No white faces in Birmingham

The shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick gave a talk at a Conservative party dinner earlier in the year which was secretly recorded. Released by the Guardian newspaper to coincide with the Conservative party conference, the recording revealed Jenrick observing that in a ninety-minute visit to the Handsworth district of Birmingham he had not seen ‘another white face’.

Handsworth is described as a ‘melting pot of different ethnicities’, an accurate description as over a third of residents are Muslim, about a quarter are Indian, another quarter are black leaving less than 10% who are white. Predictably Jenrick has received quite a lot of flak for his observation, with the usual accusations of ‘racism’. He was denounced for fuelling a ‘fire of toxic nationalism’. Unusually, in the face of this kind of intimidatory criticism, Jenrick has stood his ground, stating that it would be wrong to ‘shut down an important debate that we need to have about integration’.

However, it is not clear what such a debate would achieve. It has been glaringly obvious for a long time that neither the indigenous population, nor the various ethnicities, have any desire to integrate whenever they can exercise any freedom of choice on this matter. Ethnic minorities prefer to congregate in their own communities, and when this displacement reaches a tipping point ‘white flight’ occurs. No amount of hand wringing by politicians of either the right or left is going to have any impact on this phenomenon, given that it is human nature for people of whatever culture or race to prefer to live with their own kind, and it is folly to pretend otherwise.

So, politicians and pundits should stop living in a fantasy world, in which exhortations are made that if only people would put aside their differences, then we could all live harmoniously together in an enriching integrated yet multicultural society where diversity is our strength. This liberal utopia will never be achieved, but instead we risk societal breakdown by playing with fire through continuing large scale open ended third world immigration. Instead of talking about integration Jenrick would be better advised to start promoting well-funded schemes of repatriation of those unable to assimilate into our country.