Quote for the week

Great line from View from the Right on the strange desire of Britain’s elites to continue promoting immigration in the crowded post colonial era:

“The British couldn't afford an overseas empire any longer, so they brought the Third Worlders to Britain, imagining they could continue benignly leading them at home just as the had done in the former empire.”

Conservative opposition to the war in Afghanistan

A recent Telegraph post in support of Britain’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan drew a lot of intelligently-argued criticism from commentators.

Few people were buying the neo-conservative argument that the best way to protect Britain from terrorism was to try and remove the terrorist threat at its supposed source.

Most responders seemed to echo the US paleo-conservative argument that the West will never be able to establish a stable pro-western state in the country and should either pull out of the region altogether, or re-direct military assistance to neighboring Pakistan.

However, while it’s great to see a lot of well-argued commentators turning up on comment threads at British newspaper sites, it’s a bit disappointing there’s so few decent conservative blog sites coming out of the UK at present (Laban and and a few others excepted).

Compared with the US, which has generated a plethora of independent conservative sites and blogs, as well as several popular webzines like Taki’s Magazine and American Conservative, Britain appears to be a bit of independent conservative wasteland.

Immigration and housing shortages in Britain

Last week there was a lively exchange at the Guardian website, on a comment thread for a blog post by Simon Fletcher, about access to public housing in Britain.

In response to the author’s claim that the difficulties low-income native Britons are finding in obtaining affordable housing “have nothing to do with immigration,” a commentator under the name Zac Smith, weighted in with a public housing allocation list from Birmingham City Council, showing most housing in Birmingham was indeed going to recent immigrants. Then about half way through the thread a commentator named Monnie hit on the main reason why recent immigrants were more likely to receive council housing:

“…migrants jump the queue because they tend to have bigger families and that means they are deemed to have greater priority for housing.”

Family size is a key criteria for preferential treatment by local government authorities and native Britons, with smaller families on average than African or South Asian immigrants, are more likely to lose out.

Unlike skilled middle-class Britons who are able to deal with overcrowding by voting with their feet and moving overseas, the country’s disgruntled working-class natives can’t just up and leave if they can’t find a house.

Traditional blue-collar destinations like Australia only want a limited number of educated and skilled workers from the motherland, while economic stagnation, illegal immigration and language barriers mean Continental Europe is unlikely to appeal to most working-class Britons. Subsequently they have little to lose by supporting immigration restrictionist  parties like the much-maligned British National Party.

Go the Chaps

As Britain descends into a egalitarian globalist hellhole, dominated by lucid chain stores selling underwear at train stations and surly hooded yufs' sifting about the place like demented Yawas off Star Wars, it is nice to see that somebody is standing up for common decency and traditional values.

Enter the "new chaps," with their suitably titled website The Chap.

"The Chap takes a wry look at the modern world through the steamed-up monocle of a more refined age, occasionally getting its sock suspenders into a twist at the unspeakable vulgarity of the twenty-first century."

Look out Chronicles, there's a new kid on the block.

Peak oil and progress

A thought provoking post from UK blogger Sabretache on Britain's looming energy crisis ("Living in la-la land").

It's a pity there aren't more British and Commonwealth bloggers who are willing to think "outside the box" and question prevailing right-liberal ideology.