Immigration

David Cameron’s attempt to renegotiate Britain’s EU membership has served as a powerful reminder of the case for leaving. The EU is designed in such a way that almost no sensible proposal can be passed. If one member state has a good idea, the other 27 members demand a price for approving it, or they demand concessions until it is completely watered down. If the leader of a country protests, the response is clear: What are you going to do? Walk away? You wouldn’t dare. The EU’s power-mongering has a cost. The euro has hideously distorted the economies of the member states that adopted it, and the abolition of so many border controls has worsened the immigration crisis — which, in much of Europe, has fostered a political crisis.

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that if Britain left the European Union, France could stop allowing British officials to make immigration checks on the French side of the border, and, his spokesman predicted: ‘You have potentially thousands of asylum seekers camped out in northern France who could be here almost overnight.’ Mr Cameron denounced the way prisons are being run by his administration: ‘Current levels of prison violence, drug-taking and self-harm should shame us all.’ Junior doctors went on strike again for 24 hours. Twelve men of Pakistani heritage were jailed for up to 20 years for the rape and sexual abuse of a girl when she was aged 13 and 14, over a period of two years, in Keighley, West Yorkshire.

It’s hard to recognise Sweden from the news reports we're reading nowadays. Yesterday, a 15-year-old at an immigration centre stabbed and killed one of its female employees in Mölndal, near Gothenburg. It’s the kind of story that shakes the country to its core. Sweden has taken a staggering number of unaccompanied children - some 20,000 in the past four months - so the government has to act in loco parentis. To keep them out of trouble, as well as educate and accommodate then. It’s a very tough ask, a job that many Swedes fear is simply beyond the competence of government. In such circumstances, appalling things can happen. A police spokesman had this to say: 'It was messy, of course, a crime scene with blood.

Ross Douthat’s 10 points about immigration is recommended reading for anyone sitting on the fence or who tends towards the open border position; even if you disagree, you’ll at least have an idea of what the opposition believe. Personally I agree with it all anyway and my opinions on the subject are as frozen in aspic as my musical tastes and haircut. Not that many people are likely to change their minds, of course, this being a subject more of the heart than the head, on both sides of the debate. I’d go as far as to say it that immigration has become a sacred idea, and that many believe multiculturalism to be a moral good in itself, whatever the end result.

Gstaad War and Peace has been in the news lately, so what was it that Leo wrote about all happy families being alike? Tolstoy came to mind last week right here in Gstaad, when I encountered probably the worst-looking family I’ve had the bad luck to run into in the past 79 years. I wonder if Count Tolstoy ever considered writing a saga about how ugly families are all different in their ugliness. It was early evening and I walked into the Posthotel, where Papa Hemingway once stayed while researching A Farewell to Arms. (He climbed daily on skins and schussed down after fortifying himself with glühwein.) Hemingway, alas, was not around, but a family that was obviously from the Gulf was. To call it a freak show would be too charitable.

I consider myself to be bad at making predictions, but one of the obvious things about the migrant crisis last year was that public sympathy for the Syrians, spurned in particular by the image of the drowned 3-year-old boy Aylan Kurdi, would soon evaporate. A large number of men from war zones moving into an ageing, peaceful and culturally very liberal society presents lots of ‘challenges’, as the Economist might put it; Sweden’s generous immigration policy has already been blamed for an increase in sex crimes against women, so there was a possibility that #refugeeswelcome might be blamed for problems in Germany.