A couple
of days ago, I saw TV footage of the outspoken Labour MP Jess Phillips on the campaign
trail, seeking re-election in her
suburban Birmingham constituency.
She was asked which issues voters mentioned most often on the
doorstep. Ms. Phillips did not miss a beat.
‘Immigration comes up…’ she said
thoughtfully. And then, as if remembering herself, she started talking about
bin collections instead.
A few years ago, I was at a lunch in London, sitting next to the
former editor of a national newspaper and the editor of one of Britain’s
best-known magazines, both of them highly educated and liberal-minded people.
The subject turned to immigration.
‘It’s gone much too far,’ one said. ‘You’re quite right,’ said
the other, ‘but of course you can’t say so.’
The journalist Douglas Murray has no such qualms. Best known for
his acerbic columns in the Spectator magazine and his prize-winning book on the
Bloody Sunday inquiry, he has just hurled a literary hand grenade into the
debate about immigration and identity in today’s Europe.
Indeed, the opening lines of his new book, The Strange Death Of
Europe, could hardly be more incendiary.
‘Europe is committing suicide,’ Murray writes. ‘Or at least its
leaders have decided to commit suicide… As a result, by the end of the
lifespans of most people currently alive, Europe will not be Europe and the
peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call
home.’
The causes, he thinks, are twofold. First, our political leaders
have knowingly colluded in the ‘mass movement of peoples into Europe’, filling
‘cold and rainy northern towns’ with ‘people dressed for the foothills of
Pakistan or the sandstorms of Arabia’.
Second, he believes Europe’s intellectual and cultural elites,
including those in Britain, have ‘lost faith in its beliefs, traditions, and
legitimacy’. Crippled with guilt, obsessed with atoning for the sins of empire,
they have lost sight of the historic Christian values that their people expect
them to defend.
As a result of their deluded utopianism, Murray thinks, Europe
is ceasing to be Europe. Indeed, he believes that European culture as
generations have understood it — the culture of Michelangelo and Mozart,
Shakespeare, and Goethe, Dickens and Wagner — is doomed.
‘Instead of remaining a home for the European peoples,’ he
writes, ‘we have decided to become a “utopia” only in the original Greek sense
of the word: to become “no place”.’
You will not be surprised to hear that Murray’s book has gone
down badly with the bien-pensant types at The Guardian, whose reviewer
described it as ‘gentrified xenophobia’ and a ‘slightly posher’ version of
‘naked racism’.
In its way, that verdict tells you all you need to know about
the intellectual blinkers of the liberal intelligentsia.
I opened Murray’s book this week with slight skepticism, and I
still think he overdoes the apocalyptic negativity.
