Settlement, Colonisation and Exploitation

The recently-concluded trial of several men in Northumbria for sexually exploiting children and young women has been recognised as a representative case of a type that has arisen in several English towns and cities. Muslim clerics have been among those who have recently made statements to the effect that here is a pattern of behaviour that is unacceptable in modern Britain. Women of indigenous British origin are first classified as being beneath the contempt of Muslim men, and once the whole female population has been condemned to a less-than-equal status, weak individuals within the category can be selected for sub-human exploitation.

It is notable that the so-called Islamic State has also classified the women of some non-Islamic tribes and religions as worthy of enslavement and concubinage; and it can be noted that this behaviour is of much more recent origin than the exploitation of girls in Rotherham and other places in England. The Nazis exploited Jewish women as "field whores" for the army; as did the Japanese Empire with Korean "comfort women". Thus it can be emphasised that nothing in this piece assumes that the cases in the UK over the past two decades  [many of which have not yet been brought to the courts, and some may never properly be pursued] are a particular aberration of British Muslims. It is a tragically recurrent theme in human history; but its recent appearance in the United Kingdom merits attention against the broad sweep of history.

One of the major achievements of the nineteenth century Factory Acts was to ensure [eventually] that children were not unduly exploited in the workplace. A feature that is less well-remembered is that overnight working by women was banned from the factories and workshops, where there had been cases of extreme intimidation and bullying as well as sexual aggression. That provision against women working at night continued after the Second World War, and it is firmly embedded in my memory that as the Lancashire cotton industry collapsed in the later nineteen-fifties, some of the more successful firms decided to expand production by 24-hour working, In the absence of an available male workforce, some of the mills began recruiting Commonwealth citizens, mostly from the Indian sub-continent. In the first instance the men came alone: only later did they bring their wives [or import their brides]. Then there developed a pattern of settlement, whereby as the native Brits withdrew from the terraced houses where their forebears had lived while they were in the mills, abundant cheap housing was available for more immigrants to occupy. Ethnic sub-groups attracted their families into the areas where they were becoming settled, and eventually colonies of like-minded people created mutually self-reinforcing communities who became big enough for ethnic food, dress and religious traditions to become installed. Settlements had become colonies; and just as the British and the French had tried to establish settlements in the territories that they occupied, so these mainly-Islamic groups did in the UK and in the French Faubourgs. Some of the European colonies - especially in Africa - have been eradicated, or eroded, Algeria is no longer part of France, but there is a huge swathe of Africa where the language of education and commerce is French. Robert Mugabe is progressing his plan to eradicate the British-descended settlers from Zimbabwe; but English will remain the language of trade and teaching. Further south, there are members of the ANC would would like to deal with white South Africans as Mugabe has done with those who called themselves Rhodesians.

The tragedy of the British towns and cities is that immigrant colonies based on religious, ethnic and cultural similarities have been allowed - in some cases, encouraged - to regard themselves as distinct from the rest of society, protected by the concept of 'diversity' and by the pressure within the police force to eschew 'racism'. This has ensured that most of the colonists have been exempt from the application of the law and the prosecution of crime as they are applied to the indigenous British [and to the Afro-British population, where matters like stop-and-search have become extremely sensitive].

Minorities of the colonists have developed into exploiters. They have formed moralistically reinforced views on the degeneracy of British society, and twisted the outcome into a licence to treat weak and ignorant individuals from outside the colony as fair game for any sort of exploitation.

Add to that mix the option for any colonist also to decide to embrace a violent Jihadist interpretation of the prevalent religion [usually to the horror of their family and friends, whose lives can be endangered along with those of the targeted group] and we have the situation that Lord Evans has predicted will lead to a supply a Jihadist recruits from the colonies for at least two decades to come.

The situation must be recognised and understood as it is, before either the specifics of the protection of minors from the 'host population' or the roots of Jihadism can be tackled. No government willed it to turn out this way, but a mixture of past affluence and constant concession to the racism of the colonists has created a mess that must now be resolved.

Ambiguous Apples

The apple is one of the most accessible forms of food for human beings. It grows on smallish trees, and when it is picked up from the ground or plucked from the tree it is ready to eat. Apples of different varieties mature at different times from early summer to late autumn, and many varieties can also be stored well into the winter; though it is well known that if one apple in a barrel goes bad, it quickly causes the rest to rot: hence the phrase 'a rotten apple' applied to a disruptively antisocial person.

When people in the earliest stages of civilisation created their accounts of how society came into being, they built up a marvelous story of the creation of the world, of humanity being set into that context as a uniquely competent species, and how that species developed a power to be destructive as well as constructive. The tale that of the first woman, Eve, being tempted to eat the forbidden fruit - an apple - and leading her male partner to do the same is still fascinating as an insight into human nature. The idea that there are good and evil impulses in humanity, derived from the fatal decision of the first people to break the orders they had received from the universal creator, became well set in religion in the 'fertile crescent' in the middle east [the area now being devastated by 'Islamic State'] and thence globally. The humble apple remains a symbol of the power that human beings have to use their abilities constructively and creatively, or destructively in terms of how their actions impinge on other people.

Isaac Newton apparently really did get the idea that the force of gravity is universal by exercising his imagination on the simple question of why do apples - among all other terrestrial objects; and with the earth's moon - tend to descend towards the centre of the earth unless that progress is stayed by some intervening force or structure. Thus the apple is recorded as part of the origin of scientific thought.

Today the corporate results for Apple are due to be published, which are forecast to confirm that it has been consolidated as the biggest business in the world; by turnover, profits and the valuation of  its stock by the markets. The apple - with a human bite taken from it - was chosen as the logo of a business which was not a substantial processor or manufacturer of any material commodity. While the huge oil companies and motor manufacturers sold billions of dollarsworth of material commodities, many of which were processed into final products by the application of manifold patents and sold under copyright brand names, their ultimate dependence on material resources was unambiguous. Apple grew by franchising out the manufacturing processes, and thus the capital that had to be tied up in material manufacturing facilities came from other sources. Apple could incorporate products - some of them highly sophisticated - that were devised by other firms into the products that they sold, and thus maintain the momentum of their inventiveness without the burden of investment in factories or in the sort of human resources management that inevitably attaches to material production.  

Apple, Google and the other leading brands in what is [rather strangely] called the 'technology' sector of the economy are not dependent on the ownership of materially productive facilities. Most of the 'hardware' through which customers access their intellectual property are made by other corporations. The assets held by the tech companies include billions of dollarsworth of financial assets that have been accumulated from their past profits, alongside their ownership of the patents and copyrights and trademarks and brands that are defended at huge cost from 'piracy' by anyone who tries to make illicit use of their technology.

The essential difference between these 'tech' companies and those that trade in material assets is that the companies in the material sphere, exemplified by the big oil producers and by the firms that make the components of the iPhone [and assemble the final product], are selling products made from finite resources of which reserves are limited. Constant exploration has so far found enough new resources to meet foreseen demand into the medium-term future, but the material components of the planet are finite and a growing population is capable of exploiting them to the point of exhaustion.  The assets belonging to Apple are capable of indefinite expansion. New ideas can be implemented all the time, new experiences can be offered to customers, and there is no obvious limit to that expansion as the collective of human minds appears to be capable of delivering an infinite expansion of intellectual property. There is a potential limit to the physical facilities through which intellectual concepts and processes can be accessed, of course, when the human race destroys the resources of the planet on which our material existence depends. At some point in that final self-destruction of the human economy the material ability to generate electricity will fail, and then the 'technology' sector will be unable to operate; but that point will be well down the process of societal and economic decay.

I was privileged to know the mathematician who served as a professor of English Literature and who explored the capabilities and ambiguities of the human mind in an unusually profound way; who wrote a book entitled Seven Types of Ambiguity. He could have selected more than seven types but his message was that the expression of human thought is infinitely flexible, and ultimately all concepts are ambiguous. That is the basis on which the 'tech' sector has been founded, and from which its continuing productiveness will stem.