The swirling inside

Fascinating

The B.N.P. says it stands for many things, but chief among them is an implacable belief that Britain belongs to indigenous white Britons. Until a judge struck down the provision last month, the party had a whites-only membership policy. It favors an immediate end to immigration and the repatriation of people of foreign descent.

In 2006, the party won 12 of the 51 seats on the Barking and Dagenham Council, its strongest showing anywhere in the country. This time, it hopes to secure 14 more seats, enough to take control of the council, its 300 million pound annual budget and its 9,300 employees...

“I’m not a racist, but they’re letting so many of them in,” complained Bill Greed, 66, speaking of foreigners. “They come and sign on for benefits. A lot of the children in schools don’t even speak English. There’s so many illegal ones that the government can’t even find all of them.”

The B.N.P.? “I agree with what they’re saying, but not with how they go about it,” Mr. Greed said.

Mick W., a 20-year-old maintenance worker who did not want to give his last name because he is employed by the Borough Council, said his family waited a decade for decent public housing while immigrants with large families leapfrogged ahead.“I don’t mind the ones who come and get a job,” he said, “but all they do is claim, claim, claim.”

From NY TimesVoters’ Concerns on Immigration Spin British Campaign

And i think i understand this. I can empathize, this cautiously worded frustration of one's own neighborhood, limited resources now distributed over larger denominators of outsiders. And surely here, in this other land, we are all immigrants, and a little bit self conscious no, of what we are taking, no?

And yet. And yet .What is it, the berkeley education, perhaps? And yet, i, the devoted anglophile, who gazed longingly at the filthy Thames as a child and heart swelled with utter love for the gilded smoggy face of the London towers and curls up at night with Bertrand Russell, who thinks affectionately of all things british, fetishist of Newton and tweed and has been thoroughly chained and colonized in the English language to obliteration of whatever tropical deviance there might have once been...a great snarling rises and says Shut the Fuck Up. The gold on your clock faces is from the mines of brown nations, you have built your empire with guns, your delicate tea cups are filled with the sweat of my distant grandparents, you deliberately incited war and broke the backs of millions to build a wealth the world had heretofore never seen and now you grumble when the gates break down.

But this is not fair of course. All of the wealth did not go to the Barking burroughs. And the english were very good at abusing those within their society as well as those in distant lands. And here i am, a plump little fruit of colonization, enjoying a saturday morning in the distant protestant bastion of California, drinking coffee from columbia and pasteurized milk. The sins of our fathers can so quickly dissolve in the crisscrossing lines.