As Mark Steyn Cruisemate Sammy Woodhouse likes to say, she's so bored with living in Groundhog Day.
I know the feeling. Reading today's newspapers is like listening to an oldies station with only fifteen records: things that I first wrote about twenty years ago are presented as stunning new revelations that will knock your socks off - even though my socks fell off circa 2007. Here's the latest - and, as with Sammy's Muslim paedo rape-gangs, it's all down to "cultural sensitivity". Headline from The Daily Telegraph:
'I treat children with life-limiting conditions from cousin marriages – but we can't talk about it'
Well, maybe you should have have figured that out and talked about it last decade or the decade before that. The former Tory minister Richard Holden has now introduced a bill that proposes to ban the marriage of first cousins. Sir Keir Starmer, with an eye to his marginal seats, has declared that his party will vote it down.
As I wrote a decade-and-a-half ago, in my international bestseller After America, looking back at our own age from a few years hence:
The new Europe is an unhealthier continent. I am not speaking metaphorically. By the beginning of the 21st century, in the city of Bradford, 75 per cent of Pakistani Britons were married to their first cousins. Even the neanderthal racists warning against the horrors of mass immigration in the late 1960s never thought to predict that in the Yorkshire grade-school classes of the early 21st century a majority of the pupils would be the children of first cousins.
Yet it happened.
The western elites stuck till the end to their view of man as homo economicus, no matter how obvious it was that cultural identity is a primal indicator that mere economic liberty cannot easily trump. If a man is a Muslim mill worker, which is more central to his identity – that he is a Muslim or that he works in a mill? So the mill closed down, and the Muslim remained, and arranged for his British-born sons to marry cousins imported from the old country, and so a short-term need for manual labor in the mid-twentieth century led to Yorkshire adopting Mirpuri marriage customs. Beyond Bradford, in the nation as a whole, 57 per cent of British Pakistanis were married to their first cousins by the turn of the 21st century. If, like most of the experts, you were insouciant about that number and assumed that the seductive charms of assimilation would soon work their magic, well, in 1970 the percentage was half that.
But back then there were a lot fewer cousins to marry.
Many non-Pakistani Britons were a little queasy about the marital preferences of their neighbors but no longer knew quite on what basis to object to it. "The ethos of relativism," wrote the novelist Martin Amis, "finds the demographic question so saturated in revulsions that it is rendered undiscussable." That was why, even though the marital customs of the Pakistani community of New York were little different, you heard not a peep on the subject from brave American urban liberals still cheerfully making sneering cracks about inbred fundamentalist redneck southern hillbillies.
British Pakistanis were then officially less than two per cent of the population, yet accounted for a third of all children born with rare recessive genetic diseases – such as Mucolipidosis Type IV, which affects brain function and prevents the body expelling waste. Native Scots families aborted healthy babies at such a rate they're now all but extinct; Pakistani first-cousin families had two, three, four children born deaf, or blind, or requiring spoon-feeding and dressing their entire lives. Learning disabilities among this community cost the education system over $100,000 per child. They cost the government health system millions of pounds a year. And this was the only way a culturally relativist west could even broach the topic: nothing against cousin marriage, old boy, but it places a bit of a strain on the jolly old health care budget. Likewise, don't get me wrong, I've nothing against the polygamy, it's just the four welfare checks you're collecting for it. An attempt to confine spousal benefits to no more than two wives was struck down as discriminatory by the European Court of Human Rights.
But this was being penny-wise and pound-blasé. When 57 per cent of Pakistani Britons were married to first cousins, and another 15 per cent were married to relatives, and a fair number of those cousin couples were themselves the children of cousins, it surely signaled that at the very minimum this community was strongly resistant to traditional immigrant assimilation patterns. Of course, in any society, certain groups are self-segregating: the Amish, the Mennonites and so on. But when that group is not merely a curiosity on the fringe of the map but the principal source of population growth in all your major cities, the challenge posed by that self-segregation is of a different order.
~from After America (2011), personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore.
How long before the Labour Party's - or Reform's - front bench is made up entirely of first cousins? There is a huge difference between something being legally available to a statistically undetectable sliver of people who might desire it and it being a major driver of your population growth. But, as I always say, there is no greater sin in public discourse than being right too soon.