But one of the reasons that Spain is not falling apart nearly so rapidly or violently as this magazine’s esteemed patron Taki’s native land of Greece”€”despite its similarly dire economic straits”€”is that Spain’s terribly expensive myths and institutions are holding the social fabric together.

In my native land of Great Britain, even the mention of national identity causes frantic handwringing lest it cause offense or stir up hatred. This is why the news that Mohammed was the most popular boy’s name given to infants in London”€”and second-most popular in the country”€”in the past twelve months went so little remarked upon by the press. 

So when I say that this makes me unhappy, am I giving voice to a sentiment that has its origin in either a preference for one ethnicity over another in a given geographical location? Yes. Is this because I am deeply racist or a devout Christian? Absolutely not. I am a happy uncle and cousin to several mixed race children of Anglo-Asian descent. My mother is an Catholic Australian of Scots-Irish descent, and my father is Anglican English. The Fiskes were Viking invaders arriving at the Battle of Maldon in 991 AD, while the surname Harrison apparently derives from the Saxon incapacity to pronounce the Norman French name Henri. Meanwhile, although I find the Christ myth particularly resonant, faith is something I have as little truck with in my spiritual life as I do my financial or personal ones. 

However, the increase of a particular belief and the people who follow it in the United Kingdom is not a happy or a good thing for the social fabric. Any religion that claims that its main text, the Koran, is the dictation taken from God himself by his prophet and includes the following words is not one I want to have any effect on the social mores of my country of birth:

Men have authority; over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in beds apart, and beat them.

It takes quite a lot of scholastic casuistry to explain away those sentences. 

There is likely some some validity to the economic arguments put forward by moderate conservatives, neoliberals, and social democrats that immigration can be an engine of economic growth. Just look at United States history. However, there is also a great deal to be said for multiculturalism on the nation-state level, by which I mean preserving and fighting for a nation’s cultural heritage. And as the rise in votes for the UK Independence Party at the expense of the Conservative Party shows, I am not alone in my thoughts.