Peter Hitchens, a leading British right-wing author, columnist and
broadcaster, started his political life on the extreme Left as a Marxist
before seeing the error of his ways. In
an article for his newspaper,
The Mail on Sunday,
he gives an insight into why the Left has been the champion of Third
World immigration. Forget concern for the less fortunate, forget some
vague feeling of solidarity with the Third World. It was an unappetizing
mixture of bitterness…
It wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t
like Britain. We saw immigrants—from anywhere—as allies against the
staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the
end of the Sixties.
…and snobbery:
Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people—usually
in the poorest parts of Britain—who found their neighbourhoods suddenly
transformed into supposedly ‘vibrant communities’. If they dared to
express the mildest objections, we called them bigots.
He ponders the consequences of his youthful zeal…
I have imagined what it might be like to have grown old
while stranded in shabby, narrow streets where my neighbours spoke a
different language and I gradually found myself becoming a lonely, shaky
voiced stranger in a world I once knew, but which no longer knew me.
…and the hypocrisy that accompanied it:
Even back in my Trotskyist days I had begun to notice that
many of the migrants from Asia were in fact not our allies. They were
deeply, unshakeably religious. They were socially conservative. Their
attitudes towards girls and women were, in many cases, close to
medieval. Many of them were horribly hostile to Jews, in a way which we
would have condemned fiercely if anyone else had expressed it, but which
we somehow managed to forgive and forget in their case.
Hitchens blots his copybook, as far as I am concerned, by heaping blame
on Saint Enoch Powell but none of us is perfect. By opening eyes to the
Left’s hostility to Britain and the British, he has performed—and
continues to perform—an immensely valuable service.
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