital over the past 40 years back to the middle class. Wealth stored in capital that is not doing much. It makes sense that those who have accumulated that wealth will use every rhetorical and political trick in the book to prevent that. Having a large working class improves their bargaining position.
I’m not sure where you get your data but the economy didn’t grow during Covid lockdowns, it shrunk before returning to the size it was before after reopening but is now growing at a slower rate and is smaller that it would have been had had lockdowns not happened. We are paying for lockdown through inflation and higher taxes and borrowing rates. These are not abstract made up numbers but concrete costs for QE.
The idea that if you don’t own money directly to a foreign investor, you can just write it off or transfer it into consumption is equally wrong. Even if all government debt was British owned, cancelling it would be the equivalent of adding stimulus into the economy equal to the value of the bonds and the interest they pay. This again would be massively inflationary and since the UK runs a large trade deficit, it would also devalue currency and making this even worse and massively spike our borrowing costs, something else we are reliant on the rest of the world for. This really is school boy socialism economics you’re peddling here.
According to the World Bank there was a worldwide decline of 3%, followed by a growth of more than 6% and then 3% GDP. We find somewhat comparable figures in Western nations. Especially the US did fine. What it would have been without lockdowns, we will never know but on an average of, say 5 years, it is not out of the ordinary. Also 2008 was essentially much worse so far. Moreover, I never said all of this had no negative effects, it certainly did and more might be coming. Especially because it caused huge inequality. However, my point was that we can apparently run an economy with only a fraction of the work force as long as a computer fools us into thinking there is more money. So something is clearly off with all the economic dogma’s telling us population decline and an aging population means armageddon.
Here is the thing. Yes we have models based on inflation, debt, bonds, FIAT/credit money. Fine. But none of these exists in the real world. Do any of these abstract parameters – without human intervention – physically cause a Chinese factory to be half as productive? Can crops not grow with inflation, thus ruining our food supply? Does it make workers half as productive? Does it make innovators less intelligent? Does debt shoot energy and commodities into space? I am not paddling socialism at all, I am simply trying to stay focuses on the real world governed by the laws of physics. You suggest that we should submit to abstract economics, which is often irrational and empirically inconsistent. Then I’d rather go Austrian school. We over-complicate things tremendously. Also note that economic consensus pretty much changes every 50 years. That the neoclassical synthesis has things completely backwards is something more and more economists are also waking up to. We might as well consider it a collective psychosis.
If you want to talk economics anyway: QE hardly causes CPI-inflation, it causes asset inflation because of free money in reserves and low rates on bonds/loans, which the central banks buy as well as other securities. Something they can always do. That is why housing is unaffordable. Technically much of that money can simply not reach the real economy, nor do banks really need it because they simply create credit money as well. So you get a lot of rent seeking in the financial world. Private bank credit, by the way, can also be used to buy bonds, so all of these things are just different forms of either FIAT or credit money creation in the end. With some exceptions, borrowing is simply not the right word.
But you also seem to forget that we have been doing QE a lot since 2008, which is my point: the economy was already unproductive requiring constant stimulus. And there are very little rational real-world indications that this has to do with a small work force and/or a lack or productive capacity.
Inflation in the real economy is no law of nature either. You can discuss endlessly if it is – as Friedman suggested – always a monetary phenomenon. In the end it is because people – not nature – push their prices up. It is man made. And as long as we push for extreme asset inflation without taxing it, it makes little sense to think that deficits are a bigger problem. Of course, the asset owning class doesn’t mind.
And this takes us back to the main problem of the monetary policy of the past 40 years, and especially since 2008. Before talking about austerity or the problem of population decline let’s first turn the inequality back to the golden age of capitalism: the postwar consensus. Then we’ll see what else we need.
GDP per capita PPP has declined from 54.4K USD to 54.1K USD from 2019 to 2024, according to traiding economics. This will account for currency bias and inflation.
Your source, Trading Economics, gives me 18k – 23k USD GDP per capita PPP for years 2019 – 2023 (2024 isn’t in yet, obviously).
The US went from 70k to 74k
The EU from 52k to 54k
The UK from 54k to 54k, but the UK had been virtually stagnant since 2008, where the UK saw a similar slow recovery.
So nothing out of the ordinary so far. Not that these figures really mean that much.
Sorry, the 2024 was a typo, I meant 23. This is what you get for posting late at night after an evening beer.
But the UK has declined, if by only ~1%.
I also place little stock in these figures, even if PPP is marginally superior to GDPp/c, in turn marginally superior to GDP.
The immigration scam succinctly put: The problem is that we need enough demand, that is why we need people. We need to consume, even if it is senseless consumption, otherwise we do not have growth
That’s factually correct incorrect. In fact it borders on conspiratorial. The UK runs a large trade deficit. We consume more than we produce. We’re not importing people to satisfy excess productive capacity, we’re doing so to try to manage the growing dependants to workers ratio we have due to low birth rates and long retirements. We have a labour shortage combined with excess consumption, not excess production.
Even if willing, I don’t think it’s an option. The public finances are too hollowed out, the country is too unproductive and trade deficit debilitating. Any attempt to move to a higher wages will trigger more inflation. Reeves’ pay deal for doctors came at the expense of winter fuel allowances.
Blair’s great vision for the future, where everyone worked in high value, emergent fields with imported labour to perform the lower economically valued (but not necessarily socially valued) roles was a complete failure, which subsequent governments copied for reasons that are utterly unknown to this commenter. I don’t think there’s any fixing this.
And yet Kabour has promised a payout of 22% over 2 years for junior doctors. Only medics straight from uni get £14 an hour simpmy because they are “apprentices”! NHS staff have all had pay increases – from the public purse. Care staff are not employed by the NHS. They are employed by Councils or agencies. The money doesnt make its eay to them simply because few value their work. I know how few health professionals in tbe NHS think that paid carers are on a par to what heakthcare associates in hospitals do. In fact, paid carers have a much more difficult job as there is little equipment, they work in people’s houses and in the main,they work alone. Time for paid carers wages to be in a par or more than healthcare assistants. Without them, it would cost the country even more in terms of hospital:residential care and would prevent men and women from working as they would hqve to look after their own.
What you do not mention is:
what will happen when the wheels fall off the waggon and we are no longer able to borrow to fund an unsustainable level of government spending and the tax based has been squeezed dry;
the level of benefits is such that not working is a life style choice; and
the immigrants we bring in pay very little tax and ultimately their presence here is subsidized by the tax payer
If women, who were doing carework, before mass immigrarion were decently paid, why the are so many councils throughout the UK still struggling to pay these women what they won in court?
Care work has always been badly paid. I know, I did it. Minimum wage. No sick pay. No holiday pay. Before mass immigration. Bin men got much better wages than us. Our job was heavy and dirty. We had to buy our own gloves and aprons. So please do not start down the road of carers being paid decent wages. We were not. And they still are not.
Few people value care work until it happens to them or one of their own. It is specialised in its own way, looking after people in their own homes, where most dont have adapted houses.
So in may ways, the author is correct. If society doesnt value the work carers do, “patriots” wont.
Maybe time for society to march to make sure their old people, disabled people and often diabled children have carers who are respected and paid wages that reflect the heavy physical work with all the emotional baggage that comes with that.
Society doesn’t have any spare money, they’ve spent too much already, (there’s no money tree), and most people don’t have any spare, either. Many work part-time, and receive benefits. And the high-earners, they pay higher taxes, going even higher still. So, eventually, they will choose more leisure time, instead of helping others creating wealth, for all.
The problem is because our governments think in very short term, can’t explain risk (of illness, or anything), and punish anyone that thinks otherwise.
Care work is extremely hard and as you say specialised in many ways. My mother-in-law’s carer was far more on the ball regarding her health needs than many of the better paid professionals she came in contact with. Unfortunately, being for the most part ununionised and with few resources they have never striked or sought to hold the country to ransom in the way that the better paid nurses, doctors or rail workers have done and their wages have been held down by the stream of immigrants.
I doubt there will be anyone who wouldn’t feel heartsick to read about Paul’s plight.
The lives of those living in the ‘left-behind’ urban centres where the riots are breaking out have been increasingly disrupted for decades now; hence the anger. Paul’s anger at the potential disruption to his care is immediate and fierce; the anger of those in Rotherham, Sunderland, Manchester, Birmingham, Plymouth, Belfast has been simmering but is no less real.
I wish Paul all the best for whatever means of life he can attain. I wish our urban communities the same, free from the disruption of uncontrolled immigration.
Well, he is not wishing you all the best. But I heartily agree with the rest.
A very interesting and unexpected perspective on the recent UK rioting. Like other commenters, I offer the author my sincere best wishes for his future life.
I can’t believe the author is so self centered that he made the inevitable result of unchecked open borders all about his personal care. Try looking at the big picture some time.
I don’t think he argued for unlimited or unchecked open borders. He argued for his foreign born, or descendants of foreign born, carers not to be attacked because of their ethnicity or skin colour. Not the same thing.
I didn’t say the author was either for or against open borders. I said that these race riots that are now happening are the result of unchecked open borders. That is the BIG PICTURE here.
Quite a long-winded way of making the point that so many rely on immigrant employment. Is that the point or that the riots threaten those people?
I’m sure there are many people affected by civil unrest in ways we couldn’t imagine. But ultimately it rests with government policies and government inaction. There are probably many people feeling insecure in many different ways because of government inadequacy. There seems to be no future in politics. I feel anger like many of those people in the street about many issues that all go back to government. How many are there who feel that way but don’t go out onto the street? It’s so easy for the government to brand those on the street as thugs and therefore the issues they protest as equally thuggish and extreme far right beliefs. When in fact they represent the feelings of many others who are afraid to push to hard, afraid of the government and the laws they wield when they choose, fear for their jobs, or just fear ahead.
The government will attempt to crush these riots as an example of what will happen if you push back too hard.
I think three girls being effected, and the resultant fear for doing the things they like to do, is more important to me.
My heart goes out to you man. Your story should inspire us all the appreciate the important things that really matter in this world. It can be stolen from us in an instant.
Having said that, I think you are not looking at the big picture. My wife works for an agency that delivers similiar services to what you receive.
We are located in a small rural community in Alberta, Canada. They now employ many, many Indian and Filipino immigrants. They are wonderful, hard working people who contribute much to the community.
But this isn’t the reality in all communities. In Canada, unchecked immigration has created a housing crisis and made home ownership a distant dream for most young people. In Toronto, many immigrants don’t have jobs, while many others attend schools with garbage programs that won’t help them get jobs.
The situation is worse in Britain because there are religious zealots who don’t want to become part of the community and practice a religion that promoters intolerance and misogyny. Young men who grow up in violent, poverty stricken countries bring that same intolerance to Britain.
I don’t support the vandalism and racism of some people marching in the streets. I also understand that Britain is not a fundamentally racist country. The question then is why has this happened and how can we prevent it in the future?
Its not immigrants who have created the housing crisis in Canada. There is still a fair amount of land available.
Its government spending.
There remains a limit on how many houses can be built
Land isn’t the problem. It rarely is.
Very well written readable article. I imagine the writer has taken a new career direction because of his accident and he has a flair for writing and I’d encourage him to continue. There are strong arguments on both sides of the immigration debate. However, there are other ways (than the UK way) of balancing the need for low skill/wage workers vs avoiding problems of excessive immigration (loss of social cohesion, fundamentalism etc). In Gulf countries there are many very low paid workers on workers visas which end when their work ends or if they fail to obey the law. They are low paid (lower than UK) so do not bring dependents, who in any case would not be entitled to free education, healthcare or welfare. Their accommodation is usually provided for as part of their employment. There is no path to citizenship. Laws are enforced. As a result, these countries have abundant workers, almost no crime, no terrorism and the host populations do not feel squeezed. By the way, health and social carers in the Gulf, like in the UK, are almost entirely from abroad. I’d suggest the current UK system is unsustainable and there are better alternatives, which I’m sure, we’ll never even consider.
Having lived in the Gulf, I’m not sure that a society built on sharia law and serfdom is a model to emulate.
How old are the people commenting here? Who remembers Thatchers Britain where all the media spoke about was work dodgers and dole families living in sink housing schemes. Never working. Only scrounging from the state. Living in lawless families where crime was their job? And the riots in the 80s and 90s? The BNP spewing hate wherever and whenevee they could.
There is nothing new in this world when it comes to people and difference. Believe the media, you would think the UK is a hellish place to live. Well it isnt. And where are the riots in Scotland, which is part of the UK? Maybe time for Englandshire to have a hard look at itself and its “British” values rather than decide that it is a UK problem. In Scotland, there are few immigrant ghettos. People have to integrate.
‘And where are the riots in Scotland, which is part of the UK? ‘
As of the latest census data, approximately 96.0% of Scotland’s population identifies as white.
Edinburgh, Glasgow and Inverness are still Scottish cities.
How many Scots were beheaded on the streets or blown up on public transport with suicide bombs in the 80s and 90s? How many little girls were macheted?
These events may still be relatively ‘rare’, but their severity changes the picture for many people.
As a fellow broken neck sufferer you have my sympathy, I was much luckier than you
Your carers sound wonderful and you are lucky to have such good hearted people to help you
None of your carers came here to sit on the dole or have murdered children just because of the colour of their skin
They are here to contribute to society as they are doing with you
I doubt any of the rioters in Leeds would care to help you
I doubt any of the people protecting Birmingham mosques would care to help you , they seem to target white people and attempt to injure them
This isn’t about your carers, they are safe from all but a lunatic fringe that barely exists
The problems are the people that you cannot see as they won’t be helping you, they will be taking everything this country offers and giving nothing but their ideology and hatreds
This was more or less my take. I doubt many are complaining too much about decent, hard working care workers. They are complaining about the many unemployable and sometimes violent wasters who do nothing for our country but take up valuable housing stock and sexually harass females.
Britain uses poor ethnic people from around the world to perform the most disagreeable tasks. Poor people paid poorly.
When I met such people who cared for my late mother I couldn’t help feeling there was a shade of colonialism there somewhere.
The body is the most inconvenient instrument. Advanced in its complexity yet frail such as the most primitive organism can destroy it. The body that generates a mind that can travel over time and distance while being permanently confined to one room.
At its most vulnerable in infancy yet tenacious in old age. Age for which it is physically unsuited while provoking respect of the sort to be heard in the address of ‘Uncle’ used by Afro-Caribbeans towards the elderly male.
Age venerated and memorialised in antiquity in a 5th century stone found at Carlisle which recorded a woman, Tancorix, who lived sixty years. The body, our possession yet never fully under our mastery: “All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: the grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it“, declared the prophet.
Most astonishing of all is that each person’s body is unique. A fact that can be proved genetically. There has never been another like you in the past, not will there be again in the future.
If there is a secret of life, each person, being unique, possesses a small part of it. They cannot tell it. They can only live it out. Tancorix is Tancorix, but at the same time, in the genetic everywhen, she is necessary to you living your part of the secret.
Poor chap, I feel really sorry for him.
But anecdotes may not be enough to prevent the UK undergoing a genuine revolutionary moment.
Nothing to do with him or his careworkers that the British political class is so weak and can count 2024 so far as the peak of their failure.
Your condition is tragic, you have my sympathy and I wish you the best possible life under the circumstances, but resorting to describing Nigel Farage as “vile” despite the fact that he himself is describing the violence in similar terms does, I’m afraid, detract considerably from what was looking like a very well-argued piece, until the final paragraph.
On the matter of low paid work and the fact that immigrants are the only ones prepared to do it, the argument here is one-sided. The major economic problem with high immigration is precisely that it persists the low-wage economy by introducing competition from people elsewhere in the world who are used to third-world conditions. British working class people resent this, and who can seriously blame them? Would anyone in their right mind welcome the profession they inhabit being opened to competition from people who will work for half the money? It amounts to a destruction of living standards which any sane person will resist.
One of the key moments in the Brexit debates prior to 2016 was the amusing faux-pas made by some business leader on TV or radio, when he claimed that reducing immigration through leaving the EU would lead to higher wage costs. He expected this to be a persuasive argument against leaving the EU, but of course he hadn’t the wit to understand that he had just effectively promised a pay rise to everyone in the event that Leave won the referendum. This problem hasn’t gone away: British people do understand that their own living standards are compressed by loose labour markets, they hate this, and they have every right to hate it.
Yes, I realise that stopping immigration from having this effect would lead to inflationary pressures and create a headache for both business and government, but does anyone seriously suppose that permanent high immigration is the proper solution to this? I am not, of course, claiming that the actions of rioters and looters are in any way justified: of course they are not. And the racism obvious in much of what’s going on is of course repugnant: quite apart from targeting innocent people on the basis of their race, it even partly discredits the valid position that one can oppose high immigration while having no personal issues with immigrants themselves, so it’s politically self-defeating anyway.
The anger we are seeing on our streets may have been sparked by the horrific Southport stabbing incident, but the fuel that is now burning has been building up over years in communities that were ignored by government except when they complained about anything, at which point they were usually dismissed as ignorant. And now we’re surprised that they’re angry?
Nope, sorry, this will not do.
That businessman was Lord Stuart Rose, in his first speech as the Remain face of business, where he said that one of the disadvantages of Brexit was that wages would rise. Funnily enough, it was also his last speech.
This article makes no sense – Far right means Blasphemy Laws, throwing gays off buildings and controlling women’s behaviour. Then you switch to talking about the white working classes.
Incomprehensible article.
“Far right” means anything a writer wants it to mean these days. I’ve seen it applied to everyone from anti-fascists like Hayek to anti-globalists.
Actually that’s militant theocracy, which has little or nothing to do with right wing politics. Right-wing politics, no matter what flavour of it, contains only one common principle: the conviction that goverments are good at only a very small list of things, should restrict themselves to doing only those things, and should have enough money from taxation to do those things well.
You might, I suppose, argue that limited government means that the separation of Church and State permits the Church to grow in relative power and for this to then end up with theocraticallly-empowered violence of the sort you describe, but that’s (a) a bit of a stretch, and (b) a failure of the Church not the State per se.
Perhaps in the United States but with respect, in the British context that sounds like common liberalism to me.
Right Wing as I read it means a belief in natural hierarchies and inherited privileges. Nothing more nothing less. The ‘Right Wing’ protestors on the streets today seem to believe that Brtitsh people have a ‘birthright’ which is not civil and is not automatic or universal but which is specific and inherited.
Preferred models of political economy come some way down-stream from that.
The acid test is really whether you belive in ‘equality’. That will be when you part ways with the left.
We can all argue about what a state should and shouldnt be competent to do but until one is quite comfortable saying that total ‘equality’ is neither achievable nor truly desirable they have not truly put themselves apart from Whiggery.
“Right Wing as I read it means a belief in natural hierarchies and inherited privileges.”
Well it simply isn’t. There is only one common characteristic to any right-wing political position, and it’s the conviction that the state should be limited size, cost and power. That’s a broad church and can contain those whose political belief in small government is part of a wider set of convictions about the institutional role of religion, it can include libertarians who simply want to maximise human agency, it can include people who simply wish to protect their generational wealth and privilege (that’s who you’re talking about, but you only have to look at how the Left allows politics to run in the family to understand it’s hardly exclusive to the Right), it can include people with no wealth but who believe that right-wing governments are better at fostering the conditions for opportunity, it can include social conservatives who believe that left-wing governments meddle too much, interfere in family life and destroy convention etc.
Like I say a broad church but with one essential commonality, and it’s not what you believe.
“The ‘Right Wing’ protestors on the streets today seem to believe that Brtitsh people have a ‘birthright’ which is not civil and is not automatic or universal but which is specific and inherited.”
As for this, describing such beliefs in this way seems to me to be a deliberate parody intended to discredit everything about the people involved. Obviously the idea of a nativist birthright from which ethnic minorities must be excluded is nonsensical (and implicitly Fascist), but asserting this does not then provide carte blanche for the political class of a small economy like Britain to open the doors to the rest of the world world, crush working class incomes via wage arbitrage, drive the cost of housing through the roof, and bring public services to the brink of collapse. Attacking immigrants because of a resentment towards the failures of politicians is unforgivable: attacking immigration policy on this basis is entirely justified.
The people presently rioting are reacting in an indefensible way but based upon an anger the possession of which is entirely defensible.
This would come as a surprise to the numerous nations in which citizenship itself still grounded in jus sanguinis or blood-right.
A child, for instance, may be born in Malta and yet be permanently ineligible for Maltese citizenship.
Other than that afraid that your conception of ‘right wing’ strikes me as mere muscular liberalism in the British political context. In Britain ‘Right Wing’ has always meant ‘Church and Crown’ rather than any specific attitude to the size of the state.
The Navigation Acts, the Corn Laws, the Factory Act, The Lord Chamberlains office all these belong in the tradition of the inerventionist right which we call ‘Toryism’.
What you’re describing now is two hundred year-old Toryism specifically, which has only ever been right-wing under a flag of convenience, and much of the time not at all. It was at one time wholly hostile to free trade and saw the role of the state principally as a protection racket that was there to protect the interests of landowners. It had far more in common with modern Left in this respect than it did with the Right.
The modern understanding of Left and Right in politics came a bit later than the old divide between Whig and Tory: it looks to me as if we’re not disagreeing so much as talking at cross-purposes.
This is not a convincing piece.
I would urge the writer here, and everyone on all sides, to take some time to engage with and try to understand the arguments of their opponents on their own terms. We need not agree with one another but unless we take time to candidly examine the grievances that our fellow countrymen are trying to communicate then the spiral of violence will continue. Unless one can clearly and coherently articulate the arguments of ones opponent one is simply not thinking well.
I am put in mind of Benjamin Disraeli’s comments in his novel Sibyl –
England is ‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws…the rich and the poor”
‘The first is that, last year, I was in a catastrophic rock-climbing accident in which I broke my neck’. Luckily, you clearly live in the UK and have the NHS, that is society to pickup the not inconsiderable financial cost for your climbing misadventure. While wishing you well, I also wish the dispossessed, the disconnected, the sometimes lost and forgotten of our society well. I in no way support rioting, by any one of any ethnicity, yet it would be a fool (or it would seem our government), who did not acknowledge the causes of the unrest and seek ways to resolve those issues. Wishes of health and peace to all, William
I’m sorry that you broke your neck, but I can’t believe Unherd published this “article”…
What changed this was finding out that the far-Right activists who have been causing havoc across the UK for the past week were planning to bring their “protests” close to my home. ——- >In other words, what changed is that reality – and perhaps the consequences of policies the author supported – became personal. That’s what changed. The article completely ignores the cause of uproar and seeks to use disability in much the same way other minorities use their identity as a shield.
On behalf of Southport, on behalf of my carers, on behalf of myself, and on behalf of all decent Britons: will you please just f**k off? ———-> Has the writer thought of standing for office because this precisely the sentiment that led to the current situation. People have complained about unfettered immigration for years, with govt telling them to eff off. There comes a point when that “response” no longer works.
Exactly.
“vile opportunists like Nigel Farage”
That one phrase gives you away
Several years ago I had a patient (a white Englishman) who told me that he used to live and work in Birmingham. He had worked as a carer, which involved going into people’s homes. He said that he stopped doing this work out of fear, and that this was because the work took him often into a Muslim district of Birmingham, and he had been increasingly threatened there for being a non-Muslim. What is the author’s response to that?
‘… encouraged by vile opportunists like Nigel Farage’
It’s a good job somebody cares for this person, because I don’t care for him at all.
As far as I am aware, no Muslim in England has suffered so much as a grazed knee in these riots.
Long may that continue.
‘My memories of growing up there, nearly 20 years ago, are of it being basically an Anglo-Saxon ghetto.’
Anglo-Saxons in an English town?
The mosque in Southport was founded in 1994, which is 30 years ago.
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This piece probably shouldn’t have been published. The author makes a weak, emotional argument for an immigration policy on the basis of an unfortunate personal accident.
People who “look like him” won’t do the work but all that really amounts to is an acknowledgement that immigrants will work for wages that native westerners would consider exploitative. Society was perfectly capable of caring for its members without an immigration policy that seems to boil down to “any limits on immigration are far-right”.
Subscription cancelled
Ok bye.
Thank you for sharing your perspective. I have carers who come in too, and my anxiety around this has focussed on needing a guarantee that they will always be female (as am I; and I live alone). But the system is doing its best to deconstruct sex categories, as we’ve all seen with the Olympic boxing fiasco. Anyway, I digress. I just wanted to express my thanks for broadening my perspective on what care receivers may be most concerned about.
Another article in this line and I’ll cancel my subscription
Me too. I get this on BBC etc
Unfortunately I could write an opposite, equally honest but obviously anecdotal piece about the ‘care’ my father received from multiple different immigrant healthcare assistants and home carers in the years leading up to his death. He was abused verbally and physically on several occasions over 6 years. The worst offender was a male healthcare assistant who repeatedly physically abused my dad whilst on night duty at a community hospital. The others were two female live in carers who verbally abused my elderly and vulnerable father and my mother in their own home.
Being an immigrant doesn’t automatically make you a saintly carer, nurse or doctor.
Your problems with logistics, shame and anger are not strong arguments.
The reality is you have a personal viewpoint against the riots, and in your mind complaining about the practical effect on your carers, and theoretical absence of more in a low immigration society, seems a good argument against them. It isn’t.
If population count matters to you, there are much bigger countries you could live in.
You have my deepest sympathy for the tragedy that has befallen you. You are a young man so hopefully medicine will continue to develop to the point where at least some of your suffering will be eased.
Sorry that the author has a tough life. That’s about the only real thing I took away from this lived experience.
You chose to take part in an incredibly dangerous pastime, fell & broke your neck. Society is now picking up the bill for your lifelong medical needs. I’m sorry for your plight but I really don’t think it qualifies you to speak ‘on behalf’ of Southport, your carers, or of all decent Britons, let alone to tell anyone to ‘just f**k off’.
Many of those you call vile & yobs will be paying for your care. Some of them have experienced even worse ordeals than you.
Try being a parent whose young daughter has just been slashed to death. Or one who’s been phoned to let him listen to his daughter being gang-raped or having a child / sister / cousin branded ‘M’ (for their prophet) or having their tongue nailed to a table or being deliberately overdosed once they’d finished being used sexually. Or being beheaded in the street. Or having your kids blown up at a concert.
Imagine having some sympathy for Britons going through a different ordeal to you, since your ordeal is clearly the basis of your argument.
As straw men go, this one could light up the burning man festival. Because I took a risk and fell off a mountain, everybody else must accept open borders, globalization on steroids, the destruction of identity, the collapse of local communities, and all of that with a hefty wallet of white guilt and toxic men genuflection.
Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, Muslims are burning Hindus alive. There are quite a lot of Hindus there, certainly more than 10 million, there is a lot of work.
“Anglo-Saxon ghetto” Wtf – piss off. Would you use that phase to describe an average community in any other state on earth. “A Kenyan black ghetto” in Nairobi ? “A mandarin ghetto” in rural China. GFYS
A brilliant article. Clear concise and thoroughly logical.
Good luck to you and thank you illuminating the sheer evil of Farage and his ilk.
Back down to earth for many of you, there is a very big white elephant that no one on here has mentioned about the care industry, and that’s vaccination. Before covid , alot of carers were from the countries with open borders within the EU. During covid the media absolutely trashed the industry and blamed care homes and community carers for the deaths within the homes. No one would listern and hear what the NHS had done by sending residents back to the homes to clear the hospital beds. During the drive for the vaccination , all carers were threatened that they would loose their jobs if they didn’t have the vaccination by a certain date. The NHS got away with this. When the time came, after lockdown the carers left rather than vaccinate for whatever they believed in it. I have never seen so few carers in the care industry at that time, and the understaffed of the homes. Now we have the people who the author described taking these jobs for sponsorship and visa’s. And to add insult to injury, the Enquiry into the Covid lockdown, it was found to be the NHS admitted to sending residents back who had symptoms. You will find now in the Care industry this is the only people who come for interviews. You can talk economics all you like, but carers were let down big time over this.
I wonder if there’s someone in similar circumstances living in Croydon or Wembley or Birmingham right now whose carers are white and are fearful of being attacked by roaming gangs of Islamists? I really don’t understand the point of this article.