The House of Lords at its exceptional best

Archbishop George Carey has his detractors, but his article in the Times is a candid explanation of the ills that unfettered immigration is causing this country. The tone is so frank it shocks; the title reads: ‘Migration threatens the DNA of the nation’. Carey, of course, is not inciting anything as palpably evil as eugenics or as unworkable as uniformity between different ethnic and regional groups; he refers merely to the essence of Britain’s political, religious and social institutions.

Society is determined by the health of its institutions, and ours have disintegrated through apathy. Society is broken, though not in the manner that is often assumed. Political Correctness declared discussing migration taboo, and the cessation of debate has served only to neuter Britain’s tolerant and cosmopolitan institutions because they have become the preserve of those who can afford ambivalence or blind principle with regard to immigration. Legitimate, reasonable but controversial concerns have been marginalised to politics’ extremes, where the rational is manipulated into hysteria.