Douglas Murray

Until last night I thought Danny Boyle was the respected director of a film about smack-heads. But after seeing the Olympics opening ceremony I now realize ‘Danny Boyle’ is the nom de guerre of the satirical team of Rod Liddle and James Delingpole. In their capable hands what might have been merely an opportunity to showcase Britain became instead a hilarious example of our national humour. This included pretending that our national life only really began with the Empire Windrush, that our national religion is the NHS and that our leading icons include – and I never thought the boys would get away with this one – Shami Chakrabarti. It was so funny I almost wept at times. But then I reflected on their choice of music and became solemn.

Two events this week have highlighted, from very different places, an identical problem. In Bulgaria on Wednesday a bomb was detonated on a tour bus carrying Israelis. Six people were killed and many more badly injured. On Friday a couple from Oldham, Mohammed Sadiq Khan and Shasta Khan, were sent to prison for attempting to put together an explosive device and planning to attack Jewish targets in Manchester. What links these two events across a continent? The answer is ideology. It is an ideology which deliberately targets Jews as Jews. In the West many people continue to try to pretend that it is not about Jews at all, but about Israel, or about houses in East Jerusalem or the presence of Jewish communities in the West Bank or any other excuse that people can come up with.

As the world turns to London it may still imagine us a serious, taciturn people. If so, the world is in for a shock. For Britain has become a land all but denuded of grown-ups. We are in the grip of a full-scale, double-dip regression. We were not surprised that our Prime Minister should be addicted to a video game called Fruit Ninja. His predecessor, then in his late fifties, claimed to enjoy listening to teenage pop bands and had a wife who held ‘slumber parties’ for other women in their forties. Stand in any British high street and you’ll see the people to whom these politicians hope to appeal. Most middle-aged British men and women dress as if auditioning for a prequel to High School Musical. Their tastes are indistinguishable from those of adolescents.

I have a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal about the case for prosecuting certain of the Bloody Sunday soldiers. I am aware that it is not a popular argument, and one that most British people tend to shy away from. It also seems to provoke a certain amount of confusion. On a radio programme the other day, discussing potential prosecutions, the interviewer went so far as to ask how or why somebody who is ‘right-wing’ could be making these points. Firstly of course, this is a straightforward category error (‘right-wing’ equals bad and mean and therefore any ‘right-winger’ must be in favour of shooting civilians). Secondly, I think that there is in fact a vital conservative case for carrying this through to the stage of prosecutions.

So the 2011 census results for England and Wales are out. And sure enough it turns out that the last decade has seen the largest population increase in any decade since records began. Twice that of the previous decade. Woe betide anybody who does not welcome this with a punch in the air and a few ‘Woohoos’. Despite having no democratic mandate for this societal transformation — indeed acting against public opinion on the matter — the last Labour government oversaw an immigration system which either by accident or design went demonstrably out of control. Naturally, some people will welcome this. They will say that another city the size of Manchester springing up every year is exactly what this country needs. In which case I hope they live there.

Jonathan has already mentioned yesterday’s Fiscal Sustainability Report from the Office of Budgetary Responsibility. He appears to welcome mass migration both now and as an inevitable part of our future. Perhaps I could put a dissenting view? Migration itself can be a good thing. But mass migration (in the numbers it has happened in recent years in Britain and many other Western countries) is a bad thing. It strains our welfare systems, encourages people to ghetto-ise rather than assimilate and creates not so much a multi-racial society as a country made up of different mono-cultural centres. It causes a breakdown in trust both between and among communities, and erodes the possibility of any collective history or common culture.

It has just been announced that the police are going to launch an investigation into the Bloody Sunday deaths. It comes after the Police Service Northern Ireland and the Public Prosecution service reviewed the evidence of the Saville Inquiry. There will be a lot of comment about this in the coming days, but I think a couple of things are worth noting at the outset. Firstly, there can be no doubt that a number of soldiers deliberately shot and killed innocent people that day. Secondly, there can be no doubt that they then lied and misled an exceedingly long and costly public inquiry set up precisely in order to find the truth of what happened that day. As it happens, the Saville Inquiry provided ample opportunity for people to tell the truth.

We all know what a city does when a local boy or girl has done good. But what do you do when the local boy turns out to have done very bad indeed? This is the dilemma facing the Georgian authorities in the city of Gori, not far from the boundary line of South Ossetia. For as well as being the first target of Russian forces during Vladimir Putin’s 2008 invasion, Gori is best known for giving birth to Joseph Stalin. It is now two years since the large statue of its most famous son was taken down from in front of Gori’s town hall. But there remains a dilemma over what to do with his opulently preserved birthplace and the connected museum commemorating his life. The Georgian authorities are eager to look towards Europe and away from their Soviet-occupied past.

The late Auberon Waugh advised his readers to reflect on the case of David Flannigan when considering the munificent compensation often awarded to people after awful events. Mr Flannigan had been estranged from his parents for two years before the night of 21 December 1988, when Pan Am Flight 103 fell onto the family’s house in Lockerbie, killing all but one other member of his immediate family. Through a thoughtless, inhumane, process of compensation Flannigan (who had been a spray-painter) became a millionaire. Just over five years later, at the age of 24 — after fast cars, drink and drugs — he was found dead at a beach resort in Thailand.   I thought of Flannigan again this morning when reading reports of the death of Rodney King.

Even for people on the same side of an argument, opinion is often wildly divided. Among those of us who believe government should support civil marriage equality, this morning’s papers (£), and specifically Church of England fears that the religious will be ‘forced’ to carry out same-sex weddings, re-opens a fundamental division of opinion.   The coalition’s proposals rightly only relate to civil marriage equality (that the state should make civil marriage between same-sex couples equal to civil marriage between opposite-sex couples).