Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I hope to be back behind the microphone taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members around the world at 3pm North American Eastern (8pm British Summer Time) for our latest Clubland Q&A. Hope you can swing by.
~I have received several complaints from readers wanting to know why I didn't observe the twentieth anniversary of the so-called 7/7 bombings yesterday. Well, it's for the same reason that SteynOnline no longer observes the 9/11 anniversary. Because we dishonoured the dead: we were summoned to a great societal challenge and could not muster the will to rise to it. As I wrote (all together now) twenty bloody years ago:
It has been sobering this past week watching some of my 'woollier' colleagues (in Vicki Woods's self-designation) gradually awake to the realisation that the real suicide bomb is 'multiculturalism'. Its remorseless tick-tock, suddenly louder than the ethnic drumming at an anti-globalisation demo, drove poor old Boris Johnson into rampaging around this page last Thursday like some demented late-night karaoke one-man Fiddler on the Roof, stamping his feet and bellowing, 'Tradition! Tradition!' Boris's plea for more Britishness was heartfelt and valiant, but I'm not sure I'd bet on it. The London bombers were, to the naked eye, assimilated - they ate fish'n'chips, played cricket, sported appalling leisurewear. They'd adopted so many trees we couldn't see they lacked the big overarching forest - the essence of identity, of allegiance. As I've said before, you can't assimilate with a nullity - which is what multiculturalism is.
And here we are twenty years later, with the official observances still demanding that we "assimilate with a nullity". His Majesty The King:
As we remember those we lost, let us therefore use this 20th anniversary to reaffirm our commitment to building a society where people of all faiths and backgrounds can live together with mutual respect and understanding, always standing firm against those who would seek to divide us.
That is not a definition of England that his grandfather would have recognised. As for Boris Johnson - the Man Who Betrayed Brexit - and his cries for "Tradition!", England two decades on is full of exciting new traditions: London is now led by a taqiyya Muslim who bedecks the city streets for Eid; the aforementioned Sovereign hosts iftars at the Palace; there are six times as many Muslim members at Westminster as in 2005 and they demand UK taxpayer funding for new airports in Pakistan. Oh, and here's what's sure to become an annual tradition: in Dewsbury, ten miles from the 7/7 bombers' hometown of Leeds, they're holding protests in support of "grooming gangs".
Can you, au contraire, "assimilate with a nullity"? Britons are supposed to be impressed because, two decades on, the butcher politicians are insisting that the many Albanian sex traffickers and Sudanese clitoridectomists the Royal National Lifeboat Institute ferry to England's shores each night are going to be forced to accept "British values". Get a clue: If you're talking about "values", you're losing. Yesterday, à propos the revelation that 40.4 per cent of England's 2024 newborns had a non-UK mother, Dafna Breines wondered in our comment section:
I imagine that at one point in New York and other US cities, at least 40% of the children had one non-US-born parent. But those parents had a vested interest in becoming American, and so they did.
So is the crux of the issue the high percentage of children who have at least one parent not born in the UK? Or is it the issue of exactly where those non-UK parents were born, which mindsets and mentalities have they imported with them, and to what extent are they interested in becoming British?
Answer: neither. You're over-thinking it. By the way, those forty per cent stats are true with respect to, say, mid-century New York but never to the United States as a whole. Visit, say, Calvin Coolidge's grave in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, which takes you a moment to find because half the guys in the cemetery are called Coolidge. As noted by the Office of National Statistics, in some English cities - London and Luton - the newborns with a non-UK mother are around eighty per cent, or twice as high as New York before the 1924 four-decade Coolidge immigration "pause" kicked in. So, even in America, the English statistics would be deeply weird. As recently as the early Nineties, half the people present in the United States had at least one forebear who was here on July 4th 1776.
And America and - to a lesser degree - the British settler nations used to be an anomaly in the west. That's why they call it "the New World"; in the Old World, they did it the old way: England is the land where the English live, France the French, and Sweden the Swedes - and once that is no longer the case, they will be something other, and so will their "values". The imposition of a US-style "proposition nation" model on conventional long-settled ethnostates is a death-knell. As for"traditions", pace Boris Johnson, they are sustained by generational continuity: will the incoming Somalis be dancing round maypoles? playing boules outside the Mairie? dressing their multiple wives like the Abba chickies? You know the answer to that. If Muslims felt no need to assimilate when they were one per cent of the citizenry, they certainly won't when they're thirty per cent.
That's why already the King is reduced to trading "values" and "traditions" for the chimera of "mutual respect". More from me twenty sodding years ago:
Sir Edward [Heath]'s successor, Mr Blair, said on the day of the bombing that terrorists would not be allowed to 'change our country or our way of life'. Of course not. That's his job - from hunting to Europeanisation. Could you reliably say what aspects of 'our way of life' Britain's ruling class, whether pseudo-Labour like Mr Blair or pseudo-Conservative like Sir Ted, wish to preserve? The Notting Hill Carnival? Not enough, alas.
Or as I summarised Blair's plan to mandate what would once have been dismissed as fundamentally un-British:
Why introduce identity cards for a nation with no identity?
Germany is the land where the Germans live; Denmark is the land where the Danes live; Italy is the land where the Italians live - for good or ill. Anything more complicated than that is a guarantee of defeat. One more from that July 2005 column:
The Guardian hires as a 'trainee journalist' a member of Hizb ut Tahir, 'Britain's most radical Islamic group' (as his own newspaper described them) and in his first column post-7/7 he mocks the idea that anyone could be 'shocked' at a group of Yorkshiremen blowing up London: 'Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don't-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We're much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks' - or the bus blows, or the Tube vapourises. Fellow Guardian employee David Foulkes, who was killed in the Edgware Road blast, would no doubt be heartened to know he'd died for the cause of Muslim 'sassiness'.
Oh, okay, one final thought - not from twenty years ago, you'll be glad to hear, but from a mere nineteen years ago, from the intro to my 2006 bestseller, America Alone:
Europe has all but succumbed to the dull opiate of multiculturalism. In its drowsy numbness, it stirs but has no idea what to do and so does nothing. One day, years from now, as archaeologists sift through the ruins of an ancient civilization for clues to its downfall, they'll marvel at how easy it all was. You don't need to fly jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. As a matter of fact, that's a bad strategy, because even the wimpiest state will feel obliged to respond. But if you frame the issue in terms of multicultural 'sensitivity' the wimp state will bend over backwards to give you everything you want – including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers.
And so, in the mayoral offices of first London and now New York, it has proved.
Does The Guardian's enthusiasm for "sassiness" extend only to one side?
~The Mark Steyn Club is now in its ninth year. I'm thrilled by all those SteynOnline supporters across the globe - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Surrey to the Solomon Islands - who've signed up to be a part of it. My only regret is that we didn't launch it twenty-three years ago, but better late than never. You can find more information about the Club here - and, if you've a pal who might be partial to this sort of thing, don't forget our special Gift Membership.