From Patriotic Alternative.
James Eden
Many will be familiar with the phrase “the uncanny valley”. It was coined in the 1970s by Japanese professor Masahiro Mori to describe the sense of unease and strangeness one feels when observing a robot which borders on the human-like.
Just prior to the robot reaching a singularity of appearance with a human there comes a moment of unease on behalf of the observer — a feeling that something is not quite right. An eerie sensation takes hold similar to that which many feel in the presence of a waxwork depicting a famous person. There is something unsettling about it, a sense that our lived experience is somehow off-kilter — a glitch in the matrix.
The same feeling can be experienced when reading Conservative commentator Fraser Nelson. On processing the sentences one is overwhelmed with an eerie feeling that something is not quite right.
Take this line for example from his latest piece in The Daily Telegraph entitled Rishi Sunak is making us ever more reliant on mass immigration: “It [Brexit] wasn’t a vote against mass immigration or globalisation but a vote to manage it better, in a way that had carried greater democratic buy-in.”
Read it again. One is left stunned by it, transfixed as if facing down a waxwork in Madame Tussauds. There is something unreal about such a statement —it almost feels like a real argument but somehow the singularity with one hasn’t quite been fully realised.
Reality check
One tends to get this feeling when reading many Conservative commentators. Their articles are akin to the CGI characters you see in modern films. They are well crafted by people with expertise, not the stop-motion animatronics of 40 years ago. The uncanny valley feeling kicks in because, despite their realism, they fall short of reality in critical ways.
On its face, Nelson’s article would seem to concord with nationalist critiques of immigration. He says that the British public expected immigration to fall after Brexit but have been left disappointed once again as the Tories imported record numbers into the country. Nationalists would ground this criticism on biology and culture; the hundreds of thousands flooding our country are replacing the indigenous British people and changing our culture for the worse.
Nelson’s framing of the issue, however, is revealing of the typical Conservative mindset: it’s all about economics. He says of the record immigration numbers that: “If British unemployment was low… this would be a good sign of a growing economy. But we have an unemployment crisis, with over a million vacancies across the UK, yet a near-record five million on out-of-work benefits.” Brexit, he says, was an opportunity to wean British companies off the drug of cheap foreign labour.
But then came Covid and the lockdowns. According to Nelson, immigrants played a pivotal role in getting Britain back on its feet, making up 19% of the workforce (diversity built Britain, remember!). Employers were back to mainlining the drug of cheap labour and the “immigration tap” was turned back on. But with all these hard-working immigrants in the country why is there an unemployment crisis? Well, it’s Whitey’s fault yet again.
Nelson says that “the failure to nudge Britons back into work has still meant huge, painful worker shortages”. For Britons, read White people.
The costs of Britons checking out of the workforce has run into the tens of billions, dwarfing the budgets of the Home Office and Foreign Office combined. But there is also a human cost. Nelson points out that the number of working-age people claiming benefits will rise to 3.7 million over the next five years. “That’s equivalent to a city the size of Birmingham,” he continues. “It represents a staggering, unexplained and devastatingly expensive economic change.”
For Nelson, the human cost is of course framed in terms of economics. Conservatives cannot help but think it terms of money even in the context of real people and their lives. For them, the real tragedy of a White working-class person being out of work, addicted to drugs and gambling, hollowed out emotionally and physically by a system which hates him — the real tragedy here is the net loss to GDP that this person represents. The Conservative’s is truly a shekel-centric universe.
“Lazy Brits” jibe
Nelson laments that “a quarter of Hartlepool and almost half of those in central Blackpool are on out-of-work benefits, in spite of local worker shortages.” Here Nelson is adding fuel to the anti-White fire. References to Hartlepool and Blackpool are meant to suggest that it is White people — White working-class people in particular — who are lazy and refuse to work. It is obviously true that there is unemployment among this group but Nelson wishes to reinforce the trope often heard from Conservative types that the British (i.e. White people) are lazy and don’t want to work. We’ve just no choice but to import hundreds of thousands of those hard-working immigrants to do the jobs British people won’t do, goes the Conservative cry.
One can easily refute this by looking at the UK government’s data on race and employment. According to this data, in 2021 the employment rate among White British and White people aged 16 to 64 was 76%. The employment rate for the White Other category was 82%, the highest of any racial group. The rate for Indians was also high, standing at 78%. The racial groups with the lowest levels of employment were Pakistani/Bangladeshi at 58%, Blacks at 67% and Asian and Asian Other at at 69%.
The claim that British people don’t want to work is a lie. It may be true that there are large sections of the White working class who are checking out of the system but who can blame them? These people are not stupid — they know that the entire political, media and academic establishment thinks they are scum. The same establishment that let grooming gangs run rampant in their communities is now demanding they get back to work for minimum wage because “line on GDP graph must go up.”
This phenomenon of increasing White unemployment is not “unexplained” as Nelson argues. It is the result of White people waking up to the fact that they live in a system which hates them. The French political scientist Jacques Ellul writes in his book The Technological Society: “When the worker feels that he is in a hostile environment and in an economic system opposed to his interest he will not work (and this is involuntary) with the same ardour and skill.”
The environment in Britain is beyond hostile at this point and many White working class people are making the perfectly understandable decision to check out completely. After all, if the government can bail out banks then why not them? In our hyper liberal/capitalist society there is little accountability for elites. Conservatives crow about how ordinary people should take responsibility for their own lives while bankers recklessly destroy our economies only to be rewarded with massive bailouts and golden handshakes. The hypocrisy of our system has reached such a high pitch that it is becoming almost unbearable.
Couple this with the ongoing destruction of our European culture and you have a recipe for disaster. Ellul adds: “Traditional societies were centred upon human needs and instincts (for example, in family, clan, seigniory).” Liberalism is like a cancer eating away at the very foundations of our society. Not only is the instinct to White racial solidarity attacked as evil but even the foundational principles like man and woman are questioned. The sanctity of the family can now be overridden by teachers who claim a right to groom a child into transgenderism without the parents’ consent.
In The Technological Society, Ellul describes the devastating impact of the technological revolution on European nations. The technological society is one in which efficiency is the ultimate end of all human action. It is a society in which efficiency is not only the means to an end but the end in itself. The technological society is one stripped of anything which would impede this efficiency be it cultural, racial or historical.
Ellul was writing in the 1950s and so it would be fascinating to hear his critique of our society today and see what he would make of replacement migration in Europe. He may argue that this phenomenon is simply a symptom of that drive to efficiency but it would be hard to sustain the argument that mass immigration is simply a natural occurrence. It is a deliberate policy, carefully designed and implemented by people who wish to see White people destroyed in their historical homeland. The role of Conservative commentators like Nelson seems to be to provide cover for this policy — to offer British people a moral framework to justify the righteousness of their own destruction.
Nelson concludes his article with this: “You can argue (as I do) that immigration has enriched Britain and that we have good claim to be the world’s most successful melting pot.”
Yes, it’s the uncanny valley again. Or perhaps we might call it “the uncanny Tory”?
From Patriotic Alternative.