We Come in Peace?

They came to work, it was as simple as that. They came and worked and began new lives far from home. Factories, buses and a few in the NHS and yes, there was racism, there never won’t be, but there was also gratitude and support for people willing to uproot and help us rebuild our economy, so desperate for workers after years of struggle; the war babies were not yet grown, rationing was a recent memory and everybody gained – this wasn’t a one-way street. Besides, it wasn’t long before we acquired a taste for the exotic, albeit of the bravado-laden, ‘bring me the hottest curry you do’ variety and as the hard workers grafted and saved and bought houses and – yes – integrated, it all seemed to be going rather well.

So what happened; where did it all go wrong? As always the trouble and strife that has never left the Middle East rumbled along, but whatever our sometimes misguided interventions and, yes, our need, our greed for oil, it was the domestic power balance of the oil-rich lands that put our money in despotic hands, suppressed minority tribes and cultures and maintained poverty in the sight of enormous wealth. The west did not create Osama Bin Laden but under the banner of islam his disciples flew airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center a decade and a half ago and since then we have been at war.

The alarms were raised when it was revealed that the pilots and the suicide shock-troops that followed them came not from the foothills of Afghanistan, but from within our own ranks. The grandsons and daughters of all those bus drivers and doctors and factory workers turning their back on the west, which is all they have known, have been poisoned by an ideology alien to their host nation and like dormant parasites, long controlled by materialist medicine have developed immunity and proliferated. Why do they hate us? governments ask, belatedly noticing what their populations have been telling them for years.

Meanwhile the porous borders of the EU are being slowly plugged, one-by-one, by individual nations acting unilaterally to build fences, deploy troops and deter the tide of invasion from the east. But help is at hand, or at least it looks like it: “The European union’s first paramilitary force will have the power to take control over a nation’s borders without the consent of sovereign governments under plans to protect borders amid the present migrant crisis.” So says the headline in The Times. Wait, the border force wing of the – so we were told - non-existent EU Army can be deployed to shore up the breach? Or maybe, under the guise of an “integrated system of border management” it can impose a reversal of an individual countries border policy? That’s what those damned conspiracy theorists are suggesting. These days they look so much less like nut jobs.

At the same time Saudi Arabia – the source of much support and succour for the very terrorist islamist groups we fear and responsible for funding invasive mosque-building throughout the world – is setting up a 34-nation coalition of islamic nations to oppose extremism? Pull the other one, mohammed. With this coalition including Turkey, due to obtain a free pass to, er, control the EU’s borders it can’t only be me who fears what this could really mean. A Europe genuinely without borders may soon become a reality... but will it still be a union, or will we have to call it a caliphate?