SPECTATOR DEBATE: When did we stop caring about our national culture?

Peter Hitchens will be speaking at the next Spectator Event on 9 July, debating the motion ‘Too much immigration, too little integration?’ along with Ken Livingstone, David Goodhart, Trevor Phillips and others. Click here to book tickets.

I used to go on left-wing demonstrations against Enoch Powell in the Sixties, and I’m still glad I did. I was against racial bigotry then, and I’m against it now. So it has been an interesting experience to find myself accused of ‘racism’, in many cases by people who were not born in those days. Likewise, I’m one of the few people I know who has lived, by his own choice, in more than one foreign country; I’ve visited, as far as I can work out, more than 50 others. I was born abroad, and so was my wife, so my children (lucky them) feature in the totals of those with two foreign-born parents. So I’m amused to be accused of ‘xenophobia’, often by people who’ve never been anywhere but Islington, Heathrow and the English-speaking regions of Tuscany or Lot-et-Garonne.