The Mail Online has published truly startling images from the former Rhodesia. Life there seems to be returning to whence it came

For us it is a saddening sight -- a magnificent bull elephant struck down in his old age.

But for the starving of Zimbabwe, it was little short of a miracle.

The carcass provided a vital source of food, and hundreds of desperate villagers in the Gonarezhou National Park descended on the dead animal within minutes of its discovery.

Using machetes, axes and knives made from tin cans they set upon the six-ton carcass, which was found deep in scrubland.

Fights broke out as villagers battled to strip chunks of flesh from the animal and drag them away to feed their families.

It took just one hour and 47 minutes for the 13ft-tall elephant to be reduced to a skeleton.

David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party of England, writes in The Guardian what seems to be the opening shots in a battle to transform England into an affirmative action state.

In Britain today, too many people are denied the chance to escape poverty and build a better life for themselves and their family. Sadly, this is especially true for people in Britain's black community. Black pupils are permanently excluded from school at more than twice the rate of white pupils. Some 9,500 black children leave primary school every year unable to read, write and add up properly. And of the 3,000 students who started at Oxford in 2008, only five are black Caribbean in origin. This inequality extends to the job market too, with recent research showing almost half of young black people are unemployed, well over twice the rate for young white people. 

What's going wrong? To a large extent, Labour's failure to address racial inequality echoes their failure to tackle inequality generally. Since 1997, income inequality, education inequality and health inequality have all widened, hitting the black community disproportionately hard.

A new Conservative government must do better. I want to take down the barriers that prevent so many black people realising their potential. In part, we'll do this through our core reform agenda. By tackling the causes of poverty, like poor schooling, family breakdown, addiction and welfare dependency, we can succeed where Labour has failed.

But we won't just rely on across-the-board measures to boost social mobility. We'll introduce concerted action to overcome the racial barriers that exist in Britain today. One of the most obvious is when it comes to starting a business: Conservatives have always believed that enterprise is a powerful catalyst for social mobility. However, too many black people in Britain today are being denied the opportunity to start their own business and get on in life.

This is not because of a lack of aspiration. Research has shown that almost a third of black people in England want to start their own business, compared with just 9% of the white population. However, only 4% of black people do manage to launch a startup – a level lower than any other ethnic group.

Accessing finance and advice are the key challenges for would-be black entrepreneurs. According to one study, black entrepreneurs are four times more likely to be denied a bank loan outright than white entrepreneurs, while the UK Survey of Small and Medium Enterprisesshows that as many as a quarter of black entrepreneurs report problems in accessing finance.A Conservative government will help tackle these barriers by turning Labour's failing welfare schemes into a radical plan to get Britain working. This will include funding for a national mentoring programme for black people who want to start a business. It will provide would-be black entrepreneurs with the targeted support, advice – and, crucially, role models – they need to access finance and work for themselves.

We know that the government will try to help blacks and fail. What we don't know is whether blacks in England will ever have as many privileges as those in America. Out of guilt, American whites put up with a lot from them, including school busing in order to make up for segregation.  The British won't have lovely videos of lynchings and cross burnings to scare the kids with.  

Look at the disparity at Oxford.  According to Cameron in 2008 there were only five blacks in a class of 3,000.  That's about what you'd expect without affirmative action.  Will the British government begin to increase that number?  

In the US affirmative action for Hispanics piggybacked on the programs set up for blacks.  The history of slavery and segregation was needed as a justification to get the thing rolling and before others could be added. Europeans don't have this kind of weapon to use against themselves.  They would be starting discrimination programs against themselves for people who had chosen to come.  

 

Thanks to Ron Unz for his thoughtful (and prompt!) response to my critique. He said a handful of things that I would like to explore further, perhaps in a post at the Enterprise Blog. Here I want to correct a small but important error made originally by Ed Rubenstein and repeated by Unz in his response to me. In an otherwise insightful article, Rubenstein said:

"The Census lumps the prison population into a larger category -- people living in 'Group quarters'. But this category includes people in college dorms, nursing homes, and military bases."

This is not true. The Census has a subcategory within "group quarters" called institutionalization. Institutionalization includes only people in correctional facilities, mental hospitals, and nursing homes. It does not include anyone in college dorms or military bases, which are both part of a different subcategory. The point is important because I used institutionalization as a proxy for incarceration in my response to Unz, and he criticized my analysis by citing Rubenstein's inaccurate claim.

Of course, institutionalization is not a perfect measure of incarceration, but it's significantly better than as portrayed by Rubenstein and Unz. As I wrote in a footnote to my article:

"Given the pre-retirement age range I use, nursing homes should not be skewing the data. And if Hispanics disproportionately end up in mental hospitals, then frankly that's something we would want to know about anyway."

So much of the discussion of Hispanics in America is circumscribed by what one might call "The Immigrant Experience." Swirling around the minds of most journalists and academics who write about the subject are a set of Ellis Island clichés that go something like this: "Hispanics might commit crime at high rates now, and struggle with familial breakdown and the like, but just you wait! After a generation or two, they'll assimilate to the American Way, just like the Irish and Italians before them." We've all heard it.

The first problem with this view is that, by and large, Hispanics aren't immigrants. Two thirds of the population is native born.

The second problem is that, by and large, the third generation is worse off than the second on a host of issues, and sometimes worse off than first-generation immigrants. According to a recent Pew Center study, with respect to the second generation, third-generation Hispanics are...

Having just read the Hate Watch bulletin of the SPLC about the cancellation of the American Renaissance conference, scheduled for February 15, I came away with heightened contempt for the "conservative movement." I don't blame the two DC hotels that refused to host the conference for the recent fiasco, or even the Four Point Sheraton at Manassas, which backed out at the last moment. These establishments were properly concerned that those whom Hate Watch describes as "antiracist activists" would vandalize their property and rough up the guests. In today's Western world, and particularly in such decayed former nations as Germany and Spain, the antifascist Left is free to do what it wants, and this often includes going on the rampage against uncooperative reactionaries or stubbornly bourgeois Christians. What is now happening to us is a belated replication of the European "liberal democratic" scene.

Of course, I don't expect the Left to be standing up for someone's right to detail the violent crimes of ethnic minorities. Not that the Left is really against racism. Indeed, it never complains about professors at elite universities who make careers out of trashing whites and in particular white males.