Astonishing Outbreak Of Honesty At The ‘Indy’…

OK, admittedly, it’s just one columnist, but still…

Towards the end of the French summer holiday, President Sarkozy gave instructions that the Roma camps and shanty towns that had mushroomed on the edge of French cities and suburbs should be broken up and their inhabitants rounded up and deported. The condemnation has resounded around Europe. His motives have been called into question: was he not, perhaps, indulging in base demagogy to divert attention from his own unpopularity?

Well, that would be the usual brickbat hurled at him by the left, wouldn’t it?

The Vatican has weighed in, and the UN, in the shape of its Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which called on France to do more to integrate Roma families, educate their children and settle them in decent housing.

Naturally! After all, if someone isn’t fitting in, then we can’t expect them to compromise, can we? Everyone else must do so, instead…

This, however, is suddenly sitting uneasily with Mary:

Which, of course, is admirably idealistic, and absolutely right, but not much use if you are a French citizen, who has lived in France all your life, paid your taxes and woken up to find a third-world – let's use the word – encampment at the bottom of your garden, which expands every day.

Shouldn’t they celebrate the wonderful opportunity granted them to experience some diversity, Mary?

What are the authorities supposed to do? These are not travellers who buy a farmland plot and move on to it on a bank holiday weekend in breach of planning regulations; this is an incursion of an entirely different order.

Oh..?

When Italy faced a similar problem a couple of years ago, the government stood by and turned a blind eye to some pretty nasty vigilantism. In France, it has not come to that, perhaps because Mr Sarkozy acted.

Aha! Some hard truths dawn.

In condemning him, however, you need to have an alternative to offer, and it is pretty hard to find one.

Ah, but alternatives are never, ever offered by the people who advance the progressive agenda.

Not real ones, anyway…

There are whole families living without sanitation, without utilities, working in the black economy if at all, whose life in France is nonetheless more pleasant and profitable than it probably was, or ever would be, where they came from. There is no reason for them to return. As it is, though, they are parasites on a state of civilisation, material and cultural, they have done nothing to build and could not reproduce for themselves.

Wow!

That is the bald, and politically incorrect, truth.

Double wow!

This is pretty unprecedented from a columnist in a left-leaning newspaper, isn’t it?Particularly one who has previously sung from the usual 'blame Western society for everything!' hymnsheet...

Deportation could well produce an eternally revolving population as deportees try to make their way back. But should French tax-payers have to pay for schools and services and training to yank Roma families up to minimally acceptable French living standards? Should France be expected to facilitate the sort of integration that Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and other countries have shirked?

Oh. My.

I’m lost for words…

And if not, can, or should, the Roma be exempt from the freedom of movement that applies across the European Union, even though it is already practically impossible to enforce? It is disingenuous to insist that such contrasting living standards and expectations existing side by side are easily manageable and that the newcomers can be smoothly accommodated, if at all, without huge outlays of money and goodwill.

Has it finally dawned on the left that we are out of money and fast getting close to being out of goodwill too?

It seems it has:

A year or so ago, a German report concluded that, contrary to forecasts, second- and third-generation Turkish Germans were marrying in Turkey, prompting a whole new, and unanticipated, wave of what we used to call primary immigration, which was serving as a brake on integration. Something similar applies with sections of the Pakistani and Bengali communities in Britain, which have reproduced their own village systems in parts of British towns, and seek their spouses from "home".

*gulp*

The notion that integration is a simple matter of generation has not been proved. Britain and France and Germany all sought labour, preferably cheap labour, abroad, and they got that. But by recruiting from rural areas in less developed countries, we effectively transplanted whole villages and imported microcosms of the backwardness we had overcome.

Hallelujah, sister! Sing it!

With new brides, bridegrooms and the dependents they may legally bring from their home country, the UK now has a home-grown problem of corrupt voting, forced marriage, kidnapping, "honour" killing, and disability – as a recent Channel 4 Dispatches programme showed – caused by first-cousin marriages.

And the hits just keep on coming…

TB, the disease of Victorian slums which was once almost eradicated, is back, and treatment is taking money and manpower that rich countries might expect to spend on other things.

Such as..? Mary doesn’t elaborate.

In one way this is the classic post-colonial conundrum, and maybe our post-colonial generations should not grudge the money; after all, we took from those countries in our day.

We built, too. We ordered, and structured, and (yes, say it!) civilised…

But the juxtapositions that are coming about as a result of whole groups of people crossing borders, threatens to produce a clash of civilisations, not of religion, but of living standards, right on our very own doorstep.

Is this the first crack in the progressive armour of Righteousness? Have they realised there really IS no such thing as a free lunch?

Whatever the answer, it's hard to imagine ever seeing a column like this one getting approval in CiF, isn't it?