by Douglas Murray, Spectator
[…] Our much overpraised Home Secretary used her party conference speech to condemn the ‘racists’ who marched in the south of England the other week with their faces covered. She had nothing to say about the far larger number of people from her own Muslim community who have marched through Tower Hamlets and elsewhere, covering their faces and being infinitely more thuggish. On Question Time a panellist whose grandmother came here from Bengal claimed that the men on that south of England march were not just racist but exhibiting ‘small penis behaviour’. What’s more, this woman – a self-described communist – said the people objecting to illegal migration were not patriotic and not British.
We seem to be facing a slew of similar pronouncements of late – often from people who have either arrived in the country recently or whose parents arrived comparatively recently. It seems that absolutely anyone can turn up in Britain and tell us what is or is not British. But if we quibble with this lack of manners we are, of course, called ‘racist’. This is deeply unfair.
As I have pointed out before, if my parents had chosen to move to, for example, Pakistan and given birth to me there, I think I’d regard my position in the country as something like a visitor or a guest. I can say with considerable certainty that the entire population of Pakistan would regard me in such a light. But if I went around telling the Pakistani people what their country was or should be, and what Pakistani values were or were not, then I think people would think me a little presumptuous, to say the least. Yet the British public have to hear arrival after arrival tell us who we are or who we should be and they do so with the confidence that comes from knowing that most British people are too polite to clear their throat, say ‘ahem’ in a meaningful manner, and then give them both rhetorical barrels.