'Britons fear race violence': draw your own conclusions - 7 comments

It's hard to know quite what to draw from this BBC/Mori poll. For one thing, I can't find any detailed breakdown of the statistics. Perhaps they aren't broken down at all, which would be a tremendous weakness.

The most obvious flaw is the conflation of race, nationality, and immigration. A backlash against immigrants presumably involves opposing nationalities, though it need not - generational and cultural factors also play a part, not to mention economic differentials. Racial differences might play a part too, but a lot of water has flown under the bridge since the assumption held that racist violence was the preserve of predominantly white working-class communities against immigrants from the Caribbean or Indian subcontinent. Such racism still exists, but hardly has anything to do with current patterns of immigration.

Another problem is the assumption, presumably stemming from an odd faith in Enoch Powell's ability to foretell the future, of a contrast between the 'shaky peace' of today, and some kind of future bloodbath. Yet violence between gangs that define themselves on racial, ethnic, or nationalist grounds is hardly unknown, even if it's usually restricted to already violent areas. The absence of the large-scale riots of years past is hardly proof that tension and hostility has been reduced, just perhaps of social atomisation - the groups themselves are smaller.

Racism, nationalism, and hostility to outsiders, are common to all human societies, and the greatest limitation on the development and progress of humanity, but I doubt there's been any serious diminution of these impulses in centuries, with the exception of some large cosmopolitan cities (researchers in this field who are professional enough not to write pieces off the tops of their heads are welcome to comment on this point). Disappointingly, internationalism is a truly tiny movement in the world, and I suspect that socialism in practice has had a thoroughly negative effect, certainly when compared with free markets.

It's nearly two years since I posted this, but the section I quoted from bowblog still sounds to me like the best strategy for maintaining social harmony without surrendering to bigots (my emphasis):

Our effort, in the wealthy world, (where, let's face it, immigrants are going to continue to arrive in large numbers if we're to remain wealthy) must go into improving the capacity of our reception communities [...], boosting the resilience of the bottom social tier, taking working class grievances seriously and easing the pressures produced by ineluctable change. The goal must be to build social solidarity, to neutralise the embitterment and disconnection that feeds the fascists.

Bias against liberty / Immigration - no comments

Chris at Stumbling and Mumbling reminds us of the salience heuristic (more here on the Wikipedia) in attacking Rod Liddle's theory that tighter immigration controls might have prevented al-Qa’eda from organising within the NHS.

Specifically, the criticism is of the idea that the imagined policy of tighter controls would have been implemented 100% successfully, so that we would never be able to look back in hindsight and spot a dangerous individual who had slipped through the net (a false negative), while the 'right sort of people' would continue to be allowed through without (a false positive) hindrance or persecution.

Perhaps one way of looking at this kind of policy in practice is that each application of immigration policy - let's say, the processing of a particular case - must feature a particular probability of error: a probability that might increase with political pressure, with an increase in staffing levels and consequent average decline in competence, and might decrease with greater resources per head. A tighter policy - more application of policy - must, all else being equal, lead to a greater number of errors, whether that be terrorists being allowed in, or 'genuine'/'valuable' people being denied entrance/sent packing. The assumption that all the new resources can - rather than being spread around the system, making more mistakes of their own, throughout - be directed by an omniscient force to solve the existing errors, is illogical as well as hopelessly far-fetched.

Assuming both types of error make us equally unhappy (don't they? If not, please elaborate), surely only improved detection offers us a way of reducing errors - that is to say, differentiating potential terrorists from valued future citizens. Let any additional resources/legislation be directed there.

*

The original purpose of this post was in fact to link to the Friedrich Hayek quotation that Chris cites (my emphasis):

Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseeable and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules, will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will usually not be known... And so, when we decide each issue solely on what appear to be its individual merits, we always over-estimate the advantages of central direction. (Law Legislation and Liberty Vol I, p56-57.)

Beat that.