An Immigrant’s Love Letter To The West

Konstantin Kisin Constable £18.99

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Konstantin Kisin is a Russian-born comedian who now hosts a popular YouTube channel and appears regularly in the media as a cultural commentator. He first came to this country as a schoolboy in the 1990s, and he loves it here. In fact, he loves it so much that he has written this book to warn us of what will happen if we fail to stand up for Western values and allow ourselves to be swamped by Left-wing ideology.

He’s not alone, of course. Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson and many others write and speak eloquently on this theme, but Kisin has a unique perspective. He’s an immigrant and, having grown up in Russia, he believes he has first-hand experience of what our fate will be if we succumb to the siren voices of socialism.

Kisin writes very interestingly about his own family’s experiences and uses his relatives’ grim memories of the gulag to reinforce his message that we should stop feeling guilty about race and slavery. 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 per cent 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 this country.

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 we’re going to swap God Save The Queen for The Red Flag?

Call me complacent, comrades, but I don’t think we’re that daft.