The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

by Douglas Murray

However, if anyone had suggested to Powell in 1968 that he should use his Birmingham speech to predict that within the lifespan of most people listening those who identified as ‘white British’ would be in a minority in their capital city, he would have dismissed such an advisor as a maniac. As was the case in each of the other European countries, even the most famous prophet of immigration doom in fact underestimated and understated the case.

‘marriages of convenience’ carried out solely in order to gain citizenship.11 But by the 1970s and 1980s the size of the immigrant community meant it was plain that any policy aimed at diminishing the size of that community was impossible even if it was deemed desirable. As with countries across the continent, Britain was in a position that it had not intended to be in and would have to improvise its reactions to whatever challenges and benefits this new reality produced. But it was a measure of the unspoken concern about what these challenges comprised that throughout this period even the most straightforward expressions of truth became impossible to voice.

For instance, it was clear from the moment of her appointment as Minister for Asylum and Immigration during Tony Blair’s first term that Barbara Roche was seeking a complete rethink of Britain’s immigration and asylum policies. While the Prime Minister was concentrating on other matters, Roche changed every aspect of the British government’s policies. From here onwards all people claiming to be asylum seekers would be allowed to stay in Britain – whether they were genuine or not – because as she informed one official, ‘Removal takes too long, and it’s emotional.’ Roche also thought the contemporary restraints on immigration were ‘racist’ and that the whole ‘atmosphere’ around the immigration debate ‘was toxic’. Over her period in office she repeatedly stated her ambition to transform Britain. As one colleague said, ‘Roche didn’t see her job as controlling entry into Britain, but by looking at the wider picture “in a holistic way” she wanted us to see the benefit of a multicultural society.’

In a column titled ‘Let’s not dwell on immigration but sow the seeds of integration’, the then Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, responded to that census by saying, ‘We need to stop moaning about the dam-burst. It’s happened. There is nothing we can now do except make the process of absorption as eupeptic as possible.’2 Sunder Katwala from the left-wing think tank ‘British Future’ responded to the census in a similar tone, saying, ‘The question of do you want this to happen or don’t you want this to happen implies that you’ve got a choice and you could say “let’s not have any diversity”.’ But this was not possible, he insisted, ‘This is who we are – it’s inevitable.’

In the same month that these insistences that people ‘get over it’ emerged, a poll by YouGov found 67 per cent of the British public believed that immigration over the previous decade had been ‘a bad thing for Britain’. Only 11 per cent believed it had been ‘a good thing’.4 This included majorities among voters for every one of the three major parties. Poll after poll both before and since have found the same thing.

a majority of voters in Britain regularly described immigration as having had a negative impact on their public services and housing through overcrowding, as well as harming the nation’s sense of identity.

The upsides of migration have become easy to talk about: to simply nod to them is to express values of openness, tolerance and broad-mindedness. Yet to nod to, let alone express, the downsides of immigration is to invite accusations of closed-mindedness and intolerance, xenophobia and barely disguised racism. All of which leaves the attitude of the majority of the public almost impossible to express.

Nobody could argue that gang rape or child abuse are the preserve of immigrants, but the development of particular types of child-rape gangs revealed – and a subsequent government-commissioned inquiry confirmed6 – specific cultural ideas and attitudes that were clearly held by some immigrants. These include views about women, specifically non-Muslim women, other religions, races and sexual minorities that were pre-medieval. Fear of accusations of ‘racism’ for pointing out such facts, and the small but salutary number of careers like Ray Honeyford’s that had been publicly wrecked for saying far less, meant that it took years even for such facts as these to come out. This has a terrorising effect far beyond the nation’s television studios,

The other thing lost in the cosy, consensual Newsnight style of discussion is any reference to what we used to call ‘our culture’. As ever, amid the endless celebrations of diversity, the greatest irony of all remains that the one thing people cannot bring themselves to celebrate is the culture that encouraged such diversity in the first place. In the whole political and press reaction to the 2011 census one saw once again the various staging-posts of a direction of travel that is profoundly self-annihilating.

After this come a whole range of implicit and explicit claims which respond to mass immigration by pretending either that the country of arrival does not have a culture, or that its culture and identity are so especially weak, worn out or bad that if it did disappear then it could hardly be mourned. Here is Bonnie Greer again on Newsnight: ‘There’s always this failsafe, spoken or unspoken, that there is a British identity. That’s always interesting to me. I think one of the geniuses of the British — of being British — is that there isn’t this sort of rock-solid definition of identity that an American has.’ It is hard to think of another part of the world where such a claim would be acceptable, let alone from the mouth of an immigrant: your culture has always been like this — it never really existed. If one even said anything similar in Greer’s native Chicago – let alone on the main television network – it would be unlikely to receive such a polite reception as it was accorded on Newsnight.

Down the line there is another, starker, rebuttal. That says that this form of destruction is exactly what our societies deserve. ‘Do you know what white people did?’ they ask. ‘And you Europeans in particular? You travelled around the world and lived in countries and pillaged them, and tried to erase their local cultures. This is payback. Or karma.’ The novelist Will Self (currently Professor of Contemporary Thought at Brunel University) played precisely this line of attack on the BBC in the same week that the 2011 census was published. On the network’s main discussion show, Question Time, he declared, ‘Up to the Suez crisis … most people’s conception of what being British involved was basically going overseas and subjugating black and brown people and taking their stuff and the fruits of their labours. That was a core part of British identity, was the British Empire. Now various members of the political class have tried to revive that idea quite recently without much success.’9

Leaving aside the claim that any member of the political class has tried to revive the British Empire in recent years, in these comments one can hear the authentic and undisguised voice of revenge. Demonstrating that such an instinct transcends racial or religious boundaries, and can as easily be self-induced as aimed at others, it suggests that on this occasion Britain must be uniquely punished for the deeds of history. The repercussions of the argument are striking to consider. For if this is even partially a spur for the recent transformation of our country, then what we are going through is not an accident, or a mere laxness at the borders, but a cool and deliberate act of national sabotage. Motivations aside, this also throws up the ultimate questions that our politicians remain so unwilling to address: How much longer must all this go on? Are we approaching the end of this transformation? Or is this only the beginning?

For example, amid all the complacency surrounding these developments, nobody asked this question: If the fact that ‘white Britons’ now comprised a minority in their capital city was indeed a demonstration of ‘diversity’ (as the spokesman from the ONS had said), when might it cease to be so? The census had shown that some London boroughs were already lacking in ‘diversity’. Not because there weren’t enough people of immigrant origin but because there weren’t enough white British people still around to make those boroughs diverse.

Perhaps instead of simply celebrating such levels of immigration it would make matters easier if the proponents of mass immigration revealed what levels of ‘diversity’ they would like to get to and what they see as their optimal target figure? Is a ceiling of 25 per cent white Britons in London — or the country at large — a target? Or should it be 10 per cent? Or none at all? A final, and perhaps harder, question to ask would be when, if at all, given the range of claims against them, these ‘white Britons’ might ever be able to acceptably argue, let alone complain, about their odds?

Consider Will Self again, speaking to wild studio applause on the BBC after the 2011 census findings were released: ‘The people who line up on the opposition to the immigration line of the argument are usually racists [audience applause] … [with an] antipathy to people, particularly with black and brown skins.’ Having long ago reached the point where the only thing white Britons could do was to remain silent about the change in their country, at some point in recent years it began to appear as though they were expected simply to get on, silently but contentedly, with abolishing themselves, accepting the knocks and accepting the loss of their country: ‘Get over it. It’s nothing new. You were terrible. Now you are nothing.’

Throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, European governments pursued policies of mass immigration without public approval. Yet such vast societal change cannot be forced upon a society against its will without a series of arguments being brought along to help ease the case. The arguments that Europeans have been given during this period range across the moral and the technocratic. They also shift according to need and the political winds. So, for instance, it has often been claimed that immigration on this scale is an economic benefit for our countries; that in an ‘ageing society’ increased immigration is necessary; that in any case immigration makes our societies more cultured and interesting; and that even if none of these were the case, globalisation makes mass immigration unstoppable.

Over recent years there has been, for instance, a niche search to prove that the societal change Europe has been going through makes the continent significantly richer. In fact the opposite is true, as anybody who lives in a twenty-first-century welfare state can work out for themselves. Having paid into the system for all of their working lives, working Europeans know that the basis of the modern welfare state broadly consists of being able to take services out from the state (when you fall ill, become unemployed or reach retirement age), because you have paid into the system throughout your working life. There will be some people who have rarely paid in, but they will be covered by some who have rarely taken out. Anybody can see that a family of people who arrive for the first time in their adopted country and who have never paid into the system are at the very least going to take some time before they have paid in as much in taxes as they will have taken out in housing, schooling, welfare, benefits and all the other advantages of the European welfare state. In the same way it is obvious to anybody involved in the labour market – especially at the lower end – that one which is comparatively closed off will operate differently from one in which the workforce can come from almost anywhere in the world. Although from an employer’s viewpoint there is an obvious advantage to the mass import of cheap labour, it is equally obvious that a very open labour market will see people ...

Away from the spin, what UCL’s own research quietly showed was that non-EEA migrants had actually taken out around £95 billion more in services than they had paid in in taxes, meaning that if you took the period 1995–2011 and included all immigrants (not just a convenient high net-worth selection), then by UCL’s own measurements, immigrants to the United Kingdom had taken out significantly more than they had put in. Mass migration, in other words, had made the country very significantly poorer over the period in question. After some criticism for its methodology, manner of spinning and burial of crucial data, the following year UCL published its completed findings. By that point, and taking into account only UCL’s own figures, the results were even starker. For the full report showed that the earlier figure of £95 billion far understated the cost of immigration to Britain. In fact, immigrants over that 1995–2011 period had cost the United Kingdom a figure more like £114 billion, with the final figure potentially rising to as high as £159 billion. Needless to say, the discovery that immigration had actually cost the UK more than a hundred billion pounds did not make the news and nobody was made aware on their news bulletins of a headline that should have read, ‘Recent immigrants to the UK cost British taxpayers more than £100 billion’. How could they have done when the crucial findings didn’t even make it into the conclusions of the publication that had discovered them?5

Even when the GDP of a country does grow – as it must with an ever-increasing number of people in the workforce – that does not mean individuals benefit from it. On the contrary only GDP per head does that. And there is no evidence that mass migration improves GDP per head. Which is why, having lost this argument, advocates of mass migration tend to move onto others.

In fact, only three types of people now have three children or more – the very rich, the poor and recent immigrants. Among immigrants – especially those who have come from third-world countries – any provision for their children paid for by the European welfare state will be better than anything they could have expected in their country of origin. Whereas native Europeans are concerned about competition for school places, housing shortages pushing average house prices up to between five and ten times average salary in their area, and how to afford one child, let alone three or four.

It is also possible that, contra Spencer and Portes, some parents may not appreciate an endless amount of ‘diversity’ in their local schools and may want their children to be educated around people from a similar cultural background. This means, especially if those parents are in an inner-city area or suburb, that they are likely to worry about being able to afford a house in the kind of middle-class neighbourhood from which their child would be in the catchment area of a less ‘diverse’ school. If they cannot afford to bring up their children in the way in which they would like, many people will fail to have the number of children they would like.

One of the most striking things about the arguments for ongoing mass migration into European countries is that they are so readily able to shift. Whenever the economic cases for mass immigration are briefly dislodged, along come moral or cultural arguments. Without making any concession they state a position along these lines: ‘Let us pretend that mass migration does not make us financially richer. It does not matter, because mass migration makes us rich in other ways. In fact even if it makes us financially poorer, what you lose in economic benefits you will pick up in cultural benefits.’ This argument takes it as read that European societies are slightly boring or staid places, a presumption that would not go down as well in many other societies. The suggestion goes that whereas the rest of the world does not need the mass migration from other cultures in order to be improved, the countries of Europe do, and would especially benefit from such movements. It is as though it is agreed that there is a hole at the heart of Europe which needs filling and without which we would otherwise be poorer. New people bring different culture, different attitudes, different languages – and of course the endlessly cited example of new and exciting cuisine.

Food is one of the benefits that is rather embarrassingly seized upon in this argument. But to take that example, the amount of enjoyment to be got from Turkish food does not increase year on year the more Turks there are in the country. Every 100,000 extra Somalis, Eritreans or Pakistanis who enter Europe do not magnify the resulting cultural enrichment 100,000 times.

If it is the case that ‘diversity’ is a good in itself, it does not explain why in each country immigrants overwhelmingly come from a small number of countries. If you actively sought to bring ‘diversity’ to Europe after the first decades of mass migration, it would have been sensible to search for people not just from former colonies but from countries that had never been colonies and countries about which there was a genuine lack of knowledge.

But the argument for mass migration on the grounds of ‘diversity’ as being a good in itself ignores one huge and until recently unspeakable issue. Just as most cultures have good and interesting things to say for themselves, all have some bad and disagreeable things about them too. And while the positives can be stressed and exaggerated from the outset, any negatives take years to admit, if they are admitted at all.

One need only consider the decades it has taken to admit that some immigrant groups hold less liberal views than the majority of people in the countries they have come into. A Gallup survey conducted in 2009 in Britain found that precisely zero per cent of British Muslims interviewed (out of a pool of 500) thought that homosexuality was morally acceptable.17 Another survey carried out in 2016 found that 52 per cent of British Muslims thought homosexuality should be made illegal.18 The common response to such findings is that these were the attitudes of many British people a generation or two ago. The unspoken follow-on is that homosexuals in Britain should be patient and wait another generation or two for the newcomers to catch up. All the while what is ignored is the possibility that this might not happen and that the views of the incomers may in time, through population growth or other means, change the national picture as a whole. So in 2015 when YouGov carried out a survey of British attitudes towards homosexuality, one of the questions asked was whether in general respondents thought homosexuality to be ‘morally acceptable’ or ‘morally wrong’. Some people might have assumed that such a survey would smoke out latent homophobia in certain rural areas whereas the hip, diverse urban areas would show that they were relaxed about the whole matter.

In fact, the findings showed precisely the opposite. Whereas in the whole of the rest of the country around 16 per cent of people said that they thought homosexuality was ‘morally wrong’, in London the figure was almost double that (29 per cent).19 Why should people in London have been almost twice as homophobic as the rest of the country? Solely for the reason that the ethnic diversity of the capital meant that it had imported a disproportionate number of people with attitudes which the rest of the country would now regard as being morally backwards. But if the views of some migrant communities on homosexuality were only...

It was in the early 2000s in England that stories that the Sikh and white working-class communities had been telling for years were finally investigated by the media. These revealed that the organised grooming of often underage young girls by gangs of Muslim men of North African or Pakistani background was a theme in towns throughout the north of England and further afield. In each case the local police had been too scared to look into the issue, and when the media finally looked into it they too shied away. A 2004 documentary on social services in Bradford had its screening postponed after self-proclaimed ‘anti-fascists’ and local police chiefs appealed to Channel 4 to drop the documentary. The sections that dealt with the sexual exploitation of white girls by ‘Asian’ gangs were accused of being potentially inflammatory. In particular, these authorities insisted, the screening ahead of local elections could assist the British Nati...

Campaigning on, or even mentioning, the issue of grooming during those years brought with it terrible problems. When the northern Labour MP Ann Cryer took up the issue of the rape of underage girls in her own constituency, she was swiftly and widely denounced as an ‘Islamophobe’ and a ‘racist’, and at one stage had to receive police protection. It took years for central government, the police, local authorities or the Crown Prosecution Service to face up to the issue. When they finally began to do so, an official inquiry into abuse in the town of Rotherham alone revealed the exploitation of at least 1,400 children over the period 1997–2014. The victims were all non-Muslim white girls from the local community, with the youngest victim aged 11. All had been brutally raped, some had also been doused in petrol and threatened with being set on fire. Others were threatened with guns and forced to watch the violent rape of other girls as a warning should they tell anyone about the abuse. The inquiry into the abuse found that although the perpetrators were almost all men of Pakistani origin, operating in gangs, staff of the local council described their ‘nervousness ...

In 2009 police in Norway revealed that immigrants from non-Western backgrounds were responsible for ‘all reported grab-rapes’ – those in which the assailant grabbed the woman off a street or public place – in Oslo.23 In 2011 the Norwegian state’s statistical bureau was willing to note that ‘immigrants are overrepresented in the crime statistics’. They did, however, also suggest that this was not due to any cultural differences, but rather perhaps to the predominance of young men among the immigrant populations. One former head of the violent crime section of the Oslo Police Department, Hanne Kristin Rohde, testified to the extraordinary unwillingness of the Norwegian authorities to admit to what was happening. In relation to the ‘clear statistical connection’ between rapes and migrants who came from cultures where ‘women have no value of their own’, she said that ‘This was a big problem but it was difficult to talk about it.’ As for the rapists’ attitudes towards women, ‘It is a cultural problem,’ said Rohde.

One thing this demonstrates is that whereas the benefits of mass immigration undoubtedly exist and everybody is made very aware of them, the disadvantages of importing huge numbers of people from another culture take a great deal of time to admit to. In the meantime, the agreement seems to have been reached with the general public that it is not such a bad deal: if there is a bit more beheading and sexual assault than there used to be in Europe, then at least we also benefit from a much wider range of cuisines.

Before pointing out the unexploded democratic explosive behind this, it is worth considering what is true in the claim. Certainly the prevalence of mobile phones, mass media – especially television – in the third world and the lowered cost of travel over recent decades means that the desire and opportunity of people all over the world to travel has never been greater. But if globalisation really has made it impossible to prevent people travelling to Europe from across the world, it is worth noting that this global issue does not affect other countries. If the cause is economic pull, then there is no reason why Japan should not currently be experiencing unparalleled waves of immigration from the West. In 2016 the country was the world’s third largest economy if measured by nominal GDP, putting it ahead of Germany and Great Britain. But of course, despite being a larger economy than any in Europe, Japan has avoided a policy of mass immigration by implementing policies that stop it, dissuade people from staying there, and make it hard to become a citizen if you are not Japanese. Irrespective of whether one agrees with Japan’s policy or not, the country shows that even in this hyper-connected age it is possible for a modern economy to avoid the experience of mass immigration and show that such a process is not ‘inevitable’. In the same way, although China is the world’s second largest economy, it is not a destination for asylum seekers or economic migrants on the scale of Euro...

The reason people wish to come to Europe is not only because of the perception of wealth and work. It is also because Europe has made itself a desirable destination for additional reasons. Not least among them is the knowledge that Europe is likely to allow arrivals to remain in the continent once there. High among the reasons why people flock to Europe are the knowledge that its welfare states will look after migrants who arrive, and the knowledge that however long it takes or however poorly migrants may be looked after they will still enjoy a better standard of living and a better roster of rights than anywhere else, let alone in their home countries. There is also the belief – flattering to Europeans as well as true – that Europe is a more tolerant, peaceful and welcoming place than most parts of the world. If there were many such continents in the world then Europeans might be able to enjoy their status as one generous society among many. If the perception grows that Europe is in fact the only place where it is both easy to get in, easy to remain and safe to stay, then the continent may find the resulting attention less flattering in the long term than it does in the short term. In any case it is not inevitable that the world’s migrants should come to Europe. They come because Europe has made itself – for good reasons and some bad – attractive to the world’s migrants.

Many will have legitimate claims and Italy has a duty to give these people asylum: under the Geneva Conventions and the EU Dublin Treaty the first country into which a migrant enters and claims asylum is the country that must assess the claim and offer protection. But the bitter truth is that there is almost no way to find out who is who, or what is true. If the flow of applicants was not at the levels it has been for years then the finger-printing, interviews and everything else that follows could be carefully assessed. Backstories could be cross-checked and followed up on. But with the arrivals coming at this speed and in these numbers there was never any chance of this. Two other elements make all of this far worse. Many – and sometimes most – of the people arriving deliberately bring no paperwork with them because being unidentified is an advantage. Amid the demands on the time of the agencies people can pretend to be other ages, other people or even from another country. When it became known that a particular group were being put to the front of the asylum queue – Syrians, for instance – then a large number of people would claim to be Syrians, even though some of those working with the refugees noticed they were neither speaking any Syrian dialect nor knew anything about the country they claimed to be from.

In December 2014 in bad seas one boat of more than fifty sub-Saharan Africans headed off from near Nador in northern Morocco to the southern coast of Spain. The Cameroonian Muslim captain blamed the bad weather on a Nigerian Christian pastor who was praying on board. The captain and crew beat the pastor and threw him overboard before searching the other passengers, identifying the Christians, then beating and throwing them overboard in the same manner.