You need more black friends - response to Tom Jones

do you kiss your mother with that mouth

Tom, one of my many Xitter nemeses, wrote a piece this week about why he is over post-liberalism, despite initially embracing it and rebuking my criticisms, so I am writing a response. He misidentified his tribe in my post about the British new right, but that’s my fault because of where I placed the screenshot of his tweet. He is not a communitarian traitor (that term is reserved for people on the left), he is a net-zero immigration crusader, or even a not-so-sensitive young man, if I were to feel generous and acknowledge his aesthetic aspect.

Tom says he used to use the post-liberal framing on anti-immigration: lack of integration damages the fabric of society and destroys community cohesion. He did this because people across the political spectrum agree. He is right, as a left-winger, I agree that community cohesion is a good reason to be mindful about the rate of immigration, while accepting the fact of it.

He changed his tune recently, he says, as he decided to focus on the practical realities of immigration. He cites interviews of the wives of rapists convicted for the Rotheram grooming scandal who show little sympathy for Western concepts of concent and agency. The wives say the white girls caused their own rapes, maybe even did black magic on their pious husbands to tempt them to misbehave. How can we, asks Tom, even begin to talk about integration with people who believe in spirits and for whom sexual consent is a foreign concept?

The conclusion from this incident is that muslim Pakistanis are incompatible with our culture. I think that is what Tom means by saying we should be specific and not speak in platitudes:

Postliberal approaches to immigration persist, however, precisely because the wholesome abstraction it presents is a wholesome abstraction. It lets you talk about the vagaries of ‘integration’ and ‘assimilation’ without descending into the particulars of race, religion, class or sex. It lets you believe that what’s being eroded is abstract mutual obligations, common culture, shared values.

He says as much even though in the same shocking article we read of the desperate pleas of the 18-year-old daughter of one of the rapists who approached the journalist in the first place. Here is what she said: ‘I hate him. He made my mum pregnant eight times even when she didn’t want to do it. I heard her crying. Six babies died. He did that to her for so long. But never went to prison.’

Does that sound to you like a person incapable of grasping the concept of consent? This is a muslim girl raised in an extremely misogynistic and backwards household. Yet, here she is, bravely approaching a Daily Mail journalist to tell her about her rapist father, despite the risks. She believed men like her dad should be in prison. So clearly, she knows and agrees about how men should behave in the UK, even though her dad didn’t.

Tom implies that people both like her dad and her are unsuitable for the UK based on their shared ethnic background and religion, if not in this article, then throughout his substack and Xitter posting, where he emphasises the importance of data on different ethnicities’ access to benefits and crime rates.

The policy implication of emphasising data on certain nationalities being more likely to end up in prison or to be recipients of benefits is that we should discriminate against people from those places. Tom says we should be allowed to spell out irreconcilable differences, which presumably means we should be allowed to say that people from a certain race and ethnicity are likely to exhibit certain behaviours.

The claim is that data proves that different ethnicities possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, which distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another. They want to be allowed to notice this inconvenient fact and make reasonable policy adjustments to accommodate this ‘practical reality’. Is this not what they are saying?

The sentence in bold is the definition of racism.

In my post, I confused Tom into thinking he is a ‘communitarian traitor’ when he is obviously in the net-zero immigration crusader camp. The problem with people like Tom is that they single-mindedly obsess over immigration and put all their energy into that one policy area, even though the country is mired in problems that are far more consequential to the lives of the vast majority of the country, such as cost of living, energy, infrastructure, and housing. They also zero in on the adverse effects of immigration, but do not offer a solution for all the benefits of it. Are they willing to say, for example, that we should raise taxes and tax property wealth more so that we can increase social care salaries and attract more local workers?

Tom is not a communitarian traitor because he is not a communitarian. Communitarianism is a philosophy that emphasises the importance of community and social cohesion over individualism. Waging a crusade to convince people that certain immigrant groups are inferior does the opposite. It breeds mistrust, and it punishes the majority for the crimes of the few.

People like this couldn’t build, maintain or join a community to save their lives. If they did, they would realise how anti-social they have become because people would tell them. A lot of right-wingers who spent a lot of time on Xitter have lost touch with reality. How can a person who holds elected office and who, I think, has long-term political aspirations, tweet that Afghans should not be in the country because they are ‘20 times more likely to commit sexual offences’? Mate, we didn’t cancel you hard enough.

A good test for whether you should tweet something out is, would I feel embarrassed to say this in front of a black/muslim person? You may say, ‘Stella, this is what led to us covering up grooming scandals!’.

What utter bollocks. As if the only two choices for policy making and political communication are 1) cover up rape or 2) justify racism.

The instinctive embarrassment you would feel about saying we should not have Afghans in the country in front of a muslim friend is a wonderfully civilised, very English sentiment that you should embrace.

I like to think I have been generous with right-wingers like Tom. I avoid painting people into a corner by tattooing them with a label that will never fade, which is why I don’t throw the word racism around. I believe once you start telling people they are bad, shaming them and socially ostracising them, they are more likely to become radicalised and double down on what could have been views that would soften with time. You need to give people a ladder to climb down, not a rope to hang themselves with. But immigration zealots like Tom do not extend the same graciousness to muslim people. They will make arguments about how the TV series Adolescence tells white boys they are bad, but do not think that labelling young brown kids as inherently incompatible with British culture is contemptible. They see nothing wrong with humiliating random black and brown kids from obviously poor backgrounds. Indeed, they argue it is necessary.

The Danish are applauded for their immigration policy because, they say, it points out which immigrants struggle to integrate. I believe that on the left, we should not deny that migrants have agency, and there are things you can do to be more accepted: speak the language fluently, dress to blend in, pick up behavioural cues, etc. But the right needs to see the lack of self-awareness in Scandinavian countries, whose communities are notoriously insular and difficult to penetrate as an immigrant, to raise their hands in the air and say, ‘Well, it must be that some ethnicities just have it in their DNA to be lazy and violent!’. Culture plays a part, but it is not destiny. I am Greek, and from talking to other freelancers, I know I must have one of the most honest tax returns in SW1.

I often cite my own journey in British politics as evidence of how open British culture is. Can you name any other European country where you can get involved in politics as an obvious foreigner to the extent that I have? In my experience, not even the US is as open. During the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016, people would take videos of me speaking or bring their friends to meet me because they found me so exotic. I had campaign colleagues who, every time I spoke, would repeat what I had just said, imitating my accent. I had no such experience in Yorkshire or Wales. In London, I used to forget I was foreign at all. Till now, anyway. Friends of mine who live in Scandinavian countries, on the other hand, tell me of a culture where they struggle to rent because landlords discriminate against immigrants and very rarely manage to insert themselves in native social circles. So, yes,

Fraser Nelson

is right that integrating immigrants in the UK is a success. The exceptions do not disprove the rule. Most immigrants do integrate.

Here is the cope of right-wing English people like Tom: you could deport every single migrant tomorrow, and the country would still be a mess. You would still be poorer than you thought you would be. Your towns and cities would still look uglier than you remember them. Your suffering is not unique. If you truly were a communitarian, you would find comfort in the solidarity this can inspire. I miss the Greece of my childhood as much as you miss the England of yours, but what I realised when I decided to leave home during the financial crisis is that, eventually, you run out of foreigners to blame.