Diversity Challenge

Well, if you didn’t see it the second round of the Dear Wee Nicky Clegg versus Nasty Bigot Adolf Farage was an absolute hoot. An hour of pure joy as the oh-so-sincere Clegg rattled off ad hominem attack after spitty little insult after snidey remark in a bout which, to my mind he’d lost before the first question had even been posed. His opening address telegraphed his entire limited fight plan and every single response sounded like a scripted attack on Nigel Farage’s personal values. He rarely answered a question without obfuscation and evasion; at times he looked distinctly shifty and otherwise behaved like a petulant child.

Whoever had advised him had clearly decided – from the sanitised bubble in which the media hacks and politicians alike dwell – that the instincts of the already racist British public must not be allowed to be further tainted by UKIP’s hateful bigotry. A shame then that they utterly failed to read the genuine concerns of a huge proportion of the great unwashed, most of whom have the vote and who are fed up of being lied to. It was irrelevant whether they intend to vote for UKIP or to vote to leave the EU, should we ever get the long clamoured-for referendum. Nigel Farage may not be the answer to the country’s future, but he is the only politician presently asking the perfectly reasonable question; what the hell did you lot do to my country?

When the cosmopolitan elites take their delightful nuclear families away to far-off lands to immerse themselves in another culture they come back invigorated, fizzing with joy at Poppy’s rudimentary grasp of the local language and little Hugo’s newly acquired taste for an obscure artisan cheese dish which they simply MUST try and replicate for their next dinner party. But then the disappointment sets in as they discover that among the three hundred and seventy four cheeses available at their local Islington delicatessen, Bokmakiri isn’t one of them. And none of the ignorant serving girls behind the counter can indulge Poppy with an authentic Kiswahili greeting. Why, they declare, then we must bring the world here.

The world, of course is delighted by the offer – they have heard of our streets paved with gold and have met the grand British vacationer and seen his inquisitive generosity at first hand as they sold them newly-minted artefacts at heavily inflated prices. Also, when they get to England they will no longer have to subsist on bloody buffalo cheese but they can gorge on pizza and chicken tikka masala and dress in suits and jeans and tracksuit bottoms. And no longer will they have to have families of seventeen or cook around an open fire at the side of the road. They can become British!

No, no no, say Adam and Evelyn, no, you must not sacrifice your culture, you must bring it here and dance for our amusement. You must bring your clothes, your customs, your late night noisy street life, your smells your vendettas and your seventeen children and never change – don’t go changing. You must build your own churches, run your own shops and erect your own shanty town community centres. Planning permission? No problem. Integrate? Oh, you don’t want to be British – they are nasty, parochial, racist people.

In fact, so abhorrent are the white working class that you must come here and overwhelm them in reparation for what they did to your country; all those ugly roads and railways, all that sordid commerce. Come here and show them how it is to be a true citizen of the world. And don’t worry, they will move aside and give you jobs and school places and houses and interpreters and we will curb their simmering resentments for they are too ignorant to understand, as we do, that culture is important. So important that you must never lose yours… while theirs, loathsome, tiny-minded and based as it is on hatred and fear, must be utterly eradicated.

Of course, Clegg’s big schtick was based on his own peculiar sentimentality for the wondrous diversity we have in Britain today, as if Britain’s inclusion of every other part of the world wasn’t already diverse enough without more white Europeans. But have you ever noticed how diversity is too good to be left to the ‘ethnics’? It’s been a one-way street; while change must be foisted on Britain to make it ‘better’ our rulers appear to insist on incomers maintaining their monocultural ways. This is what ordinary people resent; the notion that politicians know best what is good for them. The only nose being rubbed in diversity last night was Nick Clegg’s.