About the only good thing to come out of the West's war with the Taliban is the way the question of national identity and the meaning of patriotism has been forced onto the front pages of British newspapers. At last the multi-culturalists who largely write for and edit those papers, are having their own values, (which are not universally held by their readers) rammed down their own throats with a vengeance.

Continually banging on about the war not being against Islam only begs the question: what is the West fighting for and what does its stand for? Judging by the media, closely followed by the supine politicians, it seems to mean throwing out our old identities and putting nothing in their place except a multi-cultural free-for-all of which benefits no ethnic group whatsoever.

The question about who the British people are supposed to be is seldom raised. In Oman last month Mr. Blair told British troops that they were fighting to defend not just borders but values. As to what values, Mr. Blair would no doubt say some thing like: "our ability to respect people of different faiths, races and creeds." This unpatriotic, half-educated and treacherous nonsense hasn't gone unnoticed by the Muslims themselves. Why should the British elite not make more statements on behalf of the British people and their Christian faith? Are we run by an alien anti-British occupying force? A year ago, a report from the Commission into the Future of Multi-Cultural Britain argued for disowning the word ‘British’ on the grounds that it was ‘racially coded’!

ln fact, nations are communities of ethnic peoples each with shared cultural heritage. Britishness is decidedly not simply a belief in vague political principles like ‘democracy’, ‘equality’ and ‘fair mindedeness’, since other races and nationalities also would claim to believe in these things. Even if the British have largely lost their Christian faith, they still have their historic towns and villages, occupied for the time being by ethnic Anglo-Celts who still retain local memories and traditions and who attend local festivals, even if they do not make a great chauvinistic show of it. If the British, in particular, had not been so reserved and understating about their ethnic identity, and instead were a bit more up-front about it, then perhaps the multi-cultural liberals would not have made so much of the running.

Our own values rejected

The point is this: it can safely be predicted that if our elites reject their own values others will do the same. The Muslim youth of Britain, previously showing extreme examples of a national identity crisis have finally decided to put their cards on the table. Many of them now proudly claim that they have no allegiance to this country. Mohammed Abdullar, a 22-year-old accountant from Luton told The Times: "We don't perceive ourselves as British Muslims. We are Muslims who live in Britain. Muslims in Britain view supporting the jihad as a religious duty."

The present generation of younger journalists, the interpreters and purveyors of our national culture, are largely to blame. The older generation of journalists were more knowledgeable about the world, were better educated, and more pro-British in their sentiments. Now their younger counterparts are telling us that within the last 30 years our people have come to have ‘multiple identities’, so that one can in fact be both ‘British’ and ‘Asian’ without realising that one is referring here, not to a choice of values or party affiliations, but to ethnic categories. By the same reasoning, cows and horses, just because they are grazing in the same field, can choose to call themselves ‘cow-horses’.

Much of the confusion about national identity in the West is the failure to understand the difference between modernisation and westernisation. The West embodies an astonishing paradox. It is run by liberal imperialists busy ramming their own multi-cultural values down the throats of non-western peoples (look at the way they are now planning for a multi-ethnic government to run Afghanistan). Yet these same people hate and despise western culture as ‘racist’ and ‘colonialist’, and want to replace it with a cultural free-for-all. So we have the worst of all worlds - multi-racialism, a disdain for the very people we have let into the country (because they are seen as anti-liberal and anti-feminist) and a death-wish directed at our own folk. Further, multi-culturalism is one-way traffic. It doesn't apply to other civilisations: there are only a handful of whites in Muslim, Hindu or Asian countries, and certainly none at all are in positions of cultural, economic or political power in the way coloured foreigners are in the West.

Now more thoughtful journalists are beginning, somewhat reluctantly, to quote the eminent Harvard professor Samuel Huntingdon and his well known book, The Clash of Civilisations. Here is just one paragraph from a long work, and the writer's remarks about America apply to Britain as well:-

‘If the leaders of other countries have at times attempted to disavow their cultural heritage and shift the identity of their country from one civilisation to another, in no case to date have they succeeded, and they have instead created schizophrenic torn countries. The American multi-culturalists similarly reject their country's cultural heritage. Instead of attempting to identify the US with another civilisation, they wish to create a country of many civilisations, which is to say a country not belonging to any civilisation and lacking a cultural one.’