Multicultural folly; Income inequality

If you want to understand what's wrong with the multicultural policies Britain has been following for decades now, read this Sunday Telegraph story about Ray Honeyford, the headmaster of an English school with mostly Pakistani students who was sacked 22 years ago for writing an article attacking multiculturalism. As the article notes, Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly, a New Labor paragon, delivered a speech last week questioning multiculturalism. Among other things, she asked:

In our attempt to avoid imposing a single British identity and culture, have we ended up with some communities living in isolation of each other, with no common bonds between them?

The answer is obviously yes. Too bad it took 22 years for her kind to figure this out.

Here's a column by Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times that makes the same point. Here are his concluding paragraphs:

It has transpired that this was the final triumph of multiculturalism - to create within British society a sizeable body of people who have been assured that it is absolutely fine not to integrate because, if we're honest, the prevailing culture is worthless: oppressive and decadent. People who are, as a result, perhaps terminally estranged and who have been relentlessly encouraged in their sense of alienation.

The news that the bombers of July 7 last year and those who allegedly plotted to blow up a whole bunch of aeroplanes were British born apparently came as a shock to the government. Well, it did not come as a shock to those of us who viewed multiculturalism as both dangerous and inherently racist.

It seemed, to people like Honeyford, a simple case of cause and effect. In the end, it is not the mad mullahs at whom we should direct our wrath, but the white liberals who enabled them to prosper. That the creed has now been binned should be a cause for celebration; but don'tfor a moment expect an admission that they got it wrong in the first place.

Income inequality

There is much gnashing of teeth in some quarters of our society about the uneven distribution of income. The Washington Post wrote a whole series of editorials, thoughtful and serious editorials, on the subject. Now comes blogger Tim Worstall to mine some data from a report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. He finds that poor people in the United States have incomes almost exactly the same as those in the highly egalitarian Scandinavian countries and Finland. He calculates incomes using purchasing power parity numbers and graphs the incomes of people in the 10th and 90th percentiles of each country. It turns out that the rich in the United States are much richer than people in other advanced countries, while the poor are just about as well off (well, maybe you have to make an exception for Switzerland).