If you want to hate someone, hate the British establishment
The year of soul-destroying news is not yet over, as the details of a horrific rape became public following the sentencing of the two offenders. The evil that slumbers in the human heart is not curable by public policy, but in this case, it was a crime that could have been readily prevented by those in power over us. The perpetrators were two Afghan teenagers — here illegally, unaccompanied by parents, and unfettered by any sense of shame as they ran wild in an alien land. Their victim was a 15 year old girl, separated from her friends and targeted by the sadistic pair for abuse.
This life shattering crime, that has left a child terrified and traumatised, is not just the fault of evil young men who attacked her. This was avoidable at nearly every stage. The British government need not have offered encouragement to vaguely defined Afghan “refugees”, men from a culture whose women are treated as chattel and property. Our coast guard and navy could have been ordered into action years ago, when boats began invading our waters, and turned them forcibly back. When France allowed migrants to mass on its northern shores, the sternest action could have been taken diplomatically. When migrants did land here they could have been swiftly deported either to their home country, or a safe third country. And even if we were to house illegal migrants for whatever time was necessary for their case to be heard, we could, like Greece, have done so by housing them all in secure detention centres.
With such triumphs of sentiment over reason, and such flagrant abuse of English girls by sadistic foreign youths, one can easily see why ethnonationalism is on the rise. The British establishment has achieved what the most cunning and charismatic of far right extremists could never have dreamed of pulling off — they have rendered one of the most tolerant, moderate and orderly societies on earth into one riven by ethnic tensions and a rising politics of white identity.
Those looking for stories on which to construct such a racial politics do not have far to search. The grotesque accounts of rape gangs can readily be tied to a wider narrative about national identity and the alleged inability of minority groups to become English.
A less lurid, but only somewhat less shocking story also broke recently, of a teacher fired for reprimanding Muslim pupils for washing their feet in the sink and reminding them that they lived in a Christian country, not an Islamic one. The response was not some mild reprimand for intemperate language and hurt feelings, resolved with an apology. Muslim pupils and parents lobbied for his removal, and he was duly fired for “gross misconduct”. Nor is this an isolated incident, with another teacher forced into hiding a few years ago after showing his class images of Muhhamad. His school appeared more concerned about avoiding offence and calming tensions than the safety of its staff members.
Given such outrages, it is unsurprising and inevitable that hostility towards minority groups, and Muslims in particular, has intensified, lending febrile energy to the right of British politics. Yet this powerful and simple narrative of racial grievance is ultimately self-destructive and self-defeating.
In every one of the stories I have cited, and many like them, the root cause of the problem was not ethnic minorities as a class, or even particular cultures and individuals, but the British establishment itself.
The people who govern us have no conception of national culture or identity outside of a veneer of sentimentality and a code of liberal “values” with little relationship to our own political tradition. Their morality is niceness and their religion is individualism. The incredible gift of a culture defined by peaceable cooperation, and not riven by ethnic or religious conflict, is not seen as the fragile inheritance of generations of national effort, but as the product of the human rights and equalities laws of the past decades. The fact — the incontrovertible fact — that dizzyingly rapid migration undermines this situation is simply outside of their imaginative universe.
It would be easy to worsen the situation by exploiting stories of Muslim schoolboys washing their feet in the sink to whip up hatred against them. But there is no evil in boys trying to live out their faith and culture, or in showing filial obedience to their families. The wickedness is in us, it is in our leaders, it is in those who have betrayed us and betrayed what Britain is.
If the great and good of this country do not think we are, or should be, a Christian nation, why should we be surprised that those with a simpler and more vigorous faith should assert it? When teachers who try to get the children of immigrants to adapt to our national culture are seen as wicked xenophobes by their fellow countrymen, what right do we have to be angry at any group’s refusal to integrate? Integrate into what?
Indeed, in pleading grave offence and destroying a man’s livelihood for his conservative beliefs, the Muslim parents were showing an eminent willingness to adapt to the mores of contemporary Britain. Long before Muslims came along, Christianity and British national identity were driven out of the academy, popular culture and political power as dangerous anachronisms.
We will need … to reforge a strong sense of British culture, identity and national loyalty
If our police will no longer protect our children, if our borders are now unprotected and if calling Britain a Christian country is now a sackable offence, it is because we are ruled by people who do not believe in policing, do not believe in borders and do not believe we have a national identity.
In the coming years we will have to grapple with migration, and its consequences. We will need to enforce our borders, and return those who do not belong here or who break our laws. But we will need, more urgently, to reforge a strong sense of British culture, identity and national loyalty, and include immigrants and minority groups in that strengthened sense of belonging. In a nation where British children of every creed and colour are not taught to know or love their country, integration is not just a matter for immigrants, but for all of us.
