SOMETHING is "burning" in Britain and it is not love. The land of empire-makers, it seems, is becoming less White.
Britain is fast losing its loving feeling. Stoking the fire are not the average men and women ambling along London's Oxford Street.
Some are educated, though not learned enough to know the dangers their racism is causing. Novelist Lionel Shriver — and she is not even British — is one such.
Writing in the August issue of The Spectator — a magazine once edited by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who himself is not averse to racist statements — Shriver fears that Britain would lose its whiteness.
Although she herself is an immigrant of sorts from America, she excuses herself on the grounds of being White. Her worry is that "foreigners" or "the other" are flooding the White country. Never mind if the non-Whites were born there or have been living there for long.
To Shriver, they are not Whites and they should not be there. The natives of Britain are surrendering their country to foreigners, she shrieks.
All Britain needs is a few alarmist Shrivers to turn it into a racist cauldron. Little wonder Kenan Malik of The Guardian calls Shriver's narrative the language of the British National Party. He is right.
Her language isn't very different from Germany's AfD or Marie Le Pen of France. "We are a political and territorial species." We wonder who Shriver's "we" are. Humans or just White Britons? Deep into her article — "Would you want London to be overrun with Americans like me?" — she reveals her Anglo-Saxon intent.
"For Westerners to passively accept and even abet incursions by foreigners so massive that the native-born are effectively surrendering their territory without a shot fired is biologically perverse."
Without a shot fired? Biologically perverse? Shriver may have had years in school but for sure she had missed the experience of being learned. Shriver isn't the only author stoking the racist fire.
David Murray, an Oxford graduate and author, is similarly xenophobic. If ever there is a gentrified racist, he is one. We must begin to worry about what they teach in Oxford University. Murray is troubled that London boroughs are fast becoming little India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Somalia or Lebanon.
Never mind again, if the "foreigners" are really British born. They are simply not White enough. He is worried, too, that Christianity is witnessing a collapse. Never mind if Britain has become godless by choice.
Or for that matter Europe and America. No nation can be secular and religious at the same time. Be that as it may, Murray is on a hunt for an excuse to explain Britons' loss of faith in Christianity.
The Shrivers and Murrays of the world must be told that there is nothing British or European about Christianity. The land of its birth is in the Middle East.
If Britain can so happily import a religion from the region and call it its own, it can surely do the same with the Middle Easterners. But there is hope for Britain.
If The Guardian is right, nine out of 10 Britons disagree with the claim that to be truly British you have to be White. As for two-thirds of Americans, the declining share of the White people in the country is neither good nor bad.
Oxford University may not teach it, but Michael Jackson did. It doesn't matter if you are Black or White.