The British finally decide that maybe newcomers need some instructions on quaint British customs
There has been a great deal of internet mockery of a nine-page pamphlet released by the British Home Office to instruct newcomers on local mores. It contains helpful hints such as this:
More:
The Conservatives said any asylum seekers breaking UK law should be deported and Reform said the publication showed the government “knows that they are a menace”.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the government had “a very clear principle that if you break UK law, you will be removed from the country”.
He said the number of removals of illegal immigrants from the UK “are significantly up” and that he was working to ensure that foreign national offenders are removed from the prison system.
He added: “It follows that if we’re taking this approach, it’s made explicitly clear what the UK law is and what the societal norms of the UK are and that’s why this approach is being taken.”
A section on gender explains that women in the UK have equal rights to men, and do not need the permission from a husband, father, brother or any other man to do things like work, study, travel, or make decisions. …
And a section headed Respect in Public outlines how it is not acceptable to whistle or make kissing noises at people on the street, nor “make sexual comments to someone, even if you think it is a compliment
On the one hand, it actually is a step up, although a baby step. Did the British never impress these facts on newcomers before? At any rate, they’re doing it now. At the very least, that indicates that the authorities are setting up some sort of behavioral expectations.
But on the other hand, that is unlikely to make much of a dent in cultural customs and beliefs that run deep.
And furthermore: why has the British government been so eager to take in so many people with cultures that clash so violently (literally) with British life? That’s somewhat of a rhetorical question, because we know many answers. One for the left is that the left ultimately gains voters. Another (motivating both left and right) is for cheap labor. For some who support the policy, the reason is virtue-signaling. Still another reason is suicidal empathy. One more is a sense of being unable to do much to prevent it. And again, for the left, there are those who have wanted the peace of England’s previous high-trust society to be destroyed.
The Burnham government is putting groups of young male migrants in large numbers near small English villages unable to handle them at all. I don’t believe Burnham’s promises about enforcing the law for one moment.
@ Neo > “Another (motivating both left and right) is for cheap labor.”
Cheap for who?
There is a net loss for any country that imports “cheap labor” and then doesn’t put them to work, but pays them from government welfare funds, sometimes more than is given to native citizens.
Parody here:
https://notthebee.com/article/the-internet-has-created-helpful-memes-to-add-to-the-uks-new-guide-for-teaching-migrants-that-rape-is-bad
The question is why western nations are permitting settlement by populations whose males think beating women and raping women and children is acceptable behavior.
The unspoken object of the so-soft British anti-rape instructions is Islam. Soft Britain is inexorably flushing itself down a rathole, having let huge numbers of Pakistanis in.
AesopFan:
It’s not that it’s actually cost-effective. It’s that this was the original reason when the whole thing started.
@AesopFan:Cheap for who?
Socialized costs, privatized benefits.
This is what we’re reduced to with Muslims. They must be told that in our countries:
* You can’t beat your wife.
* You can’t rape women.
* You can’t marry children.
* You can’t mutilate female genitals.
* You can’t stone people.
* You can’t behead people who don’t adhere to Islam or criticize it.
* You can’t assault or kill gays.
* You can’t demand that Westerners accept or acquiesce to Sharia law.
* You must allow freedom of speech and religion even if it doesn’t respect Islam.
* You can’t donate money to terrorist Islamist organizations.
What a drag! How can a self-respecting Muslim abide by such conditions?
Well, they can’t, so they abide by the principle of hudna, which is the Islamic military pause that refreshes until you have acquired the power to defeat your enemies and then you do so with unmitigated harshness. See 10/7.
In the meantime lie your head off to confuse your enemy. See taqiyya — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taqiyya
Islam is the main reason I left the Left.
“we know the character of the people we’ve let in to victimize you. After tens of thousands of victims we thought we’d explain to them not to do the stuff we knew all along they love to do and weren’t about to stop.”
Going forward a guaranteed defense of rape would be “I can’t read English. Don’t blame me.”
“Not guilty. Let him go.”
Can they even read the pamphlet?
“Can they even read the pamphlet?” Good question! They should publish this in Urdu and Arabic.
RELATED News story. Kate on Open Thread mentions Robert Spencer for being an honest and authoritative translator from Arabic.
Spencer’s latest at PJ Media headlines, “One California High School’s ‘Social Justice Pathway’ Leads Straight To…” Islam — because Islam promotes Social Justice!
And that’s what well-intended Palo Alto High School students want. “Riiiiight,” says Dr Evil.
Well, apparently there’s a fracas roused by this propaganda. The program had students not just going to a Mosque and a Koran. But teen-aged girls were influenced to don the Hijab! Naturally.
There would have been howls of condemnation had they gone to a Synagogue or Catholic Church or a Hindu Temple. Not so much here.
“…Because [we] know that the establishment media is far to the left and so will defend a field trip to a mosque as loudly as it would excoriate a field trip to a church. And that’s where a concern with what the left calls ‘social justice’ inevitably leads: to hatred for America and its Judeo-Christian heritage. The Palo Alto High School trip just made that more obvious than it ordinarily is.” https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2026/08/21/one-california-high-schools-social-justice-pathway-leads-straight-to-n4956409
Always to advance the approved propaganda.
ABOVE, huxley finishes his post by adding that with “Islam is the main reason I left the Left.”
There are more reasons one might do so, of course. But this one alone is a pretty Damn Big One.
“The Elites Have Lost Control. The UK is Heading For Chaos”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFNW3WlT_WM
“Civil War in Britain and Europe is Inevitable” Dr. David Betz, Professor of War Studies at the University of London, King’s College
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIgQ4NiKYmE&t=2092s
The US is on the same path: “After Charlie Kirk: The Death Of Civil Discourse | Robert George”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ79lfig0Ho
Robert P. George is an American legal scholar, political philosopher, and public intellectual. He serves as the sixth McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.
Professor George mentions he’s good friends with Prof. Cornel West, who is an honorary chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America.
IMO that reveals a certain naivete about the DSA and the lengths to which the DSA would go to entrench power.
I do agree with Prof. George that, “we could be just one more assassination away from a civil war.”
— Niketas Choniates
You beat me to it, NC. I was about to make that exact same comment.
Wide open immigration benefits investors in the short term, by undercutting native wage demands. They do it both directly by taking jobs and indirectly by the threat of replacement. It also benefits them by providing customers when the low native fertility rate does not.
(Which is also what is behind the sudden enthusiasm for a universal income on the part of the investor class. They want to import customers and for taxpayers to provide them with the money to buy their product/service.)
It benefits the professional class, esp. females, by providing cheap nannies, domestic help, etc.
It benefits the Democrats (and other lefty parties) by importing potential voters. It benefits the globalized ruling class generally by diluting national identity.
All this is short term, of course, but many of these groups are notoriously short-sighted. Lenin’s infamous comment about capitalists selling the rope that will be used to hang them comes to mind.
None of which is to say the immigration has no benefits. But the wide open flows the ruling class wants do not. In the long term, it’s even destructive for them, but they still haven’t faced up to it.
Google AI says:
@neo:stating only that it is being adapted into multiple languages
I can’t find any evidence that the Home Office has ever stated this. Did Google AI provide a citation? I could not get one from Google, when I asked for citations it would only say:
So to me this looks like another hallucination driven by political correctness.
I note that the proper time for this pamphlet was at the beginning of the sponsored invasion (which was a no-go because that would have revealed to the Brits that they WERE being invaded), but of course the Government waited until it became very clear that their citizens were not on board with the importation of people with Islamic “values” who never seemed to suffer any negative consequences for behavior that would have had the native residents jailed (and in fact, many ended up arrested for objecting to that behavior).
By “clear” I mean not just verbal objections but threats of physical violence (aka vigilante action) and, even worse, political ousting.
Not just a day late and a dollar short, but a decade late and several millions of pounds short (in monetary damages alone; the damage to the rape and murder and violence and cancellation victims is incalculable) .
Why couldn’t Google AI just say “no one’s said anything about it publicly yet but typically these documents are translated into multiple languages”? Why did it have to pretend that the Home Office addressed it in a statement that doesn’t appear to exist?
Statements are public, that’s the whole point of them. They don’t release statements into the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of The Leopard”.
The Home Office did make A statement about this guidance pamphlet, but not the one Google AI says it made, from what I can find:
Niketas:
For example:
Also:
@neo: Thanks for the links.
Your first link is not a statement from the Home Office but from Reform UK’s Home Affairs, and it includes the Home Office statement I quoted already that has no mention of translations into other languages.
Your second link asserts that the Home Office will translate them but does not include a statement from the Home Office saying so and does not link to anything containing any such statement.
If Google AI says that the Home Office made a specific statement, the statement should not be so elusive, Google AI should be able to give the citation when asked, and not tell me when I press it that there never actually was a statement but that you expect the Home Office to translate such documents in the normal course of business.
@ huxley > “Islam is the main reason I left the Left.”
Isn’t it amazing how readily the Leftists abandon their much-ballyhooed principles about feminism and the rights of women whenever it serves another purpose to do so.
*You can’t beat your wife.
* You can’t rape women.
* You can’t marry children.
* You can’t mutilate female genitals.
See Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, and Gloria Steinem of the National Organization for Women.
Which was the final deal-breaker for me and Democrats.
* You can’t assault or kill gays.
And then there is the total omission of any pushback against official and unofficial Muslim treatment of the otherwise sacrosanct persons of LGBT persuasions, which would also trigger mass protest parades if the same actions were committed by any Republican government or individual conservatives (who mostly restrict themselves to objecting to drag queens in libraries and children at porn shows).
* You can’t stone people.
* You can’t behead people who don’t adhere to Islam or criticize it.
* You can’t demand that Westerners accept or acquiesce to Sharia law.
* You must allow freedom of speech and religion even if it doesn’t respect Islam.
* You can’t donate money to terrorist Islamist organizations.
That the Left is implicitly in favor of all the other things on your list, since they haven’t as a group objected to any of them, is not as easily categorized, as they are not violations of any principles that they claim to support when it’s convenient to do so.
However, they are parallel to principles the Left absolutely does support:
* You can stone people and
* You can behead people (or shoot them, or stab them, or otherwise hurt them: too many examples to list) who don’t adhere to Leftism (in all its manifestations) or criticize it (even the tiniest bit).
* You can demand that conservatives accept or acquiesce to DEI and Covid law (among others that favor Leftist causes only).
* You don’t have to allow freedom of speech and religion if it doesn’t respect Leftists’ real agenda (power).
* You can channel taxpayer money to terrorist (such as BLM etc., or to any general Leftist) organizations.
No wonder they all get along!
*********
The circle-the-wagons reaction of Democrat feminists to Clinton’s sexual behavior, which would have resulted in a frenzy of hysterical vituperation had he been a Republican, was my first unambiguous realization of the malleability of their standards.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/30/gloria-steinem-on-her-bill-clinton-essay-i-wouldnt-write-the-same-thing-now
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/opinion/eq-steinem.html
“Why Feminists Support Clinton”
The Leftists went back to the same playbook when their own “Me Too” movement started taking down more Democrats than Republicans.
And don’t get me started on the Holodeck vibes of Code Pink and other “principled objectors to X” who only surface during Republican administrations.
Niketas:
Well, Google AI says to double-check.
My guess is that in this case the sources wanted to remain anonymous. And they certainly didn’t want to say which languages. But to me it seems sort of obvious that it would have to be translated.
@ Watt > “Parody here:”
Actually, I thought “that is not a parody!” because it is a post from NOT the Bee, which is the media outlet that tracks real events.
However, the memes it published, which were reactions to the UK pamphlet, are very real, and definitely sarcasm, although —
“Each one of those lovely meme illustrations has a crime story behind it.” – NTB
Most of them could have been featured at the Babylon Bee itself.
It’s getting hard to tell the two Bees apart.
@neo:My guess is that in this case the sources wanted to remain anonymous.
Then it seems odd that they don’t say “a Home Office source who spoke on condition of anonymity” or some such.
I’ve seen multiple outlets say the Home Office is going to or already has, or hasn’t yet, and none give any source for these assertions. I’ve even seen it asserted that translations have already been handed out to asylum seekers, also unsourced. That such simple facts are so difficult to establish is incredibly frustrating. The simple “who what when where why” would have sorted this out, but no one does this anymore, they just sling stuff given them by others.
The Home Office website says this is only “promotional” material. I don’t know if that means to them what I think it means.
But to me it seems sort of obvious that it would have to be translated.
And it would be, if the thing were being done in good faith, which to me is not at all obvious. Whether they do it or not is one issue, and whether AI summaries are willing to hallucinate public statements about it is another issue. The lie gets around the world before the truth puts its pants on.
Well, Google AI says to double-check.
Sounds like excellent advice.
The brochure reminds me of how the Chicago Transit Authority recently put up signs stating that violence on trains and buses is illegal, and violators will be arrested.
= = = = = = = =
Wasn’t another rationale for the un-Englishing of England, that people like Pakistanis were formerly part of the British Empire?
= = = = = = = =
Geoffrey – I heard Robert P. George speak at my church (not in a church service, but a “lecture” structured as an interview with the pastor). Goerge was impressive. He mentioned his friendship with Cornel West, and I think he said that their politics are polar opposites, and they don’t discuss them.
@ Selfy > ” He mentioned his friendship with Cornel West, and I think he said that their politics are polar opposites, and they don’t discuss them.”
More families should follow their example, considering how adamant the Left has been about breaking up with any of one’s kinfolk who are guilty of wrongthink and/or voting for Trump.
@ Niketas > ” Google AI should be able to give the citation when asked, and not tell me when I press it that there never actually was a statement but that you expect the Home Office to translate such documents in the normal course of business.”
@ Neo > “But to me it seems sort of obvious that it would have to be translated.”
Of course it’s obvious to us – I doubt very many of the immigrants read English even if they can speak it.
BUT nothing about way UK governments have treated the invasion of their country has been “the normal course of business,” and I wouldn’t be surprised if they deliberately don’t translate the pamphlet into the prospective perpetrators’ languages (can they read their own?) because the entire operation is solely to mollify the native citizens.
Back to huxley > “What a drag! How can a self-respecting Muslim abide by such conditions?
Well, they can’t, so they abide by the principle of hudna, which is the Islamic military pause that refreshes until you have acquired the power to defeat your enemies and then you do so with unmitigated harshness. See 10/7.
In the meantime lie your head off to confuse your enemy. See taqiyya —”
The Home Office is probably quite well aware of those principles and accomplished in their practice.
They aren’t unique to Muslims.
@AesopFan
I look at the two Bee sites in sequence, and, indeed, sometimes I have to double-check which I’m looking at when one or another story pops up.