There’s a missing link in British public life – and it underpins crises from the BBC to our prisons
Rafael Behr
A declining sense of collective identity is corroding trust in our institutions and undermining democratic politics
We’ve just had the biggest wave of immigration in our island history – in size and speed vastly outweighting anything the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes ever did – and you’re now saying we’ve lost something of our collective identity?
Rafa been reading a book of Enoch speeches or something?
The key is collective identity. A routine finding in the game is that participants’ willingness to share goes up when they feel part of a group.
Rilly?
The system has to be seen as a collective investment for mutual advantage, not expropriation and transfer to strangers. That in turn presumes there is a critical mass of people who self-identify as a single political community.
Gosh.
And, you know, guess what? Rafa doesn’t even mention that the reason we’ve lost some of our collective identity is because we simply have less of a collective identity. No doubt he’d be affronted if you even suggested that as a possibility.
“The public goods argument would be that a well-resourced criminal justice system keeps law-abiding citizens safe by reducing reoffending rates.“
While the public attitude is ‘I can’t afford a Plasaystation 5 for my child so why should my taxes go towards buying one for a knife wielding savage?’
And there’s a long queue of knife-wielding savages…
I’d bet it’s never occurred to him. I know various people here like to mutter darkly about grand plans to ruin the UK but the simple truth is that our political, cultural and business Establishment is made up of fuckwits. Much of Britain’s dreary slide is due to the unintended consequences* of imbecile policies.
*although 99% of the time these consequences are obvious to anyone who hasn’t had the common sense educated out of them.
I see it more as selfishness than fuckwittedness. People favour policies that benefit them personally. And very often they have very limited time horizons. A politician will push for something now because it’ll get him elected tomorrow. The consequences may be 5 years down the road & disastrous. But he’ll have been an elected politician for five years.
Selfishness and fuckwittedness are not mutually exclusive and can be mutually reinforcing…
Theo. It depends if you’re looking in from outside or looking out from inside. There is nothing fuckwitted about a politician doing 5 years in office then moving on to a nice sinecure in the private or public sector;. He’s moved from zilch up into the multi-millionaire bracket & set for the rest of his life.
There is nothing fuckwitted about a politician doing 5 years in office then moving on to a nice sinecure…
There could be – eg the sinecure might not be in his longer-term interest. Stupid people often misjudge their longer-term interest, or imagine it’s the same as their shorter-term interest.
Do you want to tell me when that hasn’t in a politician’s long term interest & we can work from there?
Very few parliamentary roles easily translate into specific private or even public sector job descriptions. Though many former backbenchers imagine they are employable, they soon find they aren’t. Because selfishness and fuckwittedness are not mutually exclusive and can be mutually reinforcing…
It’s just tribalism. We’ve imported millions of Third-World tribalists who will only ever put their own, and their tribes interests first.
There’s only one thing that truly unites them, and that’s their hatred of the British.
Marius, there most certainly has been a grand plan, to flood the United Kingdom (the West) with migrants and dilute the white population. The ropers in particular are an invasive species – they arrive, live together in ghetto’s that become devoid of the native species, populate at three or four times the rate of the rest of us (one big reason to keep the two child benefit cap), infiltrate all levels of local services and install members of their community into government so as to enable preferential treatment to their own kind, and eventually, dominate.
And a very good reason to not pay benefits to foreigners: https://archive.is/DoKIh (terriblegraph, “Foreign nationals make nearly 1.9m benefits claims”)
He’s simply pushing collectivism. Ask him whether he wants a nation of free-thinking, free-trading, ethnically-similar individuals who identify as that nation and he’ll accuse you of being a Neolib.
Ask him whether he wants a nation of free-thinking, free-trading, ethnically-similar individuals who identify as that nation
Of course he does (Israel). You, not so much.
Is he definitely a Yid, Steve? Never heard of the guy. Looking at the name & foto mmmmm….50/50.
But that is the cause of a lot of anti-Semitism. Liberal Jews who demand all this liberalism. But when it comes to them, hang on we’re separate & different.
And of course you’re seeing exactly the same from Muslims now.
For laffs: “This is where the BBC comes in. Britain’s national broadcaster is unusually well respected as a venerable institution and a provider of reliable news.” WoooHooo!!!
My brother in Christ, when they say “every damn time”, they mean every damn time. And when you Notice certain ethnic activists do nothing but lie all the time whilst relentlessly encouraging your people’s destruction, they accuse you of being racist.
That’s the thing tho; is the Noticing caused by actual things happening or by an inherent filter that selects things to be Noticed? Were there just a lot of bright Jewish physicists or did The Jews bring about the possibility of nuclear armageddon? Do bright Jews just do well in Western establishments that are busy indulging in nonsense and shitting on their own oiks anyway or are The Jews sprinkling Jew Powder in the water?
My late kraut aunt would undoubtedly agree with you and she was literally in the Hitler Youth so well qualified at Jew spotting. We could ask Melanie Phillips I suppose, but she is probably a plant by The Jews just so that someone can point out that it isn’t every damn time.
We’ve been over this before, of course. You aren’t going to change any more than Mel Gibson is. Your Noticing filter is probably more religious than racist. Still stupid, tho.
BiS & Steve
I have long found it weird that the former Chief Rabbi, the late Dr Jonathan Sacks, maintained that jews were safer in a multi-faith/ multicultural UK than in a Christian one. Danny Finkelstein has voiced the same opinion. How can 400,000 jews feel “safer” in a UK with 4m RoPers?
Theo – for the same reason his relatives in medieval Spain supported the Muslim conquest. The Inquisition wasn’t done for a laugh.
Unsurprisingly, after centuries of persecution under the Christian Visigoths, the Umayyad conquest was seen as a form of deliverance by the Jews – ushering in a period of relative tolerance, prosperity, and a flowering of Jewish culture in al-Andalus. However, with the Almohad and Almoravid invasions, Islam became more oppressive and many jews fledl
Historically they were correct. Christianity’s has had a long history of persecuting Jews. But that’s tended to be when a single strand of Christianity’s dominant.* They tend to be safer in a more cosmopolitan environment. So it’s not hard to see why Jews are in favour of immigration in someone else’s society. Of course, it depends on the immigrants, doesn’t it?
*Any dominant strand will tend to fission substrands as heresies Then you get tensions between the mainstream & the “öther” & Jews are accused of siding with the other. This is the story of the pogroms in E Europe. The tension’s between Western Catholics & Eastern Orthodox & which one’s dominant where. The Jews get caught in the middle. The expulsion of te Jews from Spain comes after the triumph of the Reconquista.
I do wonder if that is integral with monotheism. If you’re going to posit a single deity, you’ll always have arguments about who owns it. Polytheistic religions have already accepted multiple deities so adding a few more is less of a problem.
If Jews were by far the majority, you’d still have religious wars. Probably even more vicious with more persecutions. No one is more likely to fission than the Jews. It’s built into Judaism. Even in small numbers their constantly doing it. Hence ask two Jews a question & get three opinions.
BiS, from an evolutionary psychology pov, a tribe living as a diaspora can either marry the natives (ending the separate existence of the tribe) or create all sorts of shibboleths, cultural aversions and ungrateful children being written out of wills to discourage them from marrying the natives.
Over generations, powerful self-selection effects will apply across the group and manifest in other ways too. So despite many high IQs, a lot of our friends have inherited a culturally dumb, oppositional, student union mentality to politics where they act like a woke Alexi Sayle character from the 80’s even when it’s obviously self-harming. A third of NYC Jews voted for the Muslimist Free Palestine guy (this means 2/3 are above average intelligence at least).
anti-Semitism surely exists, it’s the Left’s latest fad. anti-Gentileism surely also exists, because Jewish people are normal human beings and humans run the usual spectrum of racism. But that’s why you get stuff like the former actress from Blossom having a melty over hearing some vapid Christian music at a Mom and Pop craft store. Reee! And it is specifically Christianity, Christ and Christians who irritate the nostrils of anti-Gentileists. They have to such cultural aversion to other religions, but then grampa didn’t live in a shetl surrounded by fanatical Hindus.
So, Mr Sacks, no doubt a lovely guy in many ways. Could not recognise the stabby, jihadi threat to British Jews as well as everybody else when he was advocating for refugee invasions. Still stuck in a cultural paradigm where “refugees”= people we need to save from the Nazis and “diversity” = the cossacks might pogrom someone else for a change. Many such cases among modern Western Christians and atheists too though! Those “Refugees Welcome Here” people are dodos, excited to see rottweilers paddling towards them.
“They tend to be safer in a more cosmopolitan environment. ”
More broadly, people don’t care so much about race and religion in a more industrial/trading/services place where the money is about skill rather than land. When the money is about land, you build a group to protect it from another group, with a stronger group identity like religion.
Like we stopped caring if people were Catholics so much after the industrial revolution. Support for the Nazis was in the good land bits and not the crap land bits like Hamburg. I think it might also explain the end of sectarianism in Ireland (agriculture is no longer a large part of the economy).
Catholicism has persecuted Jews, Protestanism not so much. The Confessing Church, most notably Bonhoeffer who was martyred for it, opposed Nazi persecution of the Jews.
Yes, true. But, in modern Britain, what threat does Christianity pose to anyone, least of all jews? Four million jew-hating RoPers are a huge threat to jews….So why don’t they see it?
Is he definitely a Yid, Steve?
Er…the clue is in his name, ‘Rafael Behr’ – which is hardly Anglo-Saxon.
He’s of Lithuanian Jewish heritage, read French & Russian at Oxford and has an MA in Russian politics and literature from UCL…
Classic leftie…
Prisons are mostly a problem with the leftists. People like The Guardian and the BBC that repeat the lie that people don’t want to fund prisons. A criminal justice system that has decayed with them in charge for over 30 years.
And the BBC? We don’t need collective TV. We don’t need the BBC any longer.
We used to have a collective identity. We identified as British, or as Englishmen. But oikophobes such as Guardian-readers have been telling us that that identity was unacceptable for more than six decades. We were called Little Englanders. Gammons. Racists. For three generations. Is it any wonder that identity has disappeared?
.
A bleak irony is that the aspiration to avoid political partisanship, imperfectly realised but sincere, is a vulnerability for the BBC’s assailants to exploit.
I don’t think the goyim are gonna buy that one anymore, Rafe.
Behr claims that the licence-fee model is an exemplar of a mutually funded public good. Yet it isn’t: the licence-fee model is not a public good because it is only partly non-rivalrous and is not non-excludable.
The licence fee would only work as a public good if it was physically impossible to receive broadcasts without one, rather than just legally prohibited. For the licence-fee model to work the Beeb must terminate all non-locked broadcasts.
The BBC is a public bad. Innocent owners of television sets are threatened with menaces that they better buy a subscription for a government propaganda network that despises them on a biological basis, pollutes the public square with outrageous lies every day and tries to pass it off as “news”, and is now actively falsifying our history and calling it “entertainment”. We should abolish the BBC and sell off all its assets at auction – ITV and Sky can bid for whatever is worth flogging, but it would be foolish and pointless to try to reform an institution that needs to be extinct.
But Steve. the BBC’s main assets, apart from its back catalogue, are its employees. You’re just sending the same people to work somewhere else. You need to get those people out of making or managing media.
Actually my experience of private sector media, is the people are no different from the BBC’s. Probably because the BBC is a massive gravitational pit that the rest of Brit media revolves around. Everyone has either worked for the BBC or aspires to.
A BBC acting for the public good would broadcast cartoon child pornography. Subject to age verification of course.
Theo already beat me to it but Jeebus on a Pogo stick?
The frenzy is out of proportion to the offence, but consistent with a longstanding vendetta. The BBC is a target for rival news organisations that resent its unique status and privileged funding. It is also ideologically threatening to the radical right because the licence-fee model is an exemplar of a mutually funded public good. The corporation doesn’t have to exhibit liberal-left bias to provoke its enemies. They already see it as a factory shipping cultural collectivism and resent the purchase it has on the nation’s affections.
how on earth is it a ‘mutually funded public good’ when most of the watchable output was produced more than 2 decades ago?
And so politics stays trapped in the doom loop: distrusted governments are afraid to take unpopular but necessary decisions; hard problems are deferred; things do not get better; governments become less popular and their room for manoeuvre is even more constrained. Each cycle stokes the appetite for demagogic simplism – the Trumpian model of holding the system itself responsible for failure and insisting that salvation requires breaking all the rules.
‘Hard problems have been deferred’. It’s estimated there are up to 200 ISIS brigades in the country? How do you propose to ‘tackle this’ with your evocation of a 1960s Coke Commercial? Trump is taking action to remove potentially hostile forces fought tooth and nail by a liberal Left that has allowed ISIS to take control of arguably the key city in the US. If that’s ‘breaking the rules’ then more of it quickly here please.
Seems a good opportunity to re-post this here, in case it’s been missed.
This is the offense. That what had been going on was known about & covered up.
This was in the comments over on Samizdata (H/T Natelie Solent)
at the time, and told the BBC about it too.
This tweet from someone called simply “Paul”, @PabloSt981, was made on October 29th 2024:
So the cut & paste job was public knowledge straight after the broadcast. One would imagine that the chances this didn’t generate a complaint to the BBC approach zero. So the claims the BBC received no complaints is almost definitely a lie.
Of course one can deny one has received complaints if one ignores them
https://www.samizdata.net/2025/11/journalists-who-think-lying-is-acceptable-and-journalists-who-would-prefer-to-think-about-something-else/#comments
I listened to the Rest is History podcast on Enoch Powell yesterday and it struck me that history is rhyming.
His infamous speech took place at a time when we had the largest influx of immigrants that had never been seen, politicians claimed the immigrants were needed even though people were losing jobs and industries were closing and anyone who complained was dismissed as a racist.
There’s a convincing argument that the wave of immigration from the Cari8bbean in the fifties was far from beneficial to the UK. The UK did have a labour shortage. It needed labour for the nationalised public services. But there was also demand for capacity from industry to meet the post war demand for consumer products. The demand for capacity could have been met by increased mechanisation & changes to industrial practises. Modernisation of the industrial base. Freeing labour to meet the needs of the public services. But there was resistance from unions to change working practises & reluctance from industrialists for the necessary investment. So an unholy alliance between the two to preserve the status quo. Hence the immigration policy approved by both Labour & Conservative. The price being paid in the 60/70s with Britian’s antiquated industrial base falling behind competitors’ productivity
Immigration can be a benefit – if, and only if, numbers are strictly limited, wholly incompatible cultures (eg RoP) are excluded, entry is granted only to necessary occupational groups, and immigrants go home when their work visa expires. As for the cross-Channel invaders, a week’s notice then strafe and sink them…
The thing is, when you work with Pakistani Muslims with skills, they are compatible. They get on fine. They want their wives to drive, don’t think twice about shaking hands with women. I’ve worked with a few software guys and they were great. Yeah, they do their prayers, go to mosque, don’t drink, but they’re like Church of England rather than The Inquisition.
What you do is set a salary level, because then you get the educated, skilled people. The disaster is importing things like curry chefs, basic workers. Because these people are basic people. They don’t even pay for themselves AND they have an incompatible culture.
Same goes for Africans. I have worked with Nigerian server administrators and other than a name with lots of o’s in it, and the accent, you’d not think them different to anyone else. That’s not like the Somalis that come here and have some really fucked up ideas.
I’ve worked with Pakistani curry chefs (my first job was washing up in the kitchen of a curry house). Fine people.
Well, OK, the ones we had 50 years ago were. But then that’s true of so many things, prices were better, beer was better erections were…..
Enoch Powell (pbuh) was so prescient…