Chuggers

Charity. Begins at home, by all accounts. And an Englishman’s home is his castle, yes? Ipso facto my charity is in my gift and I get to choose on whom it is bestowed. If that’s not the case, if I am required to give, it is no longer charity but an imposition. I have spent a long time amassing the nothing that I’ve got. It’s just about enough to allow me not to have to rely on others, which is all I’ve ever really wanted. But to give to others what you decide is my duty, you would take from me the most precious thing I possess? Angela Merkel seems to think so.

Charities here at home have been badgering old and sick and senile people into an earlier grave by guilt-tripping them into giving everything they have. Plenty of recent cases show the extreme lengths to which large charities, whose executives often earn fortunes, abuse their status. When charity becomes an industry competing for alms they act no better than the chuggers on street corners, badgering people about whom they know nothing to resort to evasion when they may otherwise have offered a few pennies voluntarily. Aggressive charity – and I include Comic Relief and its imitators, here – is no charity at all.

No man is an island, they say, but Paul Simon sang otherwise. The melancholy solitude of which he crooned was no self-pitying cry for companionship but a longed-for release from the strain of human relationships. I am a rock; I am an island. And so is Britain, and a significant part of our national character is shaped by that geographical accident. It is utter rubbish to talk of Britain being a nation of immigrants, as if we have always allowed anybody to enter without challenge, when in reality our solid sense of identity was largely as a result of our jealously guarded coastal borders and a resistance to rapid change.

Refuge, yes; if our near neighbours with which we share much history and lineage were in deep trouble we would open our arms and give generously of our resources to shelter them until they could return home. But to be aggressively bullied into letting people whose entire heritage is at odds with our values cross the whole of Europe and set up home here forever? Mobs of militant migrants in Budapest chanting the name of the country they wish to ‘take refuge’ in doesn’t smack so much of desperation than demand. Are they not safe in Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Croatia, Austria...? Or are Germany, France Sweden and the UK the only countries with rich enough pickings?

The plain facts are that a majority of most western European populations are already suspicious, if not fearful, of the changes created by the EU’s open borders. We did not ask for any of this and the prospect of further hundreds of thousands of unknown and mostly muslim immigrants flooding in and overwhelming services already past their optimal capacity is unedifying. We know what happens to an area when too many newcomers arrive too quickly and we have plenty enough uncontrollable ghettoes already. How long before these become lawless, armed, police no-go islands of their own, re-creating the very same sort of regimes they fled from?

Merkel, solving 'the English problem'.

We would not be helping refugees escape persecution - they did that when they crossed over into Turkey - we would be importing the means of our own decline. Resentment towards immigrants, even those we invited, is at a level I have never seen before in my life. Ordering us to be charitable towards them is like shaking a Shelter begging tin in our faces just after we have been mugged by a street dweller. Charity begins at home, Frau Merkel and an Englishman’s home is his castle, so excuse us if we pull up the drawbridge and politely ask you to fuck right off.