George Galloway, founder of a nearly all-Muslim Respect party, speaks at the University of Toronto in September 2005. The significant gains made by Galloway's party in the municipality elections last May was further indication of the increasing instability of British politics. Photo courtesy mje.

I am trying to avoid Samuel Huntington’s emotionally charged catchphrase, “clash of civilizations,” but how else could one describe the violence that British Muslims unleashed upon Salman Rushdie, a Westernized novelist of Indian Muslim birth, who wrote for Western readers, forcing him eventually to flee to the United States? That was in the 1990s. Since then, mutual suspicions have deepened. Last July’s bomb attacks in London have made many among the liberal elite, who were previous advocates of “multi-culturalism,” ask themselves whether they had been too optimistic. The rage that Muslim immigrants throughout Europe displayed earlier this year against the Danish newspaper cartoons depicting Muhammad as a terrorist made millions of Europeans feel that they no longer live in free countries, that they must now give up some of the liberties to which they had become accustomed.

Such fears play into the hands of the far right to such an extent that I should not be surprised if one major European country turns to a quasi-fascist party in the foreseeable future. I have France in mind, where race riots among its 12 million Muslims have become regular news. We must not forget that during the last French presidential election, the loutish leader of the far-right National Front swept aside the country’s second largest party, the Socialists, and became the challenger to President Jacques Chirac.

A Deeper Dilemma

While the overwhelming majority (over 70 percent) of British citizens wants immigration into the country to be drastically cut from its annual net level of 320,000 people, the government confesses that it cannot estimate how many illegal immigrants might be in the country. Adding to the problem is the fact that 80 percent of all people whose applications for asylum are rejected by the courts nevertheless manage to stay in Britain. The recent revelation that the Home Office, through incompetence or neglect, had allowed over 150 foreign murderers and rapists remain in the country at the end of their sentences despite court orders to deport them has caused the sacking of the immigration minister and brought the whole government into disrepute.

The latest estimate by the office of the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, states that two million new homes will have to be built in the South-Eastern corner of England by 2016 to cope with the bulging population, with 1.5 million of them for first generation immigrants and their families. But a parliamentary committee declared in mid-June that the government was underestimating the need. In any case, everywhere “greenbelts”—areas where new housing has been banned for decades to provide “lungs for the cities”—are under pressure from local authorities applying for planning permission for new housing estates, occurring in a small island that is 12 times more crowded than the United States. If we take into account that 75 percent of the newcomers settle in London and the South-East, the dire situation becomes even more apparent.

The latest major intervention in the debate came from the highly respected former Labour cabinet minister, Frank Field. Writing in The Guardian of June 23, he said that in 2004, the last year for which statistics were available, 582,000 newcomers settled in Britain. Field’s figure is 242,000 above the figure released by the government and quoted by Migration Watch. Field urged the prime minister and the country to begin looking into the alarming situation. He said that the data did not even include illegal entrants and that, since 359,000 native Britons left the country in 2004 to settle elsewhere, we had “an overall change in the total of the population of 940,000 people in the span of a single year.” This was equal to “67 parliamentary constituencies” from one parliamentary election to the next, with most of the newcomers settling in the poorest districts.

In the midst of such headline grabbing woes, the question on many people’s minds nowadays is: How long will Britain manage to remain a decent and liberal society? The example of the Netherlands next door is not reassuring. One of the most liberal societies in Europe has now become intensely hostile to all new immigration of non-European race and one of the most segregated countries on the continent.

The distinguished journalist and historian, Max Hastings, who is on the liberal wing of the Conservative party and writes a column in the left-wing newspaper The Guardian, claims that the ruling Labour party’s loss of control over Britain’s borders is deliberate. Labour really hates the majority white middle class and knows that immigrants overwhelmingly vote Labour. If present trends continue, it would help make certain that the Conservative party never again challenged its political supremacy. The theory seems incredible to me, even paranoid, but at least in the short term, it does make electoral sense.

But whatever the true motivation of the present British government, immigration from distant cultures into a formerly homogenous society, without first assimilating those already there, is an irresponsible policy. I have brought up my two children in Britain to be loyal to their country and to be grateful for its hard-won liberties, the fruits of the European Enlightenment. Yet I now fear very much that both may one day be expelled from the country they love merely for the color of their skin.