In the latest outburst of liberal inanity the Home Secretary has urged ethnic minorities to acquire a greater sense of belonging in Britain.

As a former management consultant, I recall being all too frequently obliged to give some highly-opinionated but deluded people a blinding glimpse of the obvious. Such habits are hard to break, so here I am again to tell the Home Secretary and all his kind that the reason why the ethnic minorities feel no sense of belonging in Britain is that they do not belong here. They know this, and so do most of the native population. Oh sure, they can learn to speak English well enough to get by from one transaction to the next, just as I once learned quite a lot of Arabic as a matter of personal expediency. But no-one took me for an Arab, any more than they did Lawrence of Arabia. Likewise, no-one will ever mistake the broadcaster Trevor Macdonald for a Highland clansman, however well-groomed his appearance and diction.

‘Belonging’, you see, is a very deeply-rooted and complex condition. One can be treated most hospitably in almost any community without thereby belonging to it in any real sense of the word. And simply acquiring a sense of belonging will never be enough to make it so, since that is only within the gift of the host community -- and then not as an official diktat but at every face-to-face encounter with the community's natural members. So long as even a minority in that community refuses to acknowledge you as ‘belonging’ to it, you remain an alien presence and are certain to be treated as such at various times.

In any event, most of us are bound to think there is something distinctly unwholesome about anybody seemingly anxious to disown their own racial and cultural heritage in order to acquire a spurious identity elsewhere. Flattering as it is to the chosen host community when so many seem anxious to join, it does not alter the basic incongruity of the situation. Better a happy duck any day than an imitation swan.

Guests

Invited strangers can never be more than guests in your home; and when they are not invited you will quite properly feel yourself to be invaded, whatever their own ideas about ‘belongingness’.

The fact that uninvited immigrants much prefer living conditions here is quite understandable; but that doesn't make them genuine citizens any more than squatters can be called residents.

Britain is the homeland of people with Anglo-Saxon-Celtic ancestry going back many centuries. The country belongs to us as we do to it. People of altogether different ancestry and culture cannot therefore belong here since, unlike the natives, they manifestly belong somewhere else. Any property, any job, any school or college place, any hospital bed and any other item belonging to Britain can only be taken by aliens as a form of misappropriation, since such taking is necessarily at the expense of the native population. And contending that the aliens make a valuable contribution to the country's economy and welfare does not alter that underlying reality one iota. It is historically self-evident that this country is not only perfectly capable of looking after itself; it is also a fact that it looked after most of the immigrants' world for two or three centuries. Moreover, the economic input of recent immigrants, most of them uneducated and unskilled, is vastly exceeded by what they take out in terms of this country's socio-economic and cultural assets and the damage their presence does to its social cohesion and morale. You will be hard put to find Afro-Caribbeans making any significant contribution to this country's intellectual or cultural capital. And Asians, very prominent in retail, commerce and catering, are conspicuously absent from the building, civil and mechanical engineering scenes. Businessmen they certainly are; but their contribution to the nation's basic economic infra-structure is negligible, and their cultural impact imperceptible outside the curry parlour (pace Robin Cook and chicken tikka masala). The vast majority of the people of this country are perfectly happy with their own culture and feel under no obligation whatsoever to see it mongrelised to make unwanted immigrants feel more at home.

Bluntly speaking, it ought to be plain enough to everybody that while Third World immigrants obviously want this country to belong to them, they can never belong to it. And all talk of ‘integration’ of the unwanted immigrants ignores the perfectly legitimate resistance of the native popu1ation to such enforced social engineering; people, after all, are less keen on integration than crocodiles.

Minimal concessions to host country

In any event, therefore, the clear intention of the intruders is to make minimal concessions to the host country while doing everything they can to re-shape it to their own ends. Some Muslims, for example, will always regard the Sharia (Islamic law) as taking precedence over secular legislation here and elsewhere (why else the so-called ‘Muslim Parliament’?), and they won't rest until we are all hearing the muezzin's call to prayer instead of church bells. Cultures just don't mix; either they assert their values and expand their territory or they are quickly displaced by others. So much is patently obvious from history, and all the news reports of inter-racial and inter-religious conflicts around the world.

The blind bigotry of our liberal politicians in their obsessive promotion of the ‘multi-racial society’ is therefore every bit as menacing to peace and stability as Muslim fanaticism. Both lay claim to the moral high ground and insist that the end justifies whatever means they choose to adopt. History is littered with high-minded atrocities; indeed, most of the post-colonial massacres in Africa and Asia can be laid squarely at the door of those who so piously campaigned to unleash the perpetrators from European constraints. But the so-called ‘law of unforeseen consequences’ still shadows the liberal manifesto.

‘Racism’ is merely the label used by renegade politicians to stifle any opposition to their perverse ideology; so those resisting alien attempts to misappropriate our country and heritage must expect to be prosecuted by these latter-day witch-hunters, armed with their ‘human rights catalogue’, search warrants and anti-British legislation. Needless to say ‘racists’, in their book, have no rights at all!