Max Hastings - lying about immigrants, and sounding like the BNP

Max Hastings' latest column appears to be an attempt to out-do The Sun in lavishing praise on David Cameron ahead of the next election. Max swoons:

Cameron possesses the brains, fluency and star quality to become a remarkable prime minister if he can also find iron in his soul...When friends express doubts to me about the Tory team, I respond simply: we must believe.

Testify Brother Max!

Does this mark an attempt by the Mail to become a louder cheerleader for the Conservatives than their red-top rival?

Max has listed all the problems he believes need fixing about modern Britain and - unsurprisingly - immigration pops up. But he displays an ignorance that suggests he doesn't even know what the problem is, by stating:

Immigrants, legal and otherwise, can often invoke human rights to gain access to Britain's benefits system.

By 'otherwise', he means illegal. And illegal immigrants do not get benefits. No matter how often he, or Carole Malone or Richard Littlejohn or Judge Trigger say it, it won't make it true.

Perhaps Max could tell us which benefits these illegal immigrants are getting?

He goes on:

Nothing would more swiftly check the immigration tide than calling time on newcomers' automatic claims to benefit and housing.

There's so much wrong with that sentence.

Firstly - does Max really believe that all immigrants to Britain just for benefits and housing? There are no other social or cultural reasons? Nothing to do with Britain as a fair, tolerant, multi-cultural, democratic society?

Apparently not.

Secondly - why peddle this myth that new arrivals get 'automatic claims to benefit [sic] and housing'? The benefits available to immigrants are far more complicated, and tough to get, than that.

So Max thinks people flock to Britain solely to avail themselves of free money and houses, and if these 'automatic' benefits were stopped, so would the 'tide' of people.

It's an idea that happens to be supported by the BNP. An article from May 2009 entitled 'Invaders Resort to Armed Violence to Get into Soft Touch Britain' says:

swarms of bogus “asylum seekers” know that if they can just get onto British soil, they will qualify for council housing and generous benefits...

Only once the scroungers of the world know that they will not get benefits in Britain, will they stop coming here.

Compare that with what Max says:

Nothing would more swiftly check the immigration tide than calling time on newcomers' automatic claims to benefit and housing.

'Swamp' may be more extreme than 'tide' but it's much the same idea. And it's not the first time Max has sounded like the racist far-right party.

Max also says:

It would be so irresponsible for uneasy Tories to cast a protest vote for UKIP or, worse still, the BNP.

Yes, we wouldn't want people supporting the ideas and policies of the BNP. That would indeed be worse than 'irresponsible'.

Max and Mohammed

Last week, while this blog was taking a well-earned break, the Office of National Statistics released the list of the most popular baby names in 2008.

The coverage has been mentioned fairly comprehensively elsewhere, notably by Anton and Claude.

The Telegraph claimed in its headline that Jack had 'pipped' Mohammed to the top of the list, despite the fact Mohammed came in...err...16th.

But what they did was add up all babies with names which are variations of Mohammed (Mohammad, Muhammed and so on) to give the impression that England and Wales is being overrun with Muslim babies. Despite the fact, as Martin Belam as pointed out, Judaea-Christian names are totally dominant on the list.

The Telegraph neglected to mention that there doesn't appear to be any outwardly Muslim-sounding names in the top 100 girls list.

But it does get a juicy quote from Douglas Murray, the Director of the never-not-complaining-about-Islam-think-tank the Centre for Social Cohesion, who howls:

'It’s pretty disingenuous to put out these different spellings. The names are pretty much spelled in the same way.'

It's a theme that Max Hastings took up in his nasty rant in the Mail.

But why is it deemed beyond criticism that the girl's list contains Isabel, Isobel and Isabelle, but separating Mohammed and its variants is 'shabby' and 'disingenuous'?

You could make a similar case for the (separate) appearances of Joe and Joseph, Ben and Benjamin, Samuel and Sam, Zak and Zachary, Reece and Rhys.

But they don't.

In fact, there are perfectly sound (and rather obvious) cultural reasons for the fact Mohammed is so high. As Alex Massie wrote in the Spectator:

Muslims are much more likely to name their sons Mohammed than Christians are to call their son any single name. That is, there's much greater variance amongst non-Muslim families. In other words, unless you're wanting to stoke panic and resentment what kids are called is not a terribly useful metric.

Quite so. But stoking panic is the order of the day. Here's a quick look at the available figures. Based on the three top 100 entries (that is Mohammed, Muhammad and Mohammad) there were 6,591 babies given those names in England and Wales in 2008. That represents 1.81% of the total (362,963) of boys born that year.

Even of you include all the other variants mentioned by the Telegraph, it only comes to 2.09%.

In 2007, those top three totalled 6,245 out of 354,488 - 1.76%.

In 1997 it was 3,635 - 1.12%.

So the number of boys being given the names Mohammed, Muhammad and Mohammad - the three most popular versions - has increased by 0.69% in ten years.

This is what the BNP refer to as 'Islamic Colonisation via the Cradle'. And here's what Hastings says:

The ONS's hit parade of children's names, as released for publication, seemed designed to mask a simple truth which dismays millions of people, and which politicians and bureaucracies go to great lengths to bury: the Muslim population of Britain is growing extraordinarily fast.

Obviously there are other factors that increase the 'Muslim population of Britain' - such as immigration - but an increase of babies called Mohammed of less than one percent over ten years doesn't appear to warrant the claim of 'growing extraordinarily fast'.

But Hastings talk of masking truths is apt given his very next paragraph:

In 2007, 28 per cent of children born in England and Wales, rising to 54 per cent in London, had at least one foreign-born parent. In 2008, 14.4 per cent of primary school children claimed some other tongue than English as their first language.

See what he did there? Talking about Muslims one sentence and then slipping into overall immigration figures the next and hoping Mail readers think the two are the same thing. And he has the cheek to accuse the ONS of being 'deceitful'.

He goes on to repeat claims of a Muslim takeover of Europe, suggesting it is respectable American neocon (no, those words shouldn't go together) pundits, rather than the BNP, who believe:

Europe, and Britain in particular, is threatened by a Muslim tide which will not merely transform its traditional culture but, frankly, bury it.

In a series of recent books, they argue that Islam is colonising this continent in a fashion that will render it unrecognisable a generation or two hence.

It's a crass and unpleasant bit of rhetoric and could easily have come from the BNP. And indeed has. In a recent story about Europe being 'overrun by Islam' they wrote:

The controlled media has finally admitted what the British National Party has been saying all along: that all of Europe stands on the brink of being overrun and colonised by masses of Third World Muslim invaders...

The BNP has been the only party to warn about the coming demographic tidal wave which, if left unchecked, will extinguish all of Europe and bring an end to thousands of years of Western civilisation.

Spot the difference? So the BNP is taking comfort from the 'controlled media' peddling myths that supports its racist views. Well done Max. Again.

In fact, that BNP article was based on an earlier Telegraph piece which was discussed on this blog before and which doesn't really stand up to any close scrutiny. And Max draws the same incorrect conclusions.

He goes on to claim:

Today, the adolescent children of immigrants tell pollsters that they feel much less integrated into British society than many of their parents profess.

It's hard to know where is evidence is for this, because the latest academic research done on integration showed:

Watching soaps, reading tabloids and turned off by politics – the children of International Migrants in Britain show a high degree of cultural assimilation compared to their European Neighbours.

Alas, most of the media ignored the findings, for obvious reasons, so no wonder Max (conveniently) missed that one.

But Max warms to the theme, suggesting unless they read Jane Austen or listen to The Archers they aren't integrating. As less than 5 million people a week listen to The Archers, that seems a hard test - and one that anyone with no tolerance for utterly tedious radio programmes would probably fail.

But it's also a very particular test. Because The Archers is so crushingly Middle Class, Middle England, white it reveals what Hastings is really on about: They aren't like you, the Mail reader, and me, the Mail columnist:

Parts of this country - its middle-class islands - are still wonderful places to inhabit. They are still definably old Britain.

Others, above all the inner cities, seem lost to civilisation. Everyone outside them, and especially our politicians, have abandoned them to unemployed families, feral children, unchecked crime and huge immigrant communities which may live in this country, but are tragically not of it.

Got it? If you aren't in Middle Britain, you aren't British. If you are in Middle Britain, you won't find a single criminal or out-of-control kid or unemployed person. And most importantly, no bloody foreigners.

He doesn't exactly hide his real thoughts either:

in Birmingham or Leicester...Muslims are soon expected to outnumber whites.

Is Hastings really peddling some imaginary battle between Muslims and whites here?

But he surely misses another point. If he thinks there is a problem with Muslims integrating into British society, maybe he should consider the impact of daily, misleading scare stories from tabloid newspapers and their ill-informed columnists about how evil and threating Muslims are. The type of articles that give succour to racist groups such as the BNP and the English Defence League and which put a 'respectable' face to their intolerant views.

In other news, Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has found her latest book added to the BNP's 'recommended reading' list.

Max Hastings and the BNP

Max Hastings has written a lengthy article in today's Mail about the BNP. How original. The thrust of it is that because the main three political parties have failed to deal with 'uncontrolled immigration' (a nicely unbiased phrase of course) the concerns that people have about the issue have not been addressed. And so people vote for the BNP.

Needless to say, misinformation about immigration by the media isn't mentioned anywhere. Indeed, manipulator of statistics and language Andrew Green from Migrationwatch is hailed as a hero 'whose relentless, but calm and objective, barrage of statistics is often criticised but never plausibly disputed'. Never disputed by the Mail certainly, but not never disputed (see this blog and 5CC).

So here are a few of the points Max raises. We'll begin with population:

On the Government's own, almost certainly understated, numbers, our population will pass 70 million by 2028. It could reach 80 million in the course of the century. We are the most overcrowded country in Europe, save Malta. Some 24 per cent of all births in this country are to foreign-born mothers.

And, for comparison, here is an excerpt from the BNP manifesto on immigration:

Britain’s population is now over 60 million and rising, solely due to immigration. Not only is Britain increasingly overcrowded, but the fact is that a country is the product of its people and if you change the people you inevitably change the nature of the country...Non-indigenous births will soon account for more than half of all the babies born in Britain.

Hmm. What about education? Max says:

Today, there are 300 primary schools in England where more than 70 per cent of pupils - nearly half a million children - use English only as a second language. It is unlikely the virtuous liberals of any major political party send their own children to such schools. I doubt that they would be happy if they had to do so.

The BNP says:

Fourteen percent of all primary school children do not have English as a mother tongue...At least 316 primary schools in England have a large majority of children whose first language is not English.

On identity, Max says:

Many thoughtful, educated people...use such phrases as 'It's not our country any more', and 'I don't feel I belong in the place where I grew up'.

While the BNP states:

these facts point inexorably to the overwhelming and extinguishing of Britain and British identity under a tsunami of immigration...uncontrolled immigration is leading to...a breakdown in community spirit.

On new arrivals, Max writes:

Most new arrivals come from the Third World, at a rate which is increasing the national population by almost one per cent every two years.

The BNP:

At least twenty percent of the currently resident population were either born overseas or are descendants of foreign-born parents. The vast majority of these foreign-born residents are of Third World extraction.

From Max:

There are also heavy health costs...A few years ago, tuberculosis was all but extinct in Britain. Today, there is a striking increase in reported cases, 65 per cent of them involving patients not born in Britain, with 21 per cent Africanborn. Hepatitis B cases have almost doubled in six years, to 325,000, 96 per cent of these involving patients born outside the UK.

From the BNP 2007 Mini manifesto:

'Health tourists' are costing the NHS £2billion a year, and diseases such as TB and AIDS are on the increase as a result of immigration.

Max quotes the 2008 House of Lords report that 'brutally dismissed' claims immigration benefits the UK:

The peers concluded that, contrary to New Labour propaganda, immigration has had 'little or no impact' on the economic well-being of Britain and offers 'insignificant' benefits to the existing UK population.

Whereas the BNP wrote on 15 November 2008:

The much trumpeted establishment claim that mass immigration has benefited the economy has been blown out of the water as experts told the House of Commons that immigration had brought virtually no economic benefit to Britain.

Max:

It is sometimes suggested that migrants offer useful cheap labour. But there is no really cheap labour in a welfare state. Each new arrival represents an additional burden on policing, health, education and infrastructure which must be paid for. Many police forces have expressed concern about the pressures and costs imposed by the huge influx of migrants.

The BNP:

The current open-door policy and unrestricted, uncontrolled immigration is leading to higher crime rates, demand for more housing (driving prices out of the reach of young people), severe extra strain on the environment, traffic congestion, longer hospital waiting lists, lower educational standards, higher income taxes, lower wages, higher unemployment, loss of British identity, a breakdown in community spirit, more restrictive policing, higher council taxes, a shortage of council homes, higher levels of stress and unhappiness and a more atomised society.

Higher levels of stress and unhappiness?! Migrants are being blamed for that too now? Anyway, Max goes on that:

Scarcely one of Britain's mainstream politicians is anywhere to be seen in a debate of vital concern for our national future. ...an issue about which much of the country cares more than the recession, health, education, Europe - the cultural identity and population stability of the island in which we live.

The BNP:

All it means is that they wish to preserve their identity and national existence. This is all the British National Party seeks for Britain - the right to be British. All the other parties shy away from this issue.

Max does call the BNP 'repulsive' and yet, as shown, has written an article full of BNP talking points. There is not a single sentence in the whole wretched piece where he mentions anything positive from immigration, or the enormous contribution immigrants have made to British society over the years. And yet he is wondering why people are voting for the BNP and concludes that it is all the fault of politicans. A little look closer to home might do him, and everyone, the world of good. Articles in (apparently) respectable papers about disease-ridden, resource-stealing, identity-destroying immigrants feeds the BNP agenda exactly.