Posted Tuesday, November 3, 1998

Editorial, Tuesday, November 3, 1998: Confound their politics   BRADFORD University is the latest institution of higher education to scrap God Save The Queen at graduation ceremonies. According to Adrian Pearce, of the Association of University Lecturers, the National Anthem is an '"imposition" on those who do not believe in the monarchy or the deity; while a provice chancellor, Professor Colin Mellors, holds that graduation is about celebrating academic achievement of students from diverse cultures. He obviously feels that God Save The Queen in some way detracts from that. Other sources report that a few students even feel "'intimidated" by such displays of patriotism. James Burnham once said that liberalism was the ideology of Western suicide and Bradford's dons have surely proved him right. Just as Canada was transformed in less than a generation from being a British society to a cultural no-man's-land -- in an attempt to propitiate the sensibilities of Quebeckers -- so the way of life of the majority population is now under relentless assault here as well. Examples abound: recall that Southwark Council forbade its tenants to display the flag of St George during the World Cup, for fear that it would offend ethnic minorities. Likewise, British Airways replaced its traditional logo with what seemed to be tribal designs. The most bizarre aspect of such cultural self-immolation is that, as in Canada, the apparent feelings of ethnic minorities (are they ever properly consulted?) are simply an excuse for the self-haters to wreck the indigenous culture. Just as the Anglo-Canadian radicals went far further than the Quebeckers ever expected, so few members of Britain's ethnic minorities (or overseas students) have ever demanded changes of the kind that Bradford is enforcing. The National Anthem is not divisive or intimidating, but unifying and uplifting. The impetus for change has come from self-loathing elements within the majority community. In Canada, the process was accomplished stealthily. It must not happen here.

Our opinion TOO EARLY to hope that a Wind of Change is suddenly blowing gale force through the editorial offices of Fleet-street or the towering edifices of Canary Wharf built by Olympia & York (the Reichmann dynasty). But for Britain's biggest and most widely read broadsheet to print an editorial like this -- words which, written by other pens, or spoken by other mouths, would lead to prosecution under the laws that fearful British governments have passed to plaster over forty years of immigration follies -- indicates that at least one Briton in editorial office shares our aches over what has happened to the England of old. We make so bold as to predict that unless this onrush of what is coyly called "multi-culturalism" is halted, the centre of London, within say two miles of Marble Arch, will be entirely Black by the year 2010: that is the lesson of North American city development. It sounds unthinkable now, but sitting as we have behind our same study window close to the centre of that radius for thirty years (we moved into Duke Street in November 1968) we have seen many changes. In the 1960s and 1970s we would still stand up and go to the window, if we saw a Black or Asian walking down the street, and wonder What he Was Up to Here. Now, many of them wonder what we are up to. Never has a nation committed hara-kiri so rapidly as England, what the Daily Telegraph editorial calls self-immolation. Which brings us back to its anonymous author. The English chattering classes know nothing whatever about Canada's tragedy: an Englishman certainly did not write it, or at least inspire it. Could it have been the newspaper's Canadian owner, Conrad Black himself? If so, Hats Off to him, we say.

The above news item is reproduced without editing other than typographical

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