By Hilary White
LONDON, July 30, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Citing rising rates of violent crime among Britain’s black community, the decline of academic rigour in public schools, the enormous cost of housing, unprecedented rates of taxation and general social decay, The Daily Mail reports record numbers of former immigrant families are leaving Britain to return to Jamaica.
The Daily Mail said Saturday that between 20,000 and 30,000 Jamaicans, some of whom have lived for decades in the UK, and young Britons of Jamaican ancestry, will return home in the next five years. Britain’s sinking standard of living, rising violent gun crime among black British youths and the new “surveillance state” in which Britons are spied upon by government cameras on almost every major city street, are driving what some are calling an exodus of well-to-do Britons of Jamaican descent.
Michael Eboda, editor of New Nation, Britain’s biggest black newspaper told the Times, “People want a better standard of living and better schools. Then there is the question of gun crime. In the Caribbean, black kids are not shooting one another in the random way it happens in Britain.”
“People say there is no freedom in Britain. There are cameras everywhere, there is a traffic warden on every corner and the police are more likely to stop you. Add to that the tax burden. You cannot make real money in this country.”
This social decay has been largely ignored and denied through the New Labour’s decade-long tenure. In comments this spring, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair reluctantly admitted, “of course marriage is a good thing” but downplayed a need to support the institution through tax reform, and denied that British society is “broken.”
Blair’s comment came in response to a speech by David Cameron, leader of Britain’s once-mighty Conservative party, who identified support for traditional marriage as the key to restoring what he called Britain’s “broken society”. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong,” Cameron said. “We have too many children behaving like adults and too many adults behaving like children.”
Cameron promised to end unfair tax regulations on married couples and said that he wanted to see “more couples stay together, and we know the best way to ensure this is to support marriage”.
“If we are to rebuild our broken society,” Cameron said, “we have to get the foundation right. And the foundation of society is – or should be – the care of children by the man and the woman who brought them into the world.”
Some have said, however, that David Cameron’s flirtation with his party’s traditional socially conservative constituency was short-lived. Since his comments in March, the Cameron strategy of moving the party to the left to follow Labour voters has backfired. In two key by-elections on July 19, Britain’s official opposition party took a heavy hit at the ballot box. In Sedgefield in the north and the west London of Ealing Southall, Tories took third place behind Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
Despite the setback Cameron, calling for support from his backbenchers, said he would not be returning the party to its traditional policies. “Now is not time to change our strategy, now is the time to reaffirm our strategy. Remember that elections are always won on the centre ground,” he said.
Tories now lag nine points behind Labour, according to the latest YouGov poll in the Daily Telegraph, and the Herald reports that Cameron’s popularity has sunk from 43% to 27% since February. The poll specifically cited the Tories’ move to the left as the cause. The Telegraph reports that the survey of 1,877 people revealed voters consider the party’s faithful to be well to the right of its leaders.
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
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https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/mar/07032006.html