So an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a pub, and discover that everyone in there is from the Indian sub-continent. Except for the token Welshman. Who's black.
What we used to call the British Isles contain two sovereign states and, setting aside the Isle of Man and the Crown Dependencies, five principal political jurisdictions:
In London, the Prime Minister is a Hindu whose dad is a Punjabi from British East Africa. His opposite number in Dublin, the Taoiseach (a word Joe Biden just about managed to say this weekend), likewise has a Hindu father, who emigrated from Bombay to England.
The First Minister of Scotland also has a Punjabi pa, but this time Muslim. In the next Scottish election, he'll be battling it out with the Leader of the Opposition, who is another Punjabi Muslim.
The largest city in these islands is London, whose mayor is a Muslim with parents from Pakistan.
Celebrate lack of diversity! Is it possible to rise to the top in Anglo-Celtic politics without being from the Indian sub-continent? Why, yes: The new First Minister of Wales was born in Zambia. He is being hailed as the first black leader of a European country.
So the governments of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and London are, as The Spectator puts it, "now led by what no one calls 'politicians of colour'".
As part of our St Patrick's Day observances on Steyn's Song of the Week yesterday, we analysed the provenance of "No Irish Need Apply". It is not strictly the case that at the summit of today's politics no Irish/English/Scottish need apply, but it's getting there. The exception that proves the rule is Northern Ireland: Under the political settlement of the Nineties, Stormont's First Minister and Deputy Minister have equal powers and are supposed to represent each of the "communities". So, until it turns out Martin McGuinness fathered an Arab love-child on a trip to Libya to collect some more weaponry from Colonel Gaddafi, the chancelleries of power are confined to the traditional variants of hard-faced Ulstermen. Or, actually, soft-faced Ulsterwomen, since even Belfast is not immune to such modishness as can be found within the constraints of Blairite accommodation. Thus the two present leaders are the Shinner Michelle O'Neill and the DUP's Emma Little-Pengelly.
The latter is the daughter of a loyalist paramilitary, and the former comes from a long line of IRA men - so you can understand why more squeamish types over the water might prefer to seek their leaders in the Punjab. Still, aside from the distaff Prod and Papist at Stormont, it all testifies to what The Spectator's editor Fraser Nelson calls "the world's most successful multi-faith democracy".
Er, okay - if by "multi-faith democracy", you mean Muslims, Hindus, a few beleaguered Jews, and a vast godless mass whose state church has decided to cut to the chase and go full post-Christian. On the numbers, "multi-faith" sounds more like Matthew Arnold's "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" smoothly drowning in a confident, new, incoming roar.
As for "democracy", Jawad Iqbal points out:
Once Gething takes up his post (after a formal vote in the Senedd), three of the United Kingdom's four governments will have non-white leaders. The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is a British-born Hindu of Indian heritage; Scotland's First Minister, Humza Yousaf, was born to a Pakistani Muslim family in Britain. These are all important and historic firsts worthy of recognition. But there is a problem, one that is not going away any time soon. None of these leaders (through no fault of their own) has the moral and political legitimacy that comes with being voted into office by the wider electorate.
Correct. Leading your party to victory in a general election seems to be regarded as an unnecessarily burdensome way to become head of government. Rishi Sunak lost the leadership contest to Liz Truss, kicked his heels for seven weeks, half of which were taken up with official mourning for Her Late Majesty, and then somehow wound up moving into Number Ten anyway. Leo Varadkar led Fine Gael to third place in the last Irish election, but is back as Taoiseach thanks to a cosy deal with Fianna Fáil to keep out Sinn Féin. Viewed from Mr Iqbal's perspective, the present phenomenon looks less like a mass shattering of the glass ceiling, and more like a collateral effect of the ongoing evolution into a post-democratic age.
Per the 2021 census, Scotland is ninety-six per cent "white", but its political class seems to have concluded that rotating Punjabis is all the choice anybody needs. If the rap against Ulster is that it refuses to move beyond its history, elsewhere in these islands pas de problème! In some of the most ancient and settled societies on earth, it is now entirely normal for the government to be run by men whose families did not set foot in the country until the Beatles released The White Album. To put it at its mildest, that seems a little odd.
But all is for the best in the best of all possible United Kingdoms. The Spectator extrapolates from the top of the greasy pole to those lower down: "One in five British workers," coos Fraser Nelson, "were born overseas: a higher ratio than even America."
Whether or not that's a good thing, it's certainly a weird thing: even after fourteen years of Cameron-May-Johnson open borders, demographic transformation on such a scale, outside of war, is not normal. And, if it is a good thing, presumably it would be even better were it one in three UK workers - or two in three. As Douglas Murray is wont to posit, how much diversity is enough? At the start of this century London was sixty per cent "white British"; twenty years later, it's thirty-five per cent. So we still have more work to do! Let's drive it down to single digits...
The Spectator is a supposedly conservative publication, although there seems nothing very obviously conservative - or even prudent - about a twenty per cent non-native workforce and a two-thirds non-native capital city. Elsewhere in the magazine, one finds this headline:
Have the Tories finally woken up to the extremism problem?
Oh, that's an easy one. Answer: No. Had the Tories finally woken up to it, they would not be calling it "the extremism problem". The issue arose because, in what are now heavily Muslim constituencies, Members of Parliament and their families are being - not to put to fine a point upon it - physically threatened over "Palestine" and less distant issues. So, if the Tories were being honest about it, they would call it "the Islamic problem". Instead, as is traditional, they have promised a crackdown on "extremism". It seems mysterious "extremists" have infiltrated even the Government's "early warning and intervention strategy for those at risk of becoming terrorists". You read that right: in "the world's most successful multi-faith democracy", some are at risk of becoming First Minister; others are at risk of becoming terrorists. You might almost think there are pluses and minuses to careless demographic transformation within a dizzying half-century.
Of course, between those two extremes lies plenty of comfortable middle ground. That super-diverse Scottish government with the Muslim First Minister?
A poster girl for the SNP's new hate crime laws was last night revealed to be a senior member of an organisation with 'Islamist orientation and beliefs' that 'engages in hate speech and anti-semitic conspiracy theories'.
Are they running that story on the BBC?
Earlier this month [BBC correspondent Soha] Ibrahim liked a video on X of Palestine Action activists slashing an oil painting of former British prime minister Arthur Balfour, who helped pave the way for the creation of Israel. On the day of the Hamas attacks on October 7, she 'liked' videos of people in Lebanon and Tunisia chanting, dancing and waving Palestinian flags in the street in apparent celebration.
Oh, well. At least, the UK has reached that happy stage where, in The Spectator's formulation, "having a non-white leader is not remarkable in British politics". That may be because, if one were minded to remark upon it, one risks arrest and a two-year gaol sentence for being found in possession of templates for printable stickers reading "It's OK to be white", "Natives losing jobs; migrants pouring in", "Reject white guilt", "Labour loves Muslim rape gangs", "We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066" and "Diversity - designed to fail, built to replace".
While undoubtedly a bit brusque for some tastes, none of the above should be illegal to utter in a free society. But apparently "the world's most successful multi-faith democracy" requires an ever firmer grip on the citizenry to maintain it. Same in Ireland, same in Canada, where in both countries "pre-crime" is no longer a Philip K Dick sci-fi fancy but a current legislative proposal.
Last weekend, Mr Varadkar's ministry lost the Irish referendum because of unease about the consequences of mass immigration. A day later, André Ventura's Chega party quadrupled its seats in the Portuguese election for the same reason. Before the year is out, Mr Sunak's premiership will come to an end because of ...oh, go on, take a wild guess.
For all I know, Messrs Sunak, Varadkar, Khan, Yousaf and Gething might just be an exceptionally gifted quintet: whether Hindu or Anglican, Punjabi or Lancastrian, they would have made it to the top. But it was The Spectator which chose to connect their simultaneous eminence to the unalloyed good of demographic transformation. The electorates of western nations are trying to send their elites a message, and all they get back, even from "conservative" media, is nya-nya, can't hear you.
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~We had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with a special audio edition of The Mark Steyn Show, featuring Conrad Black on the dirty stinking rotten corrupt US "justice" system. Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date plumped for Kathy Shaidle's favourite band in Quadrophenia, and on Sunday Steyn's Song of the Week celebrated St Patrick's Day.
If you were too busy spending the weekend face down in a McDonald's shamrock shake, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.