Bringing It All Back Home

If we can't patronise them over there, we'll do it over here.

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Over the last few months, the long-term rumblings of discontent with the immigration policies of western, and especially European, governments, have taken on a sharper edge. Parties which make immigration an issue have done well in elections (most recently in the Netherlands), politicians who previously prevaricated are being obliged to accept that the issue (or issues) really exists, and it is elbowing its way into the media, into the statistics of public opinion polls, and linking up with  worries about the increasing lawlessness and violence in European cities. Yet the most puzzling feature of the whole situation is that governments, who you would expect to notice a popular political cause when it jumped up and down and waved its hands in front of them, have been in a state of catatonic absolute denial that there are even any problems. So here is an attempt to set out why I think there is this enormous gap between the governors and the governed.

And it is an enormous gap. The curious thing about the “immigration debate” is that it’s a non-debate, a debate which must not take place. The broad outlines of the dialogue of the deaf of the last decade or so can be set out schematically as follows:

The People: Please will somebody take notice of the problems caused by massive immigration over the last generation and do something about them.

The Elites. There is no problem. Shame on you for even suggesting there is. Only Nazis want to even talk about immigration.

And I’m not exaggerating. Immigration and its attendant problems have become like one of those subjects my parents didn’t want to talk about when I was young, because it was “not nice.” Read, for example, this masterful account of the background to the recent “riots” in Dublin in Naked Capitalism by a long-time resident and observer. Or look at the contorted prose and reasoning of this Grauniad article about the incredible upsurge in gun crime in Sweden, now the most dangerous country in Europe except for Albania, and which has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with immigration, even if the violence is largely the work of immigrant gangs and takes place in areas of high immigrant penetration. No it’s all about poverty and inequality, which, as we know, are infinitely worse in Sweden than in, say, Rumania.

From the point of view of practical politics, this is insane. Refusing to talk about immigration is not a policy, and by the most cynical of calculations, it leaves a space open for those who are prepared to pronounce the word, and to suggest that immigration has produced problems that need to be addressed by governments. It’s become a cliché in France to say that the major political parties couldn’t be doing more to ensure that Marine Le Pen wins the 2027 elections if they tried, but that doesn’t make it any less true. So what accounts for the near-suicidal silence about the subject by the western establishment? Let me make a number of suggestions, from the most banal to the extremely tendentious, and see what you think.

First, of course, a lot of effort would be involved. Mistakes would have to be acknowledged, money found, personnel recruited, construction carried out and so forth. Most of all, someone would have to take responsibility. Far easier, in the end, to let things continue to drift, and allow it to be somebody else’s problem, all the while being able to strike morally superior poses. For governments who no longer do things, and indeed increasingly lack even the basic capacity to do things, this is pretty much the default solution. But I don’t think that by itself that explains a great deal. After all, it wouldn’t cost any money for governments to at least acknowledge that there was a problem, but they won’t even do that. Indeed, they waste political capital and harm their political prospects by doing the reverse. What’s going on here?

Perhaps it helps if we consider the principal explanation put forward for the willingness, even eagerness, of western governments to adopt a policy of mass immigration over the last generation or so in the first place. We don’t need to dwell on all the stuff about aging populations: high unemployment among working-age people means that there are already plenty of workers, and there will be for the foreseeable future. It’s true, of course, that Europeans have historically demanded things like decent wages and working conditions, protection of employment and so forth, and immigrants, who have no choice, can usually be coerced into accepting worse. But the idea that mass immigration was only the search for a pliant and exploitable workforce doesn’t really hold up.

For a start, even if you were a typical greedy, grasping employer trying to save money on staff costs, wouldn’t you at least want a workforce that was capable of doing its job? Let’s say you run a chain of cut-price supermarkets, and you employ a lot of immigrant labour in menial roles. Well, according to French government statistics last month, only about 50% of 14-year olds in French schools can read and write to an acceptable standard. (About 20% are functionally illiterate and this has been true for some years.) Inevitably, these figures are much worse in the poorer areas, and among the immigrant population. Well, perhaps it doesn’t matter if you’re going to be a YouTube influenceur or a rap artist. But what if you are not? If you can’t read and write properly, you can’t work as a cashier, you can’t pass a test to drive a lorry, you can’t even stack goods on the right shelves. Likewise, increasing numbers of immigrants arrive as unaccompanied minors and never learn to speak French properly, because the resources have never been put into language teaching. After which your job prospects are, let’s say, not great. The result is that in many lower middle-class areas, a quarter to a third of a class cannot speak French well enough to follow the lessons properly, which ruins things for everybody. But let’s not talk about that.

Now, no matter how dumb your average employer or right-wing politician is, it must have occurred to them that having a cheap, flexible workforce is of no value if the workers can’t actually do the job. And indeed, it’s common to meet employers who privately deplore the fact that they can’t find staff qualified for the job, no matter how much they pay. Likewise, it’s notorious that most hotels in major European cities employ chambermaids from Eastern Europe who don’t speak the local language and try to get by on a few words of English. (It would have been nice if someone had anticipated such problems a generation ago and put money into resolving them, or even stopping them happening.) So I don’t think economic explanations are sufficient, the more so because there are now more potential cheap and desperate employees than there are jobs, and more are arriving all the time.

So what else might it be? And in particular, why do people who don’t benefit economically from mass immigration nonetheless support it? One reason, I suggest, is the lure of the exotic. When I was young, it was accepted that there were large parts of the world that you would never see, unless you were wealthy, or had a job that involved travelling or working abroad. It’s not as different now as you might think, especially in these times of insecurity, but people no longer accept it as readily, because images of the whole world are the touch of a button away, and there are powerful economic interests at work trying to make us believe that we can afford to go there. And for most of what I call the Outer Party (the subordinate part of the Professional and Managerial Caste, the PMC) life is actually pretty dull and boring, and holidays mean Greece or possibly Disneyland with millions of other families at an extortionate cost. But if you can’t go to India or Thailand, and you don’t want to go to Afghanistan, well maybe they can come to you, in the form of restaurants, shops, exotic foods at the supermarket, sushi from time to time, that kind of thing. And for many Outer Party members, this is pretty much the sum total of their interaction with the immigrant communities, except, perhaps for that brilliant and hard-working child of an Indian Doctor who’s a friend of your son or daughter, and whose parents you sometimes meet.

Perhaps the strangest silence in all of this is of parties of the Notional Left who, one might have thought, would be well aware of the impact of immigration on their core voting population, and would be doing something to mitigate the effects. Not at all: leaders of these parties compete with each other to defend what they define as the rights of immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, and to abuse and demonise anyone who tries to even raise the subject. Why is this? And conversely, parties of the Notional Left pay very little attention to policies that would actually provide practical help to immigrants, such as education, security or the provision of affordable housing. Why is that?

The place to begin I think, is the well-known change in the ownership of parties of the Old Left over the last generation or so. It’s accepted that they were taken over by middle-class professionals, uninterested in continuing to build a mass political base, and governing (when they did govern) by gimmick and focus group. But what has this to do with immigrants? Well, once, parties of the Left were strongly supported by immigrant voters, because they provided practical assistance to them, and in France, for example, many prominent leftist leaders had immigrant origins. I knew an elderly Frenchman of Armenian extraction, whose parents had come to France after the First World War, like many others, to escape the Turks. He remembered being told by an uncle, who arrived slightly later, that the Armenians were welcomed off the boat at Marseilles by the local Communist Party, and given Party and trades union membership cards, and then taken care of. It all seems so quaint and passé today. But what’s changed?

Well, we need to understand that parties of the Notional Left are now controlled, not by leaders issued from trades unions or local government and local communities, but by the descendants (and sometimes the figures themselves) of those tedious groups of Marxists you used to find in Universities in the 1970s, forever shouting at each other and feuding over exactly what Marx said in 1853, of ecologists who wanted to blow up nuclear power stations, or of feminists who would spit in your face if you held a door open for them. Groups like these—and there were others, but three is enough—did not seek popular support. They saw themselves as Vanguard groups, following the logic of Lenin’s 1905 pamphlet What is to be Done? Lenin, it will be recalled, argued that attempts by politicians such as Jaurès to take power peacefully through the ballot box and the trades unions, was doomed to failure. What was needed was a tight-knit group of professional revolutionaries, who would take power in the name of the working class. And indeed, the Bolsheviks did succeed where mass popular movements failed, spawning an elitist current of thinking, from the Frankfurt School to the New Left of the 1960s, which considered that ordinary people were stupid, and so incapable of organising themselves and bringing about a revolution. But enlightened, middle-class, university educated activists knew what was good for the working class, for women, for children, for education, for the environment, for a dozen other things, and there was no appeal against their judgements. Above all, as I remember Labour party militants saying in the 1980s, there could be no question of “appeasing the electorate.”

This is the mentality, and these are some of the same people, who have controlled the parties of the Notional Left in modern times. And all that has happened is the extension of the patronising attitude towards the ignorant lower classes, to immigrants as well. So now the Notional Left claims to speak for them, and to know what they want and need. They need anti-racism marches and NGOs, but not education or jobs. They need protection against ”institutional racism” in the police, but not against the crime from which their communities disproportionately suffer. In France, for example, where there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth about inter-conjugal violence, it is difficult to bring charges against males of immigrant extraction, for fear of starting political controversies, although everyone accepts that those societies are where the biggest problems are. Associations of Muslim women protesting against domestic violence or sexual harassment are not listened to: indeed, feminists have encouraged such women to keep silent, for fear of “stigmatising” their community.

For generations, immigrants voted for parties of the Left because they were disproportionately represented among the poor and destitute, and would benefit from governments of the Left. To a considerable extent, inertia means they still do, but the Notional Left of today doesn’t care, anyway. It’s message to the immigrant community, as to the rest of its traditional support is: Shut up and vote for us, and don’t expect anything. So last year, a group of cleaning women working for the Accor Hotels group at a hotel in one of the rougher areas of Paris won a victory over pay and conditions after a long strike. Almost all were from immigrant communities. Yet not a single anti-racist, a single feminist, a single intersectionist, took up their cause, or even mentioned it. Their victory was reported in a few lines in the PMC-adjacent media.

And this gets noticed. At the local level, parties of the  Notional Left no longer really try to appeal to immigrant communities as such. They cut deals with local “community leaders”, often religious figures, but sometimes, let’s say, crime-linked individuals, who deliver votes in return for jobs in the Town Hall and grants for their organisations. And this gets noticed too, which is why in many European countries, the immigrant vote is moving to the Right, as the Notional Left abandons any policies that might persuade them to continue to support it. After all, if the main advertised policy of your local Notional Left party in the elections is a campaign against “transphobia” in schools, why would pious first-generation, recently-naturalised immigrants from a Muslim country vote for them?

In the long run, and even for the most arrogant of Vanguard parties, this is suicidal. But in the short term, it enables parties of the Notional Left to continue to use immigrant communities as a reservoir of votes, through moral pressure and deals cut in back rooms. It also enables them to impose a particular discourse on questions of immigration which suits their objectives. In their discourse, immigrants are weak and helpless figures, always victims, suffering discrimination and marginalisation. and unable even to articulate their grievances, let alone seek to remedy them. Only the White Saviours can do that.  Above all, no criticism of any aspect of immigrant community behaviour may be allowed, even by members of these communities, since that would only strengthen the Extreme Right and deliver the country into the hands of the Fascists. Or something.

But accepting that politics is often nasty, cynical and careerist, it seems to me that there must be something more in the attitude of the Notional Left towards immigrants than just that. I have a suggestion, which involves a detour into the subject of Empires, but not at all in the way you probably expect.

The modern western mind has a bizarre understanding of the concept of Empires: all the more so since Empires have been the main motive force and the main system of political organisation until very recently. The classic Empires (Assyrian, Persian, Roman, Mughal, Qing, Arab, Ottoman etc.) were essentially Empires of expansion from an imperial home region, by war and conquest, and to some extent by assimilation. The motive was often the seizure of wealth and territory, and in many cases Empires fought among themselves, and control of a territory by one would be followed by control by another. The vast majority of countries in the world today, were imperial territories not much more than a century ago.

But when people talk of “Empires” today, they usually have in mind a rather unclear impression of the short-lived British and French Empires in Africa, whose origins are much more complex, and actually much more interesting. Sea-borne Empires depend, of course, on seagoing ships, and it was the development of that technology that enabled the first European Empires in Latin America, whose original purpose was simply the accumulation of gold. The Portuguese subsequently established what is often described as an “Empire” but was in reality more a series of trading stations, with very limited political relationships with African kingdoms further inland. And the Dutch “Cape Colony” was in reality just a deep-water port at Simon’s Town for the Dutch East Indiamen to take on provisions and recuperate. Even when the British took the “Colony” away from the Dutch, during the Napoleonic Wars, they only really wanted the naval base.

I labour this point a bit because, as some useful maps from Wikimedia demonstrate, until about a hundred and fifty years ago, the major colonial power in Africa was in fact the Ottoman Empire, and Arab culture and Islam had been spread far down the East Coast of Africa by traders from the Gulf. The European footprint in Africa was small by comparison, and largely trade-related. The reasons why this changed have been obscured by the continued influence of the anti-colonialist movement of the 1960s, and the associated literature which claimed that Africa was “looted” by the colonial powers. (In fact, roughly the reverse is true: the Empires were a bottomless money-sink). Now, the real motives certainly included greed: Cecil Rhodes is only the most famous of the entrepreneurs who promised their governments that colonies would be profitable, only to have to be rescued by those same governments when they went bankrupt. And certain individuals made fortunes subsequently, from the gold mines in South Africa, for example. But the actual history of the triumph of imperial ideas at the end of the nineteenth century is much more complex and varied than that.

Some motivations were economic and strategic. The British, for example, whose economy depended on seaborne trade, sought strategic possessions where they could support their Navy, especially after the move to coal, and a secure supply of raw materials for industry. The French after 1870 saw imperial possessions as a reservoir of manpower and resources for the next war with Germany. As it happened, both were right, and the Empires probably saved Britain and France in both of the Wars of the twentieth century.

But some were more narrowly political. The vast new wealth created in Britain, France and Germany by their industrial revolutions created possibilities for the acquisition of colonies both to support their industry (as mentioned above) but more importantly as symbols of prestige and status in the world. To have colonies in, say, 1895, was the equivalent of having nuclear weapons and being a permanent member of the Security Council a century later. Thus, the Germans, late to the party after unification, had to make do with Namibia, Tanganyika and Rwanda for their “place in the sun,” that they thought their economic power entitled them to.

But although the full story of the rise and fall of imperialism as a doctrine is fascinating, and seldom given enough importance, I am concerned here with one of the aspects of western interaction with Africa and the Middle East—so going well beyond Empires as such—which gets hardly any coverage: the humanitarian dimension. And here, we begin to approach the core of the  relationship between western thought about the less fortunate parts of the world a century ago, and western thought about unfortunate immigrants today. And the correspondences, in terms of ideology, structures and type of people involved, are quite startling.

The first type of interaction, little remembered today, was that of missionary work: missionary foundations, often well-funded and politically influential, were the NGOs of their day. Now of course missionary work long pre-dated modern imperialism: the activities of Catholic missionaries in Latin America and Japan from the sixteenth century are well known. But the real impetus came with the rise of Evangelical Christianity in Protestant nations in the eighteenth century. The domestic urge to take the Gospel to the poor and deprived, to agitate for better working conditions and social reform at home, naturally enough developed into a concern for the condition of the rest of the world. Churches had already sent out “missions” to support the tiny European settler and trader communities around the world, but from the end of the eighteenth century, missionary organisations (like the famous London Missionary Society) were set up to take the Word of God around the world. From the beginning, missionaries emphasised education and humanitarian action, learning local languages and translating the Bible. Their work often brought them into conflict with other westerners who were present for more mercenary reasons.

Although it seems hard now to accept, there have been times when politics was dominated by morally serious people. In Britain, the Evangelical movement had a great influence on politics, as a number of famous politicians—including Gladstone, the great reforming Prime Minister—were deeply influenced by its ideas. The reforms of the time—education, conditions of work, rights to vote—were accompanied by a wish to be what later governments were to call “a force for good” in the world. Evangelicals had been extremely influential in successful efforts to end the slave trade in British possessions, and subsequently helped to persuade London to set up the Africa Squadron, which patrolled the coats of West Africa, trying to intercept slave traders and free the slaves. Such lobby groups overlapped with the enthusiasts for missionary work and doing good in Africa and elsewhere. Even later, when a formal British Empire was established, the colonial administrators who went out to run it partook of the same deeply serious moral fervour that brought about the political, social and governmental reforms in Britain.

Although they lacked the same Evangelical tradition, the French were not slow to follow the British in spreading Christianity. Hardly had the French wrested control of Algeria from the Ottomans and succeeded in pacifying it than they began building the Basilique of Notre Dame d'Afrique, which still dominates the skyline of Algiers today. Under Napoleon III there were expeditions and private colonial initiatives, but it was after the foundation of the Third Republic in 1871 that colonisation became a popular cause. As in Britain, it was supported by very large numbers of the PMC of the era, like the famous Socialist Jules Ferry, the architect of much of the French Empire in Africa, who argued in the standard vocabulary  of the time that “the superior races have the duty to civilise the inferior races.” (It was opposed by many on the Right, however, who feared it would interfere with the smooth functioning of the markets.)

The French of course, had the advantage of universal Republican principles dating from the Revolution, and the very universality of these principles meant that they could be applied with confidence to any situation, anywhere. They also shared the modernising zeal of the British, (abolishing slavery, spreading education and trying to improve the status of women for example.)

For something like three generations, the formal apparatus of the Empires of Britain and France, as extravagantly over-praised at the time as they have been extravagantly demonised since, rather diverted attention from a lot of the mundane everyday reality, which had more effect on ordinary peoples’ lives. As well as annexations, invasions, rebellions, discoveries of natural resources, treaties and the rest, there were colonial administrations beavering away, trying to introduce what we would now describe as”good governance.” They wrote laws, set up formal local government structures, abolished slavery, tried to “modernise” societies and customs, built roads and railways, and sent promising young natives to be educated in the mother country. And beyond them, were large networks of teachers, doctors, military officers, technical specialists and others, attracted by a whole range of motives from the most elevated to the most mercenary.

Which is to say that a colonial administrator or missionary who fell asleep a hundred years ago and woke up today, would be surprised at how little things had changed. As in the past, the media concentration on the more newsworthy elements of the relationship between the West and the Rest may make it seem as though it was all about conflict. In fact, as in the past, the major part of this relationship consists of “soft” rather than “hard” power, and is run today by development ministries and international organisations. It’s striking, to put it mildly, to see the sheer volume of activity funded by these organisations in just about every area you can think of: judicial reform, women’s rights, public sector management, legal drafting, independent media, police accountability, budget transparency, anti-corruption training, and a hundred others. If you doubt me, go to the websites of the EU, the UN, the OECD and the major donors like Canada, Sweden, Germany and the rest, and marvel at the pages and pages and pages of projects covering every aspect of life Over There. There are even consultancies to help you find projects, and newsletters to guide you, especially in Brussels. Or look at the sites of some national development agencies, and marvel at the neo-colonial arrogance of officials with no real experience hiring consultancies with no real experience to put together teams of people to interfere in the most sensitive areas of other peoples’ countries.

And go to an Embassy of a medium-sized western country in the Global South these days, and you’ll probably find that, apart from the Ambassador and a few Chancery staff, the Consular staff and possibly a Defence Attaché and a Trade specialist, the bulk of the Embassy’s effort is concentrated on issues loosely referred to as “development” “governance” “reform” “conflict prevention” and “human rights,” which are a collective code for attempts to impose a PMC agenda on the country. There will be a couple of enthusiastic young secondees from the Development Ministry, who need interpreters, some locally-recruited staff who have been educated abroad and speak English, which is the language that the Embassy will in practice have to work in, and most of the actual work will be contracted out to local NGOs staffed by young people educated abroad and speaking English too. The most important subject will probably be Gender: the Embassy may have a full-time Gender Adviser, an ambitious Gender programme, sponsor seminars of young, foreign-educated women, and every year award a special prize for a woman who has succeeded especially well in business. (The actual condition of ordinary women, especially outside the capital, will not be a priority: anyway, the problems are too big.) And then there’s a coup or war which nobody saw coming because they were doing other things.

Now if this sounds like a slightly ill-tempered accusation that nothing much has changed in attitudes since the colonial era, well, to an extent it is. And it’s arguably got worse: a hundred years ago, colonial administrators and missionaries were both better informed and less intrusive than their descendants. But it’s important to understand two things. One is that, as with the period of formal colonisation, people get involved for all sorts of reasons, and many have strong ideological or moral imperatives for what they do. The average First Secretary (Development) in an Embassy probably does believe they are “doing good.” And this in turn means that, like the rest of the PMC agenda, their projects are inherently virtuous and can never fail, they can only be failed. As I have always said, there’s no-one more dangerous than an idealist.

But the second point, directly related to the colonial era, is perhaps more important. During that era, there was a complete distinction between those working on the ground, and those working in organisations and governments in the home country. The Africa Office in London was run by people who in almost every case had never visited the continent. Likewise, the staff on the ground only occasionally came back to the mother country: a member of the Sudanese Civil Service, a highly-respected government organisation of the era, might be recruited in London, but would spend his entire working life in Sudan, entitled perhaps to a home visit a few times in his career. (George Orwell’s father came home once every seven years from India for example.) Likewise, the officers of Missionary Societies, or of the many voluntary organisations that sent doctors and teachers abroad, seldom left their home country.

This isn’t as bizarre as it sounds. A hundred years ago, simply getting from London via Alexandria to Khartoum could take weeks, and cost a fortune. Today, the Foreign Ministry official responsible for the Middle East might do an introductory tour in ten days. A century ago it might have taken six months. So in practice, the policy-makers, the funders, the political leaders, had only a very tenuous idea of what was happening on the ground, and those on the ground often did what seemed best to them. Often the two were in conflict, as missionaries and colonial administrators were on the ground.

Over the generations, of course, the moral seriousness of that era has faded. The sense of duty involved in bringing “good governance” or the “Word of God” to native populations has been replaced by the mechanical, and often aggressive, desire to oblige other parts of the world to reconstruct themselves in our idealised image. The Republican fervour that animated people like Ferry is now regarded with embarrassment in France, which has completely swallowed PMC-style Liberal ideology. What remains is precisely this empty, incoherent Liberal ideology, and a desire to force it on others through political and financial power, often for careerist reasons, and as a way of having an unacknowledged influence on sensitive areas of foreign governments. And what remains also, in a degenerate form, is the desire to feel good about oneself, to have a series of performative acts carried out abroad that will confirm what wonderful people we are.

Yet globalisation offers all sorts of new opportunities for performative, self-congratulatory initiatives. Rather than just sending people Over There, we can bring the raw material for our sense of pride and virtue Over Here, so we can strike additional moral poses. In effect, our leaders have imported the colonies into our own countries, so that we can patronise their people as we did a hundred years ago. Of course, the PMC is not going to get its hands dirty with the practical details, any more than the London Missionary Society or the Ministère des Colonies once did. They live almost as far detached from the performative ingredients they have brought over as their ideological ancestors a century or more ago. They leave the actual management of the situation to the often poorly-paid and unconsidered forces of the State (the town hall staff, social workers, police, medical personnel and teachers, who are at the sharp end every day) as well as charitable organisations, who are completely overwhelmed by the scale of the problems. Meanwhile, the PMC in their chic areas of the cities smugly congratulate themselves on how virtuous and superior they are, and how evil and despicable is anyone who is critical of their immigration policies, or even wants to talk about them.

And this, perhaps, is the ultimate benefit of the current policy of uncontrolled immigration: moral superiority, which comes this time not from anything you have done, but just from what you think. There are few pleasures more exquisite and delicate, after all, than sitting in moral judgement on others, without having to do anything practical yourself. Some decades ago, Michel Rocard, then François Mitterrand’s Prime Minister, famously said that France could not “welcome all of the misery of the world.” He was furiously criticised for saying this, but a moment’s thought shows he was right: how long would it take, for example, to find, transport to France, house, feed and clothe the hundreds of millions of destitute people in the world? Rocard’s mistake was to treat performative, normative language as though it was intended to apply to the real world, as though it was a question of what we should do, as opposed to the much more important question of what we should say. And evidently, the PMC are not exactly rushing to offer the miserable of the world a place in their own homes. (Always beware of people who say “we must” when they really mean “you must.”)

And now, I think, there are signs that this clever piece of moral superiority theatre is starting to break down. As always it’s impossible to say at what speed it will happen, but it is clear the process is under way. There comes a point where normative intimidation no longer functions. Ironically enough, all that would really be necessary is to listen to the immigrant populations themselves. They do not want anti-racism marches and calls to defund the police. They want jobs, opportunities and decent education for their children, security in their daily lives and freedom from the influence of drugs gang and religious extremists. (Any colonial administrator of 1900 brought back to life would have seen exactly what needed doing.)

Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, they’ll give an anti-racist and anti-islamophobia march, and nobody will come.