Day by day the continent of Europe is not only changing but is losing any possibility of a soft landing in response to such change. An entire political class have failed to appreciate that many of us who live in Europe love the Europe that was ours. We do not want our politicians, through weakness, self-hatred, malice, tiredness or abandonment to change our home into an utterly different place. And while Europeans may be almost endlessly compassionate, we may not be boundlessly so. The public may want many contradictory things, but they will not forgive politicians if – whether by accident or design – they change our continent completely. If they do so change it then many of us will regret this quietly. Others will regret it less quietly. Prisoners of the past and of the present, for Europeans there seem finally to be no decent answers to the future. Which is how the fatal blow will finally land.

Notes

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1    Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, Pushkin Press, 2014, p. 425.

2    ‘Merkel confronts Facebook’s Zuckerberg over policing hate-posts’, Bloomberg, 26 September 2015.

3    Pope John Paul II, Ecclesia in Europa, 28 June 2003.

4    Chancellor Helmut Kohl, speech at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, 5 February 1996.

5    For an interesting discussion of many of these issues, see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Harvard University Press, 2012.

THE BEGINNING

1    Hansard, 2 December 2002. Blunkett was talking about the Times journalist Anthony Browne.

3    Guy Goodwin from the ONS quoted in ‘Census shows rise in foreign-born’, BBC News, 11 December 2012.

4    Ken Livingstone in ‘World civilisation or clash of civilisations?’ conference, London, 20 January 2007.

5    See David Miles, The Tribes of Britain, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005, p. 236.

6    Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998, pp. 467–8.

7    Full text in Reflections of a Statesman: The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell, Bellew Publishing, 1991, pp. 373–9.

8    Ibid.

9    See the 2008 BBC documentary, ‘Rivers of Blood’.

10    For instance in the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 1962.

11    In the wake of the 1977 Franks Report.

12    See ‘Ray Honeyford: Racist or right?’, BBC, 10 February 2012.

13    Andrew Neather, ‘Don’t listen to the whingers – London needs immigrants’, Evening Standard, 22 October 2009.

14    Tom Bower, Broken Vows: Tony Blair and the Tragedy of Power, Faber & Faber, 2016, pp. 171–8.

15    Hugh Muir, ‘Hideously diverse Britain: The immigration “conspiracy”’, The Guardian, 2 March 2011.

16    Bower, Broken Vows, pp. 175–6.

17    ONS figures.

18    Ibid., Migration Statistics Quarterly Report, November 2015.

HOW WE GOT HOOKED ON IMMIGRATION

1    This conversation from March 1959 was recalled by his colleague and confidant Alain Peyrefitte in C’était de Gaulle (1994) and is the subject of some contention.

2    Boris Johnson, ‘Let’s not dwell on immigration but sow the seeds of integration’, The Telegraph, 17 December 2012.

3    Sunder Katwala quoted in ‘Census shows rise in foreign-born’, BBC News, 11 December 2012.

4    YouGov poll for The Sunday Times. Fieldwork 13–14th December 2012. Available at http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/w0hvkihpjg/YG-Archive-Pol-Sunday-Times-results-14-161212.pdf.

5    BBC Newsnight, 11 December 2012.

6    The Louise Casey review into Rotherham borough council, 4 February 2015.

7    Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain, Little Brown, 2004, pp. x and 2.

9    BBC Question Time, 13 December 2012.