By Brendan Walsh, editor of The Tablet magazine
The percentage of those who say they are “proud to be British” is higher among those who make up Britain’s various immigrant communities than among those born in Britain.
The British distaste for extremism, the supposed national genius for moderation, for reasonable compromise and “fair play” is not just in the bloodstream but in the air.
When continental Europe was convulsed by revolutionary uprisings in the nineteenth century, and the rise of Communism and Fascism in the twentieth, the British seemed immune.
Mosley marched, and Marxists infiltrated, but neither prevailed. Is this instinct still intact? Perhaps we are about to find out.
Nigel Farage, left, promises that if his party wins the next general election five planes a day will take off with illegal immigrants on board whose claims for asylum will have been peremptorily dismissed.
Those planes need to land somewhere. But where? As we write in our editorial in this week’s Tablet, Farage’s mass deportation plan will include the offer of bribes to the Taliban to take back the thousands of Afghans who fled the country, many in fear of their lives. This would be like sending Jewish refugees back to Nazi Germany.