It is not ‘racist’ to lament the rise of monocultural ethnic enclaves.
BRENDAN O’NEILL, CHIEF POLITICAL WRITER
Robert Jenrick has only gone and forgotten the golden rule of the woke era. Namely, that you are permitted to bemoan a surplus of white people, but you must never clock an absence of white people. Wailing about the pale, stale males who clog up our institutions is fine. Wondering where the white people are at when you visit certain parts of the Midlands is evil. How did these rules of the new racialism slip his mind?
Jenrick – the newly svelte YouTubin’ Tory – is in hot water for comments he made during a dinner at the Aldridge-Brownhills Conservative Association on 14 March. Yes, seven months ago. He mentioned visiting Handsworth in Birmingham. He said that in the hour-and-a-half he was filming – man’s always filming – he ‘didn’t see another white face’. It was ‘one of the worst-integrated places I’ve ever been to’, he said.
Someone recorded his comments and they were leaked by the Guardian on Monday, to coincide with the start of the Tories’ conference. One envisions Guardianistas dashing for the fainting couch upon hearing Jenrick’s scandalous comments. The paper is full of pained commentary on his ‘far right’ blather. It quotes Hope Not Hate railing against his ‘inflammatory remarks’. And a Brummie MP who says Jenrick peddles a ‘culture-warrior narrative’ with ‘far-right clichés’.
Hold on. This is the same Guardian, right, that called the European Union ‘too white’? And which said videogames are ‘too white and too male’? And which has published headlines saying ‘We hear too many white, male voices’? And which published a feature titled ‘Glossies So White’, lamenting that the people photographed for the covers of Britain’s magazines are ‘overwhelmingly white’? And which splashed with a column titled ‘Dear white people, your discomfort is progress’?
So that’s it: bitching about too many honkies is okay, but commenting on a lack of white people is borderline Nazi. The chattering-class rage over Jenrick’s comments is an orgy of cant. The Independent gleefully reports that he’s been ‘slammed’ for his comments. Which left me wondering when the Independent will be ‘slammed’ for publishing poisonous drivel saying ‘it is up to white people to rescue white people from our own worst selves, from the distorted monsters we have… become’.
If Jenrick had written off the non-white inhabitants of Handsworth as ‘monsters’, I’d have enthusiastically joined in the condemnation of him. But he didn’t. Pretty much the only people these days who denounce an entire racial group – us crackers – as monstrous and possibly deserving of eradication (whiteness ‘must be abolished’, says a Guardian hack) are Jenrick’s critics. Oli Dugmore, formerly of PoliticsJOE, is calling Jenrick ‘divisive’. The same Oli Dugmore who once thought it would be a hoot to hit the streets and ‘Ask white people where they’re from’. Remember, folks, noticing low numbers of whites is bad; taunting white oiks for the titillation of mullet-sporting ironic leftists who get a boner listening to Kneecap is good.
Even worse than these people’s hypocrisy is their cowardice. Jenrick is right – it’s worrying that parts of the country have become ethnic enclaves. Even the Guardian’s shrill assault had to admit that 91.3 per cent of Handsworth’s inhabitants are non-white. In some neighbourhoods, it’s 99 per cent. That’s not diversity, is it? It speaks not to the vibrant, multicultural patchwork of the rich, right-on Londoner’s dreams, but to the slow formation of communities Balkanised along ethnic lines. As Jenrick said: ‘I want people to be living alongside each other, not parallel lives.’
That’s the irony of this storm – it’s Jenrick who is standing up for diversity while his critics seem content for often very poor, migrant-descended people to live in monocultural communities where they rarely encounter people of an alternative extraction. I guess moneyed liberals quaffing merlot in the Westminster bubble don’t have to give a damn about the poverty-line Bangladeshi woman in Handsworth who can’t speak English, and doesn’t have to, because she’ll never cross paths with a non-Bengali speaker. Screw her, she can stay put, and live her life as a fleshy symbol of ‘diversity’ whose sole role is to give cushy liberals in Fulham a warm, fuzzy feeling about ‘Open Britain’.
‘A bit of racial diversity won’t kill you’, say Jenrick’s critics, with superb paternalism. Jenrick knows that. We all know it. I grew up in an ethnically diverse community. Next door to us Micks were a family from Guyana and an old Jewish couple originally from Eastern Europe. If you had told my mum when she got off the boat from Ireland that soon her best friend would be a black lady from Latin America, she’d have thought you mad. Yet there we were. But we didn’t live in cultural prisons falsely advertised as ‘diversity’. We lived mingled lives, not parallel ones.
The Jenrick scandal exposes the hogwash of the religion of diversity. That the elite footsoldiers of the ideology of multiculturalism are cool with parts of the country being 99 per cent ethnic minority confirms they couldn’t give a toss about diversity. No, to them ‘diversity’ is little more than a weaponised buzzword to be wielded against anyone who speaks of British values, British culture and the importance of integrating immigrants into these things.
As for diversity of thought – their urge to silence Jenrick is proof of their burning hostility to that. They yap about multiculturalism while pushing a monoculture of groupthink where no one is permitted to wonder if Britain is becoming more divided, more atomised, more tense. Under the ideological cover of multiculturalism they enforce their singular vision of a Balkanised Britain ruled by them and them alone. There used to be a phrase for this: divide and rule.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
This article (Robert Jenrick is right – Britain feels more and more Balkanised) was created and published by Spiked Online and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Brendan O’Neill
See Related Article Below
I’m a Brummie… get me out of here!
In defence of Robert Jenrick
PIMLICO JOURNAL
As I am sure you are aware, that naughty Mr Jenrick has ruffled the feathers of the great and righteous with his recent observations on the (lack of) diversity in Handsworth.
X and Bluesky — granted, more the latter than the former — are filled with the howls of anguish and dogmatic piety of such luminaries as the woman from Time Team, the Bishop of Birmingham, and centrist tough-guy Lewis Goodall (more on him later) all decrying Jenrick’s attack on that shining multi-ethnic city on the hill, Birmingham.
The narrative, such as it stands, is that Birmingham is a vibrant, post-national dreamworld; where the River Rea runs deep and clear, and hardworking, respectful neighbours go a-knocking as soft evening falls offering gifts of pierogi, samosas, and both types of jollof. Enoch Powell’s proclamations on Smethwick in the middle of the last century have been jet-washed off the walls, and in their place stands only love, respect, and British values. Many nations: one city. They support Pakistan in the cricket, and The Lionesses in the footy. The world united under the banner of the Bullring.
Jenrick then, in this reading, brings only hatred and division by pointing out (completely accurately, as it turns out) that there are very few white people in Handsworth. Whether it is evil or merely cynical politics, to honestly represent what he saw is down to the individuals themselves to decide — but you must know and understand that Robert Jenrick is a fascist for giving this a voice. Ordinary Brummies, we are told, have no truck with the politics of division.
I live in Birmingham. South Birmingham to be exact, in the uncanny footprint of the sprawling car plant that disappeared, sold to the Chinese in 2005 and now turned to an unsatisfying shopping precinct (a Hungry Horse and a Beefeater sit back-to-back, watching over a Costa Coffee, a Puregym, and a Poundland), and behind it, endless rows of even more unsatisfying toytown housing.
I work in the city centre, and on the occasions I have to go in to the office, my walk from New Street Station takes me along Corporation Street, Joe Chamberlain’s grand Parisian boulevard, now decrepit and daubed with Palestine flag graffiti on the trademark red terracotta brickwork and homeless people shouting and smoking weed outside the Lloyds Bank on the corner at 8am.
In short, my bona fides cannot be questioned. I live and work in Birmingham. I pay an exorbitant and ever-increasing Council Tax for the privilege of them not emptying my bins. I have a season ticket at St Andrew’s. I know what I am talking about. And Robert Jenrick is right. Not only is he right, but I would also contend that he was actually quite restrained and did not go far enough.
Handsworth is bad. But before we even discuss that, in terms of how many white faces you would see there, the demographic data is unarguable: the most recent census tells us quite clearly that the proportion of the white population in Handsworth decreased from 12% in 2011, already staggeringly low, to just 8.7% in 2021. Add four years of Boriswaving into this, and it’s not an unreasonable inference to think that percentage will have gone down even further.
What this mere statistic cannot tell us is the general sense of filth and decay on the streets and the claustrophobic grimness of the suburb. Handsworth, it should be noted, not only gave its name to a set of ’80s riots, but was also the epicentre of the West Midlands leg of the 2011 sequel, where three Asian men were killed by black looters. Winson Green was the home of Channel 4’s infamous Cameron-era shockumentary Benefits Street (2014). Robert Jenrick is not unfairly targeting the area by calling it a slum: it is a slum. Anywhere where normal people feel the need to lock their car doors in stationary traffic can be accurately described as such. Indeed, when BBC News asked local residents for their thoughts on Jenrick’s comments, one resident by the name of Mariaj Khan said that
…the area was a slum and he was not offended by the comments because they were true… he only saw Asian and black people, adding: “I never saw a white face around here.” […] As for the area’s appearance, he added there was “garbage everywhere”, with multiple people living in single houses — sometimes three or four families in one property, he claimed.
Mr Khan stated that if there was integration in the area, you would see faces of “every other colour”.
It seems strange to be so vocally opposed to Jenrick’s comments when large swathes of the populace will have been to a game or a concert at Villa Park, and will have formed such a judgement on the area themselves. As they say on the other side of the M5, ‘folk ay daft’.
Another problem for the city of Birmingham is that Handsworth may not even be in the top five worst parts. For poverty and deprivation, for segregation, for the sheer filthiness of the streets, and for proximity to crime, it is outranked by Sparkbrook, Alum Rock, Small Heath, Erdington, Bordesley Green, Hodge Hill, and Heartlands. 27 of Birmingham’s 69 wards have deprivation scores that rank them in the 10% most deprived areas nationally. It’s not just Handsworth that is a slum, but almost the entire northern and eastern flanks of the city. People in Birmingham know that to be a white person going down the Alum Rock Road at night, spray-painted with ‘No Whites Allowed’ graffiti in 2024, is tantamount to swimming down the Zambezi River: if the crocs don’t get you, the hippos will. No matter how much Lewis Goodall waxes lyrical about the ‘success story’ of modern day Birmingham (a rather strange time to do so, with the council bankrupt and the bin strike ongoing until at least March 2026), he chooses not to live here, despite being able to get to London on the train in less than ninety minutes. Why might that be?
Goodall is an interesting case. According to his X account, he either grew up in Longbridge or Northfield: two very white, working class areas in the south-western tip of the city. Both are a little down at heel since ‘the Austin’ or ‘the Rover’ (both refer to Longbridge car factory, depending on your vintage) shut down in 2005. Goodall is thirty-six, and presumably left for Oxford sometime around 2008 and never came back. In that time, the area he once knew has much changed. Goodall’s old school, Turves Green Boys, is now 14% EAL (English as Additional Language). This is quite different from 2008: looking back at the school’s OFSTED report from 2004 — when Goodall would have been there — the preamble states ‘Students are mostly of White-British origin and there are no students who are at an early stage of learning English’. It should be noted that 14% is still below the national figures for EAL, but it is a rather alarming increase from 0%. Things are changing, and they are changing fast — even in the white British redoubts.
The recent ‘flagging’ epidemic appears to have started concurrently in Birmingham and York. In Birmingham, at least, the movement grew out of the last remaining white-majority areas in the south-west of the city: Weoley Castle, Bartley Green, Northfield, Rednal, Longbridge. Many, if not most, neighbourhoods in the south of the city now have flags adorning their lampposts, except quirky Stirchley whose residents seem to have decided it is the Stoke Newington of the Midlands, and that they are too urbane for such trivia. If the city is truly as thriving, tolerant, and united as Jenrick’s detractors declare, why would such a movement be necessary, and so popular? Why would it be so important to express Englishness or Britishness with such ostentation? Very few have been removed, and the Facebook comments, if such a barometer can be considered, are generally very supportive of the Weoley flaggers and their associates. Birmingham’s vaunted multicultural success story seems to have been implemented without the consultation or consent of those whose families have been here the longest, or at least those who haven’t yet left for Warwickshire, Worcestershire, or Staffordshire. Many more will follow as things continue to deteriorate.
Birmingham, sadly, is too far gone. Tolkien’s Birmingham, all spacious sweeping suburbs with ornate Edwardian detailing and solid, dependable brickwork will remain as a fossil record of those who came before, but the population transfer is only heading in one direction and the level of crime, the sense of cultural alienation from the rest of Britain, and the appalling degradation of the social fabric will continue to get worse. It’s two years until our mortgage deal ends and we are over the border to Worcestershire and we are never, ever looking back.
I may not be able to get a pizza and a bag of drugs delivered at 3am by an Afghan on an electric bike with insulated mittens, but my children will be able to grow up in what is left of England.
This article was written by an anonymous Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to [email protected].
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This article (I’m a Brummie… get me out of here!) was created and published by Pimlico Journal and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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