The Strange Death of Europe

Bloomsbury 352pp £18.99 The Week Bookshop £16.99

“There are two books lurking in these pages,” said Clive Davis in The Times. The first is a “cogent” account of how, in recent decades, Europe’s “well-meaning but misguided” elites have turned a blind eye to the failures of integration and to the rise of Islamism. This, Douglas Murray suggests, has allowed extremism to take hold in some immigrant communities. Encased within these arguments, however, is a “diatribe” against mass immigration that is “so lurid, it often reads like an overheated Breitbart editorial”. In his opening line, he declares that “Europe is committing suicide”: decadent and godless, and rendered helpless by our relativism, we have become “easy prey” for a resurgent Islam. There is a “lofty, dismissive” tone to Murray’s views on ethnic minorities that “evokes a Peterhouse don sweeping aside the great unwashed while sipping a good port”.

“Gentrification comes for everything eventually,” said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian: poor neighbourhoods, peasant food, football. Now Murray is giving Ukip-style xenophobia the same treatment: polishing it up “for middle-class consumption”. Though “posher” and better read than your average bigot, he warms to the same themes: Muslim immigrants “raping and murdering and terrorising”, welcomed in by idiots “who’d gladly trade a few beheadings for some colourful ethnic restaurants”. Opponents of mass immigration have always been dismissed as racist, said Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. And The Strange Death of Europe “mordantly” exposes the many familiar “canards” that we have been fed on the subject – such as the claim that immigration brings great economic benefits, or that Britain has always been a “nation of immigrants”. Lacerating and elegant, this is a “brilliant” if “depressing” book.