An Immigrant’s Love Letter To The West

Konstantin Kisin Constable €24 ★★★★★

Konstantin Kisin is a Russianborn comedian who now hosts a popular YouTube channel and appears regularly in the media as a cultural commentator. He first came to the UK as a schoolboy in the 1990s, and has written this book to warn what will happen if Western values are swamped by leftwing ideology.

He’s not alone, of course but Kisin has a unique perspective on this theme. He’s an immigrant and, having grown up in Russia, he believes he has first-hand experience of what happens when socialism takes over.

Kisin writes very interestingly about his own family’s experiences and uses his relatives’ grim memories of the gulag to reinforce his message. He’s an engaging writer with a nice line in self-deprecating wit, but I have two problems with his arguments.

The first is that he pushes them too far.

In an otherwise sensible chapter on free speech and the dangers of allowing comedy to be governed by political correctness, he goes on from lamenting the removal of Little Britain from the BBC’s iPlayer to claim that this explains ‘why 75% of BBC panel shows are populated with Remainers’. What on earth is the connection?

In similar fashion, he uses the 2006 murder of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya as an argument against press regulation in Britain.

But the UK is not Russia, and this is my other beef with Kisin: for all his dire warnings about socialism, is it really likely that The Red Flag will replace God Save The Queen? Call me complacent, comrades, but I doubt it.