Jihadis and how the political class failed my city. . .
Birmingham is being blamed for becoming ‘the jihadi capital of Britain’ (mail) but this is far from fair. There are, of course, some areas of the city with high muslim populations and it may be true that ‘highly concentrated muslim council wards in Birmingham . . . have produced 26 of the 269 known jihadis’, but this is only 10 per cent — where are the other 90 per cent from? it’s true that parts of hagley road fall below the general standard, but it’s otherwise a pleasant avenue of trees, hotels, restaurants, offices and large houses, typical of any affluent city. For most of my life (i’m 67), i’ve witnessed the changes in this area and opposed them since the Sixties. i remember what these parts of the city were like before they deteriorated. The people of Birmingham didn’t ask for this to happen; it was foisted on them. The reason for the change is simple: uncontrolled migration in the Fifties and Sixties, followed by the realisation that it was a catastrophic mistake that couldn’t be reversed and instead had to be controlled. By the mid-Sixties, tensions between the indigenous population and immigrants to Birmingham and other cities were growing, and this led to the race relations acts of 1965 and 1968. The latter was opposed by Enoch Powell who argued it would give immigrants more rights than indigenous Britons, fuelling further unrest. The government looked to the media for support and the BBC in particular labelled anyone opposed to immigration as a racist and/or fascist. i’m neither racist nor fascist, many of my friends are muslim or Sikh, but they, like me, want the British way of life. a semblance of sanity had been reached by the nineties and multicultural Britain had largely achieved a status quo, but this was soon destroyed by Tony Blair’s Labour government (which opened up the UK borders) and obliterated by angela merkel in 2015, when she unilaterally opened Europe’s borders to all refugees. if one asks a politician how many migrants and asylum seekers there are in the UK (as i have done many times) one will be given a number that i suspect is a gross underestimate. The race relations act led to fear of speaking one’s mind, leading to Birmingham council admitting it had shied away from problems in schools for ‘fear of being accused of racism’. The Equality act 2010 further increased the rights of those from ethnic backgrounds, making it easier for jihadis to peddle their evil ideology without censure. So please don’t blame Birmingham for the current problems: its very liberal council must shoulder some of the blame — but the primary blame lies with governments which failed dismally to manage the catastrophic mistakes of their predecessors. ROBERT J. EVANS, Sheldon, Birmingham.