The story of a happy wedding and a sad magazine

Bank Holiday Monday, North London, and the adolescent boy suddenly emerged from the shop doorway, a mobile-clutching friend beside him. “Excuse me,” he said, “But do you know the way to the Tinseltown café, please?” I showed him where to go, and he thanked me. If he had a gun, a knife, a cosh, a lack of respect for authority or gang membership, he kept them well hidden. Was this polite boy too, I asked myself on the way to Tesco, typical of modern society? Or are violence and abuse the only things that count? They’re certainly more exciting.

Two days earlier we were preparing to drive to my nephew’s wedding in Sussex when a magazine called The Salisbury Review dropped through my letter-box. Started up by the conservative philosopher, Roger Scruton and named after the Victorian PM rather than the cathedral city, TSR describes itself as an organ of thought, hoping to demonstrate that conservative opinion is “varied, fertile and catholic”.

The articles, specially chosen from the last few years of the magazine’s history, seemed to me to be neither varied nor catholic, and I had doubts about their fertility. But they certainly did represent a strand of thinking that I recognised from many letters, e-mails and Today’s Papers slots on the radio.

There was “Labour’s war against our cultural heritage” in one piece, “the assault on our traditional culture” in another. The superior and specifically English nature of the idea of the countryside, as stewarded by “the landowning class” was simultaneously praised and – since it is passing – lamented. Also regretted was the abandonment of the “idea of a common life” the rise of “unbridled individualism”, and in one purple Scruton passage, “social decay: the decline in religious observance and local customs; the rise of crime and violence; the pornocratic culture of the mass media, the desecration of love and marriage . . .”. At this moment of exploding spleen, my spellchecker had an problem with Scruton’s invented word “pornocratic” and insisted on inserting “pancreatic”.

There was too much education nowadays, all of it in pseudo-subjects, the law was encouraging social ills not combating them, it was becoming impossible to describe gay men as “perverts”, and no one these days appeared to understand why women priests were a bad idea. Und, as the Germans wearily put it, so weiter.

The theme, as you may have gathered, was the many ills of modernity; change was to be regretted. But if one alteration was worst of all, to judge by its recurrence, it was the dilution of identity and the destruction of tradition caused by immigration. The late Sir Alfred Sherman, writing in 2005, argues: “Mass immigration underlies some of our problems; the tap must be turned off: the flow of Muslims into countries like ours must be stopped.”

A poet called Raymond Tong avers that the optimum population for England is about 27 million and that, had there been an English parliament then, the English would have recognised long ago that the country was full. The Anglo-Saxons, suggests Scruton, have been robbed, or have robbed themselves, of their country.

There is no catholicity here, because everything must be getting worse. The Germans have a word for this approach: Zweckpessimismus, or “calculated pessimism”. Zweckpessimismus is the political “project” that informs the Daily Mail and most forms of right-wing populism. It waxes at times when all you hear or read about is gangs, murders and feral youth. The old ways are changing, the new ways are worse. What we need is someone strong to say: “Enough is enough!”.

The magazine tossed aside, we set off for the wedding. My nephew is my sister’s oldest son, and the product of an inner-city comprehensive, a campus university and of a mixed partnership between an Englishwoman and a Greek Cypriot. He was getting married to a half-English, half-Namibian woman. My brother-in-law sang a Greek wedding song. The bride’s Namibian uncle, living in America, brought greetings from two continents and a motto in one of the Ovambo languages. My sister read a poem.

Next week, in a way almost designed to provoke the Zweck-pessimists, the Commission for Racial Equality will hold an online conference entitled Mixedness and Mixing about the fastest-growing and youngest ethnic group in the United Kingdom – those of mixed race.

According to the 2001 National Census, the numbers of mixed-race Britons grew by 75 per cent during the 1990s; the evidence is that this trend has continued, and half of them seemed to be at the wedding: coffee-coloured kids with interesting hair were everywhere.

After the secular service their young parents – state-educated, victim-acculturated, dumbed-down and identity-blurred – applauded the Greek song and the Ovambo motto with the enthusiasm for life that that generation seems to possess in such abundance. The motto, translated into English, concerned the advantages of people moving from their home villages and families, because in so doing they created a wider, bigger family. It was anti-pessimismus.

Isn’t that also a way of looking at things? I am not trying to argue that gun crime is something we should ignore or that migration is free of problems, or that life isn’t hard for some or frightening for others. Just as there are many reasons to be hopeful, I also am made fearful by violent computer games and swearing kids. But I hold the magazine in one mind’s eye, and the marriage in the other, and am more convinced that the world we are building is represented by the latter.

So I want politicians who are not seduced by Zweckpessimismus. It worried me when the Shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, seemed to suggest over the weekend that firearm crime was in part the product of the Human Rights Act, as though a gun-toting gang member had somehow started off on the slippery slope of “rights” and fetched up thinking it was OK to shoot someone. This just isn’t true, Mr Davis. You’d be more honest if you admitted that you didn’t know why some people behaved so badly, and more honest still if you admitted that it really doesn’t happen very often. All parties, but particularly the Tories, should remind themselves of why it is so boring to be told about a polite boy in the doorway.