In this week's episode of Trigonometry, we ask the experts: what's going on in the culture wars in Australia, and why we need to stop demonising immigrants. We're joined by the editor of Spiked Online, Brendan O'Neill, and Nicholas Groen.
00:04:01.660And it's a perfectly legitimate thing to say that we've built a great society here, certainly better than many societies around the world, and we want to protect that.
00:04:14.760So I don't have any people who feel anxious that too many migrants are coming in from very different cultures.
00:04:25.860I don't feel that way, but I don't demonize that.
00:04:31.100And then there are some racists. Then there are some very small-minded, bigoted racists. But that's not the way I look at the debate in Australia or anywhere else, really.
00:04:42.020Do you think it's cultural, essentially?
00:04:43.980It's cultural and it's perfectly legitimate to say we say, as the Japanese say, we are proud of our culture and it's not compatible with too many people coming in here because then it'll be a different culture.
00:04:59.380They underestimate the extent to which a culture can remain, can protect the best parts of it and then become more exciting.
00:05:07.140We have a commentator in Australia called Philip Adams who I think his line is that we invited a lot of European migrants into Australia and found that it was so much fun we wanted more.
00:05:22.820But, you know, I'm not an open-door policy person either.
00:05:28.440I'm in favour of a vigorous and expansive immigration program for Australia.
00:05:33.040And I respect people who want to, I don't hold up the cross and say you're a racist if people feel differently.
00:05:41.860So your concern is how those refugees are treated, essentially?
00:05:45.180Well, I don't want to, one of my concerns is self-righteousness.
00:05:49.080So it's very important for me not to be self-righteous about this because I'm a privileged person who's going to say to a desperate person, sorry, you're not coming.
00:05:58.520And whether I draw that line at $200,000, $300,000, $400,000, a million a year, and at the moment it's something like $200,000 a year, I'm going to be just as much of a bastard as anyone else.
00:06:13.620So let's get off our high horses. Let's try and make ourselves as comfortable as we can be
00:06:19.580with a policy, whatever policy we come up with, and we will be making heartless and cruel decisions.
00:06:29.220Nevertheless, let's make them as, let's minimise that and let's feel as good as we can about it.
00:06:36.620and locking up little kids on islands off Australia
00:06:42.400without any judicial review, there's nothing good about that.
00:09:07.560Theresa May announced when she became Prime Minister that she was going to tackle burning
00:09:10.880injustices in society and one of the announcements she made was that the government would run
00:09:17.320something called a racial disparities audit so it would look at how different ethnic groups
00:09:21.760fair in British society, in the public services, so the NHS, in health, in education, but also in
00:09:28.080areas like employment and other kinds of discrimination, policing, criminal justice
00:09:35.260system, and so on. And the report was published last year, or a website was launched that showed
00:09:42.400these statistics. And interestingly, the audit revealed that the picture is very complex. It's
00:09:49.920not clear-cut that white people always do better and ethnic minorities always do worse. In fact,
00:09:55.000there are some areas where ethnic minorities are doing really well. So, if you look at the NHS,
00:09:59.000for instance, about a third of doctors in the NHS are BME, the non-white, or a third of senior
00:10:05.240consultants in the NHS are non-white. So, there are some areas where actually there's a real
00:10:09.120success story, there's something to celebrate. But when the audit was published, all the emphasis
00:10:13.860from government and from the media was on the negatives, where ethnic minorities are not doing
00:10:17.680well. And it perpetuated what I thought was a very negative, inaccurate picture, really,
00:10:24.680of British society. It reinforces this idea that ethnic minorities are being systematically
00:10:30.160oppressed, that there's a kind of institutional problem. When in fact, what we've seen in the
00:10:35.680last 20 years is a kind of liberalisation and opening up for many people. And my worry has
00:10:41.800always been that when you tell that negative story, it skews policy. It means that people
00:10:47.480make bad policy decisions because they think they're trying to correct something that's actually
00:10:50.260working quite well but it also reinforces for a lot of younger people this idea that they can't
00:10:55.900succeed and that I think can have quite a big material impact it can mean that they're not
00:11:00.900motivated to go out apply to university go and be ambitious seek good jobs because they'll think
00:11:07.140that they've always got a kind of white racist decision maker who's holding them back and I
00:11:14.060I think that can create a lot of tension and division in this society.
00:11:16.800If you're constantly telling people from ethnic backgrounds that this society is against you,
00:11:23.700that's not going to be great for engendering harmonious social relations.
00:11:27.540You know, they're going to be resentful.
00:11:28.860You've made the point even further, actually, that, for example,
00:11:32.840a black defendant who's suspicious about his lawyer is more likely to make a bad decision,
00:11:38.980for example, to plead innocent when, in fact, they should plead guilty.
00:11:42.560And as a result of that, you end up with young black men getting harsher sentences because they don't trust the system and they don't do what they ought to do kind of in a percentage play situation.
00:11:54.940Yeah. The criminal justice system report, which was authored by or led by David Lammy, MP, showed that there was this disparity.
00:12:04.120I mean, in many other areas, many other parts of the criminal justice system, the disparity between ethnic groups can be explained by a number of different factors.
00:12:13.020The fact that there are proportionally a higher number of black men in the criminal justice system is, you know, there are reasons for that.
00:12:22.360You know, the higher proportions of arrests, you know, you can go into the detail of that.
00:12:29.600There was one disparity which was interesting in that report, which is why is it that black men are more likely to receive harsh sentencing?
00:12:36.460And they found, interestingly, as you say, that they were not pleading guilty because they didn't trust the advice of their solicitors and they didn't trust the system.
00:12:45.760and that's I would argue is partly a result of not completely but it's partly a result of
00:12:51.920their fear that the system is going to be prejudiced against them so it has this really
00:12:56.280counterproductive effect it's you know damaging to their life chances really and the same things
00:13:01.740happened in other areas like mental health for instance where we know that there's been a huge
00:13:06.120amount of debate and discussion about whether the institutional there's institutional racism in the
00:13:09.680mental health system because a higher proportion of ethnic minorities are likely to appear in the
00:13:14.760system and to be detained, forcibly detained, which is obviously worrying when you look at the
00:13:19.440statistics and think, well, why is it? You know, are they more likely to have mental illness? Yes,
00:13:23.240they are actually. You know, there's lots of good research to show that they're, for all sorts of
00:13:26.760reasons, they have higher risk factors. But also what researchers have found is that a lot of people
00:13:32.660from ethnic groups are worried about how the system is going to treat them. So they don't
00:13:37.080report until it's almost too late, until their condition has worsened to a point where they may
00:13:42.800end up being violent to themselves or other people. And at that point, they need to be
00:13:46.340forcibly detained. At that point, the police get involved. And the system has to react
00:13:51.660differently to you. So the thing that frustrates me is that people use these statistics almost
00:13:57.220with a political agenda to try and prove a point about systematic racism. But the effects
00:14:01.920of that is even more damaging. And if we were more honest, if we were looking at the statistics
00:14:06.560more dispassionately, you would see that it's just a really complex picture. And I think
00:14:11.960ethnic minorities are, you know, the ones who suffer the most often, you know, because no one's
00:14:16.200really thinking about their interests as, you know, as individuals in the system. They're just
00:14:19.660thinking, how can we make a political point? How can we show that we're virtuous? You know, I think
00:14:23.740in the case of the government, I think the government was trying very hard to show that it
00:14:26.980wasn't the nasty party anymore and that, you know, they care about these vulnerable groups.
00:14:31.420But in doing that, they, you know, they have perpetuated a lot of these perceptions and this
00:14:37.280very negative story. Francis, can you say something really loud to mask?
00:14:41.400I was going to say, this is going to...
00:14:42.500There's a fucking helicopter that's just decided.
00:15:36.580And I sometimes think that if it had been working-class,
00:15:39.400black boys working class asian boys there'd be a massive outcry about it rightly so but because
00:15:43.840it's working class white boys we tend just to shrug our shoulders and go oh well what can you
00:15:48.840do let's crack on and they do tend to be forgotten almost yeah i think i think that has changed
00:15:54.980actually i mean in the last few years there's been more awareness of the fact that uh it's not just
00:16:00.380it's not just a racial thing yeah and and what we don't want to get into is this idea that somehow
00:16:04.940white working class boys are being failed because of their whiteness either you know there are
00:16:08.900problems with our education system i actually i think what's happening is that a lot of
00:16:12.720immigrant families are correcting and are intervening and are uh you know getting their
00:16:18.020kids to go to private tutors to correct for faults in the system and um you know it's not unusual if
00:16:24.440you're going you know if you're driving around south london um you will see in shop windows
00:16:28.520adverts for maths and english tuition um for immigrant groups you know there are saturday
00:16:33.160schools there's a very strong culture of supplementary schools in the afro-caribbean
00:16:36.140community for instance these are all to try and correct for what they perceive to be
00:16:39.720problems in the education system and that hasn't been the case for a lot of white working class
00:16:44.760communities um but yeah you know we have to i think we should focus our education system on
00:16:51.180you know supporting the people who are struggling whatever their ethnic background and for too long
00:16:56.040we've racialized a lot of these problems this is the point where it is like what france's question
00:17:01.620reveals and your answer is that we we think in terms of race all the time now and this way of
00:17:06.860thinking encourages white people to think about well well if you're talking about these ethnic
00:17:11.000minorities what about us we are victimized in this area or that area and it's just like and even if
00:17:15.700you don't agree with it as i don't like i was driving home the other day and there was a girl
00:17:19.800waiting to cross the road and it was like one of those choice situations i could have driven or i
00:17:24.020could have let her pass and i swear to god i looked at her and she was black and i went oh she's black
00:17:28.260i gotta let her through you know this is how we start to think and it's crazy isn't it this is
00:17:33.520absolutely mental that we've we've been encouraged to think in this way well done for not being racist
00:17:37.800even laughing about it um yeah i think people change their behavior and um they're on guard
00:17:48.220there's a sort of sensitivity about it and in a way the the the end result is that you end up
00:17:54.780treating people differently because they're race and they know it so um i remember um i think i
00:18:00.000may have said it even at the battle of ideas session that i was at that um there was one
00:18:03.420writer um i won't name her she wrote a blog um who complained that white people would come up to her
00:18:10.780and say how articulate she was and she felt that this was an insult because really they weren't
00:18:15.340expecting her to be articulate because she's a black female and i thought you know even when
00:18:19.040when compliments are treated as some kind of, you know, expression of racism, you know,
00:18:25.160there's literally nothing you can do, everything you say. And it could be that they just thought
00:18:29.440she genuinely was articulate and they were congratulating her for it. But people then
00:18:33.580become very defensive and afraid. I remember reading a report a long time ago. It was,
00:18:40.080I think it was in the, it was a report of the Met Police. It wasn't about 10 years ago.
00:18:45.360And they noted that black police officers were more likely to be formally disciplined than white police officers in the Met.
00:18:53.180And there was a discussion in the paper about, you know, what was the driver behind this?
00:18:58.360And it turns out one of the reasons was because their superiors were so worried about having informal conversations with them about problems that they felt they had to go through the formal means.
00:19:09.600We don't trust how people will perceive.
00:19:12.000We don't think that they will give us the benefit of the doubt.
00:19:13.740So we do everything in a much more formally regulated way.
00:19:17.480So in the workplace, people are afraid of interacting with their colleagues in a particular way.
00:19:22.840You know, a word said incorrectly or a slightly insensitive remark, you know, where do you come from?
00:19:29.160That kind of thing is now regarded as racism could get you disciplined.
00:19:33.640You could end up in a racial grievance situation.
00:19:36.060You know, the workplace is, you know, essentially it's still a workplace.
00:19:39.000You know, you have a boss. They have the power to sack you.
00:19:41.500So the kind of informal social relationships that you need to be healthy in order for a civic society to be strong are being weakened by, you know, people's, you know, kind of desperation to jump onto anything as being potentially offensive.
00:19:55.460you wrote an article for quillette which i think got a lot of people's attention including ours
00:20:05.740and for anyone who hasn't read it we'll put it in in the in the youtube below but tell us a little
00:20:11.080bit about what was the kind of the just the crux of your article for anyone who hasn't seen it
00:20:14.940well the crux of the article was essentially was based on a conversation essentially i had with a
00:20:19.540friend of mine, a black friend of mine, and it was about how we discuss race, when I say
00:20:25.740we, I mean black people, in public and in private, and how there's a big difference
00:20:39.800These calculations are essentially based on how many black people view our interests.
00:20:47.960So essentially, I'd say maybe on self-preservative instincts, like I wrote in the article about how, OK, I was talking to this friend of mine and he was complaining about a black friend of his at the workplace who sort of, you know, plays the race card anytime there's a difficult situation with a white person.
00:21:04.300Yeah. The friend is like a friend of my friend is like, oh, you know, bring out the race card and most likely 99 percent of the time a white person will back down.
00:21:14.460So my friend told me, oh, he finds this disgusting, doesn't like it, this is completely wrong,
00:22:09.380Now, what is actually preventing the white population, about 87 percent, who control almost all the political and economic power, from actually dominating us overtly, my friend asks me.
00:22:20.360The only thing that's stopping them from doing that is the fear of being called racist, yeah, is political correctness, is the restraint which has been placed on them by society regarding how they should talk to minorities, yeah?
00:22:33.740And he says that's the only saving grace we actually have.
00:22:36.460And he says, take that away, and what do we have?
00:22:38.760Take that away and we could have a situation like we had in the 70s and the 80s, OK, where people on the road are, you know, using the N-word freely.
00:22:45.960And don't feel afraid to do that because there's, you know, no social ostracism, no social consequences from doing that.
00:22:52.580So they're going to—people are going to be doing it.
00:22:54.500And he's like, what was interesting here, my friend, who is a very intelligent guy, very successful banker in a city in London,
00:23:01.000I said it's not because, you know, white people are evil or something like that, but he said that's simply human nature.
00:23:05.760If you put people in a position of dominance over another group of people and they're not Czechs, OK, they are going to abuse that position.
00:23:15.180So his argument is essentially that you need white guilt to protect minorities.
00:23:20.100Yes, that without white guilt, we'd be in a much more difficult situation here.
00:23:25.300And essentially, you know, white people sort of wouldn't have any restraints towards, you know, talking to us anyhow or using exploiting that advantage, which they do have over us in numbers, in political power, in economic power, etc.
00:23:37.920He's like, you know, that's the only restraint.
00:23:40.020So he sees that as a sort of necessary evil.
00:23:43.340He's like, I don't like it aesthetically, morally.
00:23:47.040I don't really like it, but I think we need it, you know, in order to protect ourselves
00:24:24.320I actually, you know, started imagining certain scenarios.
00:24:27.700I started actually thinking, OK, fine.
00:24:29.440What if tomorrow now, you know, political correctness was simply, you know, dubbed unnecessary by mainstream white society?
00:24:37.220Because there's obviously already a segment of society which says it's rubbish.
00:24:40.000But I'm talking of mainstream majority, 60, 70 percent of the people.
00:24:43.480What if they actually said political correctness is rubbish? Actually, we should be able to say anything we like, more or less, to black people, etc. Would that be a more pleasant environment for me to live in, being a minority here in numbers? I can't imagine it being, yeah, if that were to be the case, if it were to go in that direction that people would want to exploit that advantage.
00:25:07.020So, like I said, I couldn't—I definitely didn't, you know, think what my friend was saying was rubbish, but I thought about it.
00:25:14.520And the thing is, you know, maybe it's—I don't know, maybe it's naive or something, but based on my experiences with—especially people here in the U.K., because I've had different experiences also in Poland, that's a different kettle of fish.
00:25:27.860But based on my experience with people here in the UK, I do believe fundamentally that a majority of the white population here does not have racist instincts and would not exploit to their advantage, yeah, if, you know, the whole race thing and the numbers advantage they have and the political advantage they have, if, say, political correctness theoretically was to disappear.
00:25:52.420That's what I believe, that there's a fundamental decency in most people who live here.
00:25:57.200I believe that 200%, 300%, based on experiences which I've had, based on experiences—I'm married to a Nigerian wife.
00:26:05.640She's actually lived in the U.K. a bit longer than me, counting on the intervals and all that.
00:26:10.080And based on her experience also, you know, based on things we talk about, based on experiences of some other people, when we actually sit down and talk—because, you know, sometimes black people may complain about racism here.
00:26:22.120But, you know, when we sit down, when I say we, when we black people sit down in the room, you know, and I'm like, yeah, but guys, come on.
00:26:27.860You know, these people really, they're not that bad.
00:28:50.660They voted for a guy who said all the things he said.
00:28:53.760So even the black people before—I focus here on black people.
00:28:57.180That's the community I know, obviously the other minority groups.
00:29:00.540Even the black people before, who were sort of neutral or didn't buy into those narratives
00:29:06.000that, oh, essentially every second white person is racist, you know, sort of now feel sometimes
00:29:12.560a little bit silly, thinking, ah, actually, I was naive, yeah?
00:29:15.960It seems these white folk are actually pretty racist.
00:29:18.340I mean, they did vote for this Trump guy who said all those things.
00:29:21.600So, you know, maybe I was the one who was naive and not these identity politics guys, yeah?
00:29:26.220Maybe they were the ones who were right, yeah?
00:29:27.900And there are some others who say, yeah, well, of course, you know, Trump doesn't represent all white people, etc., etc.
00:29:34.060But since there is such a political force right now, we definitely need to stand on the side of our people, OK, and defend our people who are being attacked by this kind of politics.
00:29:46.780So even if we don't agree 90 or much less 100 percent with the black identitarians, we definitely need to hold the line with them because, you know, these are the guys fighting for us.
00:29:57.580Definitely Trump is not fighting for us.
00:29:59.280And the people who support Trump are definitely not fighting for us.
00:30:02.160OK, so it's sort of it's bad for people like me.
00:42:42.560It's check my privilege and try and work out why they're saying this.
00:42:46.160Why are they saying these things which are patently untrue?
00:42:48.760And the reason they're saying them is because identity politics encourages you to see yourself as weak and pathetic.
00:42:54.640Whereas left wing politics in particular, but also right wing liberal politics used to encourage you to see yourself as confident and capable.