Douglas Murray

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).

Back in November I wrote a cover story for The Spectator arguing that the trend in North Africa for those countries which had thrown off their dictators appeared to be more in the direction of Winter than that of Spring. Since then there have been many developments, including the first round of the Egyptian Presidential elections where the field is led by the Muslim Brotherhood candidate.  And now, in a new development reported by Raymond Ibrahim over at the Gatestone Institute, we learn about the first beheading of an ‘apostate’ convert to Christianity over in Tunisia   I recommend you don’t watch the video that he links to in his blog. His summary is enough:-   ‘A young man appears held down by masked men.

What a strange place Britain has become. You sometimes need some time away to realise quite how strange. Take yesterday’s main story: the latest paedophile rape-gang case from the north of England. The judge in the trial told the men, during sentencing, that they had selected their victims ‘because they were not part of your community or religion’. But that is the sort of fact which causes the most terrible contortions in modern Britain. The perpetrators were all Muslim men of Pakistani origin and the victims all underage, white girls. We know exactly how we should think, how loud would be our proclamations and our desire to analyse the ‘root-causes’ were this situation reversed. But this way round? Gulp.