The ethnonationalist right dislike her because overt values-led education flavoured with patriotic symbolism doesn’t match their idea that disorder and violence is a racial feature
Great analysis, thank you. It's important to realise that for people like Tomlinson, no amount of assimilation will ever be acceptable. Even if Katherine Birbalsingh was to jump through his hoops, he would pull out others, until eventually, for his final unanswerable trick, he will say that she and her students simply can never be authentically British by virtue of their ethnicity.
These debates have their precursor in 19th century Germany regarding the assimilation of Jews. Remember that Wagner's whole argument in relation to Jewish music is that is cannot be authentic. Bear that in mind when reading Tomlinson's insidious remarks about the performance of British identity.
Tomlinson writes in trembling, overwrought prose (and North can be a windbag), but you haven't really rebutted them. There are just nine white British pupils at the school, and yet we’re told this is a triumph of “integration.” Into what, exactly? Into the exam system, the Ofsted checklist, the bureaucratic creed of “British values” stripped of anything distinctly British? And since when was a nation defined by it's values?
And the question that haunts the margins, do they remain Englishmen when they leave?, is the one the piece never dares to ask. Do they feel that quiet tug of continuity when walking through a churchyard, reading the names of the war dead? Do they feel kinship with that story, or merely admiration for its efficiency? The author cannot say, Much like the school itself, this piece tells people what they want to hear.
"His dead are in the churchyard, thirty generations laid.
Their names were old in history when Domesday Book was made"
Pete North’s ancestors have spoken English, Middle English, Old English, Britonnic (maybe Latin). Culture can be rebuilt.
The recent online attack on Birbalsingh was a new low for Peter North, one of many over the past couple of years, including his joining the neo-Nazi BNP remnants of the Homeland Party - until he recently discovered, seemingly to his surprise, that these racists were also Jew-haters. No one was shocked except, apparently, him.
Since North is by his own admission a racist, one might even say those neo-Nazis at Homeland were more consistent than he was. But consistency is not North's strong point as anyone who has waded through his intemperate tracts will know.
He lacks the education to critique education or Birbalsingh's particular achievement. He does not understand it. She is just a convenient target at which to direct his boilerplate bile.
Not that you can call that vile pile-on against Birbalsingh any kind of critique. It was boorish and embarrassingly ignorant. Yet North styles it a "debate" and thought he was brave and forthright.
As for Tomlinson, he is part of that constellation that are often labelled post-liberals. At least Tomlinson grounds himself in Catholic religion, one of the pillars of Western civilisation, even though I think he is pursuing a blind alley. North, in contrast, dismisses religion as "superstition" and falls back on an often contradictory grab-bag of semi-digested modernist cliché, just like the worst of the woke left and precisely the kind of thing that other so-called post-liberals reject.
But for North, the language of ideas is merely a polemical weapon that he wields without comprehension. He does not understand politics. His commentary is superficial, derivative and parasitic. He frequently uses the language of fascism, seemingly unaware of its provenance, but common currency in the fetid pool in which he chooses to swim.
I had hoped his recent arrest and subsequent public admission, in a plea for sympathy, of mental problems might temper his online bovver-boy persona. But it seems not. As soon as the police told him they were taking no further action, he clambered back onto his bully-pulpit.
Good essay. I saw the disagreement between Katherine Birbalsingh and Northern Variant on X. I come down heavily on the side of Katherine. It's worth noting that only 10% of Reform voters align with ethnonationalist legacies of the type once espoused by the likes of the BNP. They are a small, but highly vocal minority.
Coonor Tomlinson is a more complex figure. He's vehemently anti-Islam and believes Islam won't ever adapt to British values. His views could probably be summed up with the belief that modest levels of cultural pluralism can work, with the exception of one religion, Islam.
Some of us warned about this. We correctly intuited that increasing the foreign-born share of the population would automatically mean a shift in the Overton Window to the Right. The evidence was there for anybody willing to look. Every time American foreign-born citizenship rates rose above 14%, populism emerged, before conventional politicians deflated the problem by shutting down immigration for a generation or more. The evidence from psychology is also quite clear, once ingroup has been fixed by childhood environment (and parental education in particular), it's notoriously difficult to shift, ineradicable by education or experience.
Plus, there is the evidence from economics and the neurological effects this can have. High non-selective immigration creates Gilded Age effects, whilst the very low migration and tight labour markets of the FDR era created the greatest period of growth and prosperity in American history. And as if lowering the living standard of C2, D and E group workers wasn't enough by placing them in a position of fierce Social Darwinism in terms of labour competition and wage dilution (with double the cost effect through housing), brain science teaches us that increasing economic insecurity and other factors like financial worries can increase cortisol and unleash a whole host of neurochemistry which activates threat perception in the brain.
Britain's policy makers have unleashed a very specific version of PTSD which increases the degree to which an individual affected sees other people as threats. It's lower in magnitude (30-60% of PTSD's neural signal intensity), but in vulnerable groups (e.g., low SES), it can accumulate, blurring the lines with subthreshold PTSD.
Most decision makers understandably don't want to accept that their policy making economic decisions have induced biological and neurological conditions which make a large segment of the population fundamentally more likely to outsiders as a threat. Of course, there is also a good degree of blurring of economic causes- Net Zero has made a disastrous migration policy far, far worse, and not enough people acknowledge that regardless of the message, the medium of smartphones and social media has profound effects in terms of increasing social alienation, anxiety and depression, even in adults.
To quote an AI: 'This digital amplification is moderate but compounding—adding 20-50% to cortisol reactivity in heavy users (e.g., via delayed recovery), per studies, making threat perception ~1.5x more biased than stressor-alone effects.'
We've unwittingly walked into a pressure cooker of varied contributory factors, and it's only going to get worse. It's a neurobiological problem, not a social or political problem.
Great analysis, thank you. It's important to realise that for people like Tomlinson, no amount of assimilation will ever be acceptable. Even if Katherine Birbalsingh was to jump through his hoops, he would pull out others, until eventually, for his final unanswerable trick, he will say that she and her students simply can never be authentically British by virtue of their ethnicity.
These debates have their precursor in 19th century Germany regarding the assimilation of Jews. Remember that Wagner's whole argument in relation to Jewish music is that is cannot be authentic. Bear that in mind when reading Tomlinson's insidious remarks about the performance of British identity.
Tomlinson writes in trembling, overwrought prose (and North can be a windbag), but you haven't really rebutted them. There are just nine white British pupils at the school, and yet we’re told this is a triumph of “integration.” Into what, exactly? Into the exam system, the Ofsted checklist, the bureaucratic creed of “British values” stripped of anything distinctly British? And since when was a nation defined by it's values?
And the question that haunts the margins, do they remain Englishmen when they leave?, is the one the piece never dares to ask. Do they feel that quiet tug of continuity when walking through a churchyard, reading the names of the war dead? Do they feel kinship with that story, or merely admiration for its efficiency? The author cannot say, Much like the school itself, this piece tells people what they want to hear.
"His dead are in the churchyard, thirty generations laid.
Their names were old in history when Domesday Book was made"
Pete North’s ancestors have spoken English, Middle English, Old English, Britonnic (maybe Latin). Culture can be rebuilt.
The recent online attack on Birbalsingh was a new low for Peter North, one of many over the past couple of years, including his joining the neo-Nazi BNP remnants of the Homeland Party - until he recently discovered, seemingly to his surprise, that these racists were also Jew-haters. No one was shocked except, apparently, him.
Since North is by his own admission a racist, one might even say those neo-Nazis at Homeland were more consistent than he was. But consistency is not North's strong point as anyone who has waded through his intemperate tracts will know.
He lacks the education to critique education or Birbalsingh's particular achievement. He does not understand it. She is just a convenient target at which to direct his boilerplate bile.
Not that you can call that vile pile-on against Birbalsingh any kind of critique. It was boorish and embarrassingly ignorant. Yet North styles it a "debate" and thought he was brave and forthright.
As for Tomlinson, he is part of that constellation that are often labelled post-liberals. At least Tomlinson grounds himself in Catholic religion, one of the pillars of Western civilisation, even though I think he is pursuing a blind alley. North, in contrast, dismisses religion as "superstition" and falls back on an often contradictory grab-bag of semi-digested modernist cliché, just like the worst of the woke left and precisely the kind of thing that other so-called post-liberals reject.
But for North, the language of ideas is merely a polemical weapon that he wields without comprehension. He does not understand politics. His commentary is superficial, derivative and parasitic. He frequently uses the language of fascism, seemingly unaware of its provenance, but common currency in the fetid pool in which he chooses to swim.
I had hoped his recent arrest and subsequent public admission, in a plea for sympathy, of mental problems might temper his online bovver-boy persona. But it seems not. As soon as the police told him they were taking no further action, he clambered back onto his bully-pulpit.
There is also the disappointing possibility that Birbalsingh is an over-hyped self-promoter:
https://zmkc.blogspot.com/2023/05/confidence-trick.html?m=1
Good essay. I saw the disagreement between Katherine Birbalsingh and Northern Variant on X. I come down heavily on the side of Katherine. It's worth noting that only 10% of Reform voters align with ethnonationalist legacies of the type once espoused by the likes of the BNP. They are a small, but highly vocal minority.
Coonor Tomlinson is a more complex figure. He's vehemently anti-Islam and believes Islam won't ever adapt to British values. His views could probably be summed up with the belief that modest levels of cultural pluralism can work, with the exception of one religion, Islam.
Some of us warned about this. We correctly intuited that increasing the foreign-born share of the population would automatically mean a shift in the Overton Window to the Right. The evidence was there for anybody willing to look. Every time American foreign-born citizenship rates rose above 14%, populism emerged, before conventional politicians deflated the problem by shutting down immigration for a generation or more. The evidence from psychology is also quite clear, once ingroup has been fixed by childhood environment (and parental education in particular), it's notoriously difficult to shift, ineradicable by education or experience.
Plus, there is the evidence from economics and the neurological effects this can have. High non-selective immigration creates Gilded Age effects, whilst the very low migration and tight labour markets of the FDR era created the greatest period of growth and prosperity in American history. And as if lowering the living standard of C2, D and E group workers wasn't enough by placing them in a position of fierce Social Darwinism in terms of labour competition and wage dilution (with double the cost effect through housing), brain science teaches us that increasing economic insecurity and other factors like financial worries can increase cortisol and unleash a whole host of neurochemistry which activates threat perception in the brain.
Britain's policy makers have unleashed a very specific version of PTSD which increases the degree to which an individual affected sees other people as threats. It's lower in magnitude (30-60% of PTSD's neural signal intensity), but in vulnerable groups (e.g., low SES), it can accumulate, blurring the lines with subthreshold PTSD.
Most decision makers understandably don't want to accept that their policy making economic decisions have induced biological and neurological conditions which make a large segment of the population fundamentally more likely to outsiders as a threat. Of course, there is also a good degree of blurring of economic causes- Net Zero has made a disastrous migration policy far, far worse, and not enough people acknowledge that regardless of the message, the medium of smartphones and social media has profound effects in terms of increasing social alienation, anxiety and depression, even in adults.
To quote an AI: 'This digital amplification is moderate but compounding—adding 20-50% to cortisol reactivity in heavy users (e.g., via delayed recovery), per studies, making threat perception ~1.5x more biased than stressor-alone effects.'
We've unwittingly walked into a pressure cooker of varied contributory factors, and it's only going to get worse. It's a neurobiological problem, not a social or political problem.