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Blind egalitarianism leads to Detroit, Michigan. This once vital and impressive city is now a loosely connected network of shantytowns; its districts emptied of affluence and pockmarked with hives of crime.

If you’re not sad about this, you really should be. During World War 2, Detroit pretty much saved the Western world. This city was the armament factory on which democracy counted, and it delivered in that role to fine excess, not only matching the arms of the enemy, but producing weaponry of greatly superior speed, accuracy and power.

So you see, we all have reason to mourn what has happened to Detroit. And, perhaps more, we all have reason to fear its replication elsewhere.

The story of Detroit’s modern history is fast and cautionary. This once booming city had in 1945 an overwhelmingly Northern-European majority, whose industry principally involved the construction of automobiles and machine parts. In the 50s, 60s and 70s, a huge economic migration of African Americans from the South occurred with thousands of Southern Blacks tempted by the promise of shovel-ready jobs and better living standards, as well as less callous race-legislation. As a result of the quick demographic shift and its accompanying imports of crime and drugs, racial tensions quickly began to surface, and eventually erupted as a civil implosion in 1967. After this, Whites began to abandon the city, leaving the economy behind to collapse.

There. That’s it. Simple enough, but also devastating.

Conservatives across America shiver at the example of Detroit. When they see the wild, Zimbabwean grasslands developing a few miles from a modern skyline, they rattle with fear for their own city, and for their country.

And we should worry too.

The other day I was having coffee (regular readers must think I do little else) on Fulham Broadway. After I’d finished drinking, I decided to go for a walk outside the area familiar to me and headed up Fulham High Street.

London is noted for its sharp contrasts, but what I found surprised even me. Fulham High Street, once the glamourous preserve of ‘it girls’ and celebrity, now seems like a dingy African backwater, consisting in the main of fried chicken outlets, cloth markets (which spill anarchically into the road), and penny-pinching trinket stores. Everything present seemed run-down or damaged in some way. Halfway up the street I went to withdraw some money from a cashpoint, but when I approached it appeared the screen had been shattered. Knife marks were visible everywhere, intimating a mad effort to break it open.

Like Detroit, Fulham’s demographic profile has altered violently over recent decades. Not very long ago, as I say, this area was counted as extremely salubrious and local properties stood far beyond the means of most working people. For some time now though, (as with so many British miseries, this can be backdated to the assumption of office by Anthony Blair), Fulham has been a magnet for various kinds of third-world immigration. Somalis have provided the greatest number; other nationalities include Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Nigerians. And as these groups arrived, affluent residents left.

What has happened in Fulham is a micro example of a general London trend. Until now, perhaps naively, I had imagined this to be mainly an East-London phenomenon. Fulham however is located very close to where I live, in the heart of the wealthy West.

If you look as a detective would at these two scenarios – that of London and that of Detroit, you’d be motivated to ask how cities so far apart and dissimilar to each other could undergo the same process.

Something must connect them, but what? What is true in A that is also true in B?

For me, the answer consists of two separate but interwoven blunders. The first is the failure – by government – to discriminate between sources of immigration. Who on earth walked through Fulham in 1997 and thought to himself – “Nice. Very nice. But not enough Somalis….”

We know immigration is of more economic benefit than the average voter realises, but this is only true (with a few rare exceptions) of immigration from economically competent regions like India, America, Europe and the Far East.

Logic alone should make this argument for us. If Somalis can’t create thriving businesses in Mogadishu, then what reason is there to assume they can in London?

The second failure has been to lamely assume that affluent residents will tolerate the degradation of their area and can’t (or won’t) move elsewhere. For years the Liberal-Left has turned a blind eye to the example of places like Bradford, in which Whites (by choice) live and work in one part of the city, and Muslims (by choice) live and work in another. Because this self-segregation violates Leftist doctrine, it is ignored completely in the relevant areas of policy, and with disastrous effect.

Back in America, the task of explaining Detroit has become a major liberal headache. One can only blame General Motors for so long and for so many things before people get wise to you. Even if it isn’t permissible to speak such things openly (yet), every American is aware that the African-American community of Detroit deserves most of the blame for the city’s downfall. All the worst elements of Black culture have come to fore here, – including victim-ideology, racism and aggressive criminality, all of which feed into and support each other.

Tiring of the hypocrisy, lies and misplaced emphases of the Detroit debate in America, Patrick Cleburne wrote the following on Conservative website Vdare: “Detroit’s history from fantastic boom to squalid collapse in barely half a century resembles that of an exhausted Klondike mining district–yet the underlying impetus, the Auto industry, has in fact gone from strength to strength. Detroit has become a laughing stock in Europe… The truth is quite simple: huge prosperity attracted an immense influx of American Blacks–whose habits of life made the city unviable. There are ways of dealing with this type of problem, but they were not adopted.”

This is as good an encapsulation of the Detroit phenomenon as you’ll find, but it isn’t universally accepted.

The Liberal Left claim that the flight of industry from Detroit is the most obvious and relevant cause of its decline. The outsourcing of car-making jobs, unwise governmental policies, police brutality, failed social programs etc… All of these are more convincing to the Left than the two seismic race riots which set in motion the emptying of Detroit’s Caucasian majority….

I’ll leave you to make up your own mind as to which is more convincing.

So what can be done to prevent more Detroits from emerging? According to the vulgar (extreme) right, this must involve the creation of cities exclusively for Whites, or at least free of a large population of Blacks.

On the surface of it, this might seem a reasonable solution, but it nevertheless has a flaw. 

There already are almost exclusively White cities in America. Throughout the North-West, such cities are plentiful. They are also culturally barren, socially tedious, Meth-ridden and economically inferior to more diverse cities like Los Angeles and New York.

A solution therefore requires a compromise between Left and Right. It’s a question as yet without an answer. How do we create a genuinely pluralist city in which no ethnic group can predominate and in which all are held to the same moral standard of behavior?

Whichever country finds a convincing answer will hold the keys to the future.

D, LDN.

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