A new book reveals that the land Queen Elizabeth II once ruled no longer exists. (Join the BNP. Now.) –Ed.
With the coming of prosperity – which almost everyone must surely have welcomed – the problems began.
Theinhabitants of the British archipelago became a collection of classesand races and individuals, living side by side and for the most parttrying to ignore one another.
For a while, we had the optimisticidea of multi-culturalism. In the wake of massive immigration,governments woke up to the realisation that behind the statistics werehuman beings with religious beliefs and political attitudes that mightnot sit easily with modern British secularism.
Multi-culturalism,it was argued, would enable everyone to feel at home in their ownlanguage, religion, dress codes and eating habits.
This idea isin the process of being abandoned because it is now seen to ‘encourageseparateness between communities’, as Trevor Phillips, chairman of theCommission for Racial Equality, has put it.
On a day when BritishMuslims were burning the Union flag outside Regent’s Park mosque inLondon, Phillips said: ‘What we should be talking about is how we reachan integrated society in which people are equal under the law and wherethere are some common values.’
Against the ‘extremist’ ideas of radical Islamists, he proposed anurgent need to ‘assert a core of Britishness’ by which everyone,including Muslims, ‘work by the rules of British people – and thatexcludes terrorism’.
But how do you impose ‘a core ofBritishness’ upon people who are only British in the sense ofpossessing a passport, and who perhaps do not want someone else’sso-called values thrust upon them?
Britishness, anyway, isapparently not so desirable a quality that all Britons want to share init, as the numbers of Scots pressing to leave the Union are witness to.
What are these values, in any case? ‘Democracy and the rule of law’, is the answer some would give.
Yes, but the history of the past 200 years shows Britain was only ever a partial democracy.
Ageneral election is an opportunity for the electorate to expresspreferences, and to change the make-up of Parliament, but onlyestablished or ‘acceptable’ political viewpoints are offered at theballot box.
Those who wish to be governed by greens, bycommunists, by fascists, by Islamic fundamentalists or others – andthis represents a substantial part of the electorate if added together- have no chance whatsoever of seeing a candidate with their viewpointelected to Parliament.
And anyway an election leaves the civil service, the police and the judiciary untouched.
Britain has remained a country governed by those who think they knew best.