The former head of the Church of England has made the silliest and feeblest case yet for mass illegal migration.
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams – very much one of The Good People, always keen to let the rest of us know where we’ve gone wrong – has penned an article in the Guardian about the artistic talents of migrants (and asylum seekers in particular). Somehow, this is supposed to override any doubts we might have about mass uncontrolled immigration.
In an attempt to answer any objections before he makes this extraordinary argument, Williams, in his opening paragraph, serves up some perfunctory remarks about the grooming- or, more accurately, rape-gangs scandal – ‘an undeniably appalling series of events, institutional failures and victim-blaming’. With that tidied safely out of the way, he lets rip. I don’t think I’m being unfair or misrepresenting his intent when I boil down the hot take that follows as ‘but look at the nice stuff some migrants make’.
As the ‘progressive’ world collapses, we must spare a thought for those, like Williams, left gasping in the rubble. They’ve had such a long run of criticising others – sometimes not altogether unreasonably – for being trapped in longing for a never-never golden age. Now the boot is very much on the other foot. Time, the old ratbag, will do that to people.
What we are seeing here is, I think, the slow demise of the long 20th century (and about time too, as we slide into the second quarter of the 21st). The Rowan Williams iteration of Anglicanism, a kind of less subtle version of one of William Shatner’s speeches in Star Trek, or of the lyrics to ‘Ebony and Ivory’, was never much of a goer even in the years that started with a ‘1’ and a ‘9’. It is blatantly laughable now.
‘According to this picture’, says Williams, referring to the ‘narrative’ he thinks is being nefariously spun, ‘migrants are eager to experience the benefits of our society, but they are also out to undermine it, because they come from cultures whose values are dramatically different from our own’.
While I’m reluctant to take a pot at ‘Boomers’ in general, this stance is very clearly that of somebody who was 18 in 1968. Ironically, the article demonstrates the inability of the progressive mind to understand the vital importance of culture. People don’t commit crimes because of their ethnicity, after all. But cultural background can play a role. Where does Williams think the rape gangs originated? Clue – they weren’t Buddhists.
But fear not, because migrants are bringing cultural enrichment. Yes, some of them do bring some nice baubles. Yet for Williams that somehow trumps the problems caused by the current immigration crisis. He persistently conflates the genuine refugee fleeing persecution with the illegal economic migrants and chancers arriving on boats from the barbaric hardships of, er, 21st-century France.
The peppering of progressive buzzwords and phrases in the article is telling. The rape-gangs scandal has been ‘transformed into a narrative’, apparently, by nasty demagogues. And there’s been lots of ‘myth-making’ and ‘rhetoric’, of course.
The piece is a fascinating example of a blinkered mind, trapped in the class-fuelled prejudices of a vanished age. It has far less to do with migration as such than the fact that high-status whites – that is, people like Williams – despise low-status whites. Everything is passed through that filter. The most important factor in Williams’s calculations is that low-status whites are being horribly gauche again. As always, they are being misled by myths (because they supposedly don’t have minds of their own, just putty moulded by nasty ‘rhetoric’).
Read it all in Spiked