Melanie Phillips: Britain's broken heart

10th March 2008, Daily Mail:

Britain currently seems to be in a state of permanent uproar about its national identity.

Home-grown Brits don't seem to know what it is any more, while immigrants flock to these shores in vast numbers to claim it for themselves.

The Prime Minister frets about recreating a sense of national solidarity which he thinks has been lost ...

This country has simply lost belief in itself.

... there are now two Britains.

There is the Britain that loves and would defend to the death its own historic national identity — and the Britain that either wants to destroy it or refuses to acknowledge that it is under such threat ...

The decades-long onslaught against Britain's identity has taken many forms.

Mass immigration — the single most important but unacknowledged source of Mr Brown's concerns — has transformed the country beyond recognition ...

What made this totally unmanageable, however, was the pernicious doctrine of multiculturalism ...

Deeper even than all that lay an attack on the very idea of the nation itself ...

As for the EU, with what shared values are we now supposed to identify, since — as last week's shameful parliamentary passage of the EU constitutional treaty so graphically underlined — we are now merely citizens of the province of Euroland West, in the banana republic of Bureaucratica?

Who would fight or die for that? ...

The result of all this has been a double whammy.

With the best will in the world, immigrants find there is no British national identity into which they can assimilate.

And indigenous Brits have been forced to become strangers in their own country — and are then vilified as racists if they dare protest.

Even the BBC, through its current "white working-class" season, has finally grasped that a section of the community has been effectively shut out of the national conversation.

But welcome as this recognition is, the season itself also encapsulates the problem. For it regards the white working class as a kind of vanishing primitive tribe towards whom disdain is only temporarily suspended in the interests of anthropological curiosity.

But these people are the indigenous people of England, whose cultural heart has been broken.

So what is the remedy? ...

If Humpty is to be put back together again, fundamentals need to be addressed across the board.

Things like mass immigration which must be stopped; multiculturalism which must be abandoned; human rights law which must be abolished; the welfare state which must be remodelled; and membership of the EU which must be renegotiated ...

Lawrence Auster:

She says that part of the motive driving the open immigration policy is to make Britain non-white. Well, if it's the case that the other side--the side seeking to destroy Britain--is doing so by means of eliminating Britain's white character, it follows that part of the way of saving Britain is to defend Britain's white character.

In other words, even a person, such as Phillips, who professes not to care about race at all, but who only cares about British nationhood and culture conceived apart from matters of racial identity, must acknowledge that if British nationhood is to be defended, Britain's historic racial identity must also be defended.

Stand and applaud for Melanie Phillips. Well said.