No prizes for guessing which of our "communities" is the worst offender. And we're not talking about Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram. The Times reports, with a surprising mention of the M-word, on the dangers of cousin marriages: 

The dangers of marriage between first cousins are to be highlighted by a leading professor, with a warning that their children are at risk of genetic defects.

Baroness Deech, a family law professor and crossbencher, will call next week for a “vigorous” public campaign to deter the practice, which is prevalent in Muslim and immigrant communities and on the rise. She will reignite a debate started five years ago when Ann Cryer, MP for Keighley, drew attention to the number of disabled babies being born in the town and called for cousin marriage to be stopped.

Fifty-five per cent of British Pakistanis are married to first cousins and in Bradford the figure is 75 per cent. British Pakistanis represent 3 per cent of all births in Britain but one third of children with recessive disorders.

Lady Deech will also warn that marriage between first cousins can be a barrier to the integration of minority communities. In a lecture she will call for testing for genetic defects where such marriages are arranged and the keeping of a register of people who carry genetic diseases, so that two carriers are not introduced. “Some variant of this could be possible in cities such as Bradford with a high density of immigrant population,” she will say.

Lady Deech, who chaired the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for eight years, will also suggest that married first cousins use invitro fertilisation so that embryos can be tested for recessive diseases.

“Human rights and religious and cultural practices are respected by not banning cousin marriage,” she will argue. “But those involved must be made aware of the consequences.” Her comments will be made at the Museum of London in the last of a series of family law lectures that she has given under the auspices of Gresham College. Other topics have included marriage, divorce law, cohabitation and gay partnerships; last week she argued that children do better in two-parent families of different genders.

“The local estimate was that 75 per cent of Bradford disabled children had cousin parents and the rate of cousin marriage in the UK Pakistani community is increasing,” Lady Deech will say.

In Birmingham, another city with a substantial immigrant community, Lady Deech notes that 10 per cent of the children of first cousins die in infancy or have a disability.

She will note that the practice has always been associated with immigrants and the poor and is “at odds with freedom of choice, romantic love and integration”. But factors linked to cousin marriage in the British immigrant community are working against what she calls its “otherwise inevitable decline”.

One is finance: such marriages can be arranged to settle debts. Another is financial support of relatives abroad. 

Correction, perhaps this is about Fanny Price after all.

Yet there are cultural differences or ignorance about disabled children, she says. Women may be blamed in some minority cultures for being childless or having disabled children; while the “Muslim view . . . is that it is a consequence of Allah’s will, and they may therefore approach it with fatalism”.

Careful now, you're in danger of telling the truth. Lady Deech omits to mention the burden that all these disabled and sick children place on the taxpayer, who, since so many Muslims do not work, is overwhelmingly non-Muslim. Disability and genuine illness, as opposed to the work-allergy of many sickness benefit claimants, is something that the taxpayer should support. But in the case of the Muslim "community", this is self-inflicted, and, as so often, that "community" does not bear the consequences of its primitive beliefs and actions.