The Swiss have decided to introduce quotas on migrants from the EU, thereby incurring the wrath of The Times and specifically its columnist Roger Boyes.
Oh well, Boyes will be Boyes, but there has to be a limit to ideological rants complete with frothing at the mouth, especially when the vehicle for such is a formerly respectable newspaper.
Generally speaking, in my approaching dotage I no longer mind people holding any views, no matter how ridiculous, ill-informed or different from mine. However, when they defend such views, I do expect to hear some intellectual rigour or at least a modicum of logic.
Neither was on offer in Mr Boyes’s article Britain Shouldn’t Copy the Xenophobic Swiss. Instead we were served the complete kit of federastic EU invective against anyone daring to disagree.
“Xenophobic” set the leitmotif nicely and the word was oft-repeated throughout the diatribe. But no theme can be truly effective without its variations, and these were aplenty:
…“Fear of the foreigner” (thanks for letting us know what xenophobia means, Roge)… “searching for foreign scapegoats”… Scapegoats for what exactly?
The prosperous, free Swiss seem to be doing all right, better than just about any other nation on earth, but never mind. They must still need scapegoats, someone to carry the can for their prosperity and freedom. If you’re confused, don’t ask me, ask Roger.
…“Barely concealed racism’, “anti-EU racism”, “casual racism towards foreign workers…” Now we’re talking. So it’s not just any old foreigners the Swiss fear but specifically those of different races?
Well, that depends on how you define racism. My friend Roger defines it rather broadly: “Is being anti-German racist? Yes, it is.” In other words racism to him means the same as xenophobia, but never mind the meaning, feel the zeal.
If the Swiss really suffer from this inordinate fear of foreigners, they have a funny way of showing it, as Roger himself demonstrates self-refutingly: “…about 24 per cent of Switzerland’s population is made up of foreigners”.
They “remain foreign simply because of tough naturalisation rules”. Crikey. Fancy the injustice of it all. So what percentage of the Swiss population would Roger see as being in agreement with his flaming conscience? We’ve already seen that 24 percent is too low. What wouldn’t be? 30 percent? 50?
Obviously the only way for the Swiss to get back into Roger’s good books would be to naturalise this quarter of their population, then remove all restrictions on immigration, admit another quarter and naturalise them as well.
Moreover, the Swiss must follow the example of the Germans who cloyingly repent their recent past. The Swiss too must apologise and seek forgiveness for their own atrocities, quite on a par with the Holocaust.
Are you ready for this? They “banned the building of new minarets and deported foreigners who have committed crimes.”
We shouldn’t copy them but they ought to copy us. The number of mosques in Britain has grown from about 60 half a century ago to about 1,600 now, thereby setting a fine model for the Swiss to follow.
As to deporting foreign criminals – perish the thought. We need them right here, where we can see them spitting venom at everything British and recruiting suicide bombers in many of the 1,600 mosques.
Mr Boyes (I renounce all claims to his friendship) may not realise this, but he’s sounding like an apparatchik preaching the party line. The party in this instance is EU fanatics, most of them informed by Marx’s pronouncement that “the proletariat knows no national borders”.
For Europe to unite into a single state, every European nation must cease to exist qua nation. This could be achieved with nuclear bombs, but such a solution would rather defeat the purpose. The only bomb that could do the job properly is the demographic one, clustered with the cultural variety.
In other words, all European nations must be tossed into a cauldron of bubbling EU emanations and boiled together until they form a homogeneous, amorphous, foul-smelling mass. Then no nation would be able to resist the rule of denationalised EU Marxists who, like Marx’s ‘proletarians of the world’, are united in their hatred of European tradition – particularly the last 2,000 years of it.
European tradition was indeed universal, defined as it was by a universal religion. But this universality was expressed through, and enriched by, the particularity of every European nation, each with its own language, culture, history, ties of kinship and genetic commonality.
Trying to preserve nationhood in no way contradicts what Boyes bizarrely calls “our tradition of curiosity about the outside world”, displaying yet again his party’s well-honed intellectual integrity. The simpletons among us tend to believe that such curiosity would be best satisfied by studying and visiting other countries, not by swarms of foreigners flooding into ours.
I’d like Boyes to explain how the 300,000 French people living in London can teach me anything about their country I haven’t learned by going there for decades and now spending half my time in France. Ethnographic curiosity, Roger, can only be vectored outwards, as it was in the days of the British Empire.
Of course we must copy the Swiss, and of course they’re not xenophobic. They are patriots who wish to preserve their patria. Having half of their population made up of those alien to their culture and civilisation means that eventually they’ll have no patria left.
We too must put a limit on minarets, we too must deport foreign criminals, and we too must tighten naturalisation laws. Foreign workers must be allowed in only if their application for entry is sponsored by a potential British employer. They should be allowed to stay for as long as their employer needs them.
While here, they must be treated kindly and politely, as cherished guests. But they mustn’t be allowed to take over the house.
An application for naturalisation must be accompanied by an honest desire to become British. For an applicant to become a British subject some years later, he must demonstrate that he has indeed become British.
This means native fluency in English – and native understanding of the complex cultural, historical, ethnic, folkloric and social strands out of which the British nationality is woven.
As to The Times, it had better arrest its leftward slide before long. Otherwise its accelerating momentum may soon take the paper crashing down into the swampy territory presently occupied by The Guardian, if not The Morning Star.