The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

by Douglas Murray

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.