Islam versus Europe

The maternity wards at Dewsbury District are never less than busy and it is a matter of cultural fact that the proportion of Asian deliveries was and is far, far higher than within the indigenous population.

I read in the Sunday Times a while back that between 1991 and 2001 the Indian population in Dewsbury increased by 25% and the Pakistani by 60%, a combination of prolific birthrates and imported spouses and relatives. That growth rate has not diminished in the intervening years and the pressure on the health service is immense.

After the birth of our son my wife was on an open ward and the mother in the next bed was an Asian woman. Witnessing the differences in approaches to new motherhood was instructive in itself but dispiriting in the context of this work. We were doting parents, fascinated by every coo and cry of this little miracle. Visiting times were awaited with eager anticipation, the hospital rule of no more than two visitors per bed strictly adhered to.

It became quickly clear that the mum in the adjacent bed had neither care nor concern for her own child. Its cries were ignored, there was no attempt to feed or change it – the nurses were regarded as hired help to assist this infant through its first days while the mum got some rest. But that was something and nothing really. Not our problem.

More galling was the total disregard for any hospital rules by her family – a situation we saw was incredibly common, and simply tolerated with a resigned shrug by the hospital staff. Her visitors, always and exclusively men it seemed, turned up whenever they wanted, in as many numbers as they cared to see fit. Two to a bed? I saw six on more than one occasion.
But it was this habit of turning up when they wanted, sitting there silently round the bed, that eventually caused the greatest offence.

My wife, like most new mums, wanted to feed her child herself and, like many, had struggled initially to get her baby to ‘latch’ onto her nipple, but she persevered and succeeded and took great pride in this most natural of acts. And then one afternoon – out of visiting times so I wasn’t there – as she fed her son, she became uncomfortably aware of furniture being moved.

She looked up from her baby’s face to find the host of men round the adjacent bed had brazenly turned their chairs round to enjoy the sight of a white woman’s exposed breast. I’m not saying that was their sole reason for being there – the opportunity to ogle other women’s breasts – but I couldn’t tell you why they did visit, and at such inopportune times. I never heard them speak to the mother they were visiting. The child was generally in a side room being cared for by nurses. If anyone has a better explanation I’d be glad to hear it.

My wife couldn’t get out of that hospital fast enough and it’s probably a good job that I wasn’t present when the peepshow incident occurred, but then again if I had been, or if any other father had been, I severely doubt that it would have happened at all.

We complained to the hospital staff, as you would expect, and we received the default, disconsolate reply that characterises all such incidents across the entire landscape of cultural exchanges in a town like Dewsbury – that familiar shrug of the shoulders, raised eyebrows and cursory “what can you do?” or an occasional “we’ve mentioned it to management but we’re told to be tolerant to avoid being called racist”.

As so often, the default position, the creeping retreat from a culture with alien values to ours, was maintained and strengthened not by its own proponents but by the gutless white, liberal management class of middle Britain.