Do Eurosceptics and Sun readers really hate foreigners?

Personal View
James Munson
4 x ENOPHOBIA", wrote John Gummer in his last column, "is an ugly characteristic to which island races are sadly prone." By island races he meant, of course, the British, although he might equally well have been referring to the Madagascars, Sardinians, Cretans, Icelanders, Irishmen or the inhabitants of Galveston Island or Novoya Zemlya.
But Mr Gummer had in mind his own people. His arguments need close examination because they are so typical of the intellectual porridge that is produced today in favour of "Europe".
By implication, if island "races" (an unfortunate choice of word surely) are more prone to xenophobia, continental nations are not. This is very odd. If it is true, why do so many millions of Frenchmen despise the growing number of Algerians and Moroccans in their midst ? Why do so many Italians dislike those migrants flooding in from North Africa.?
Mr Gummer refers to the "Euro-bashing" of the tabloids as an example of the "generalised dislike of foreigners." Poor Mr Gummer: where is his sense of humour? Tabloids are written tongue-in-cheek and are read in the same way. The "working classes" have depths of humour which the serious middle classes of this land can never understand. The ribald writing which the tabloids use when they attack the EU is as much designed to get up the noses of the pofaced middle classes as to express a valid point.
MR GLIMMER then jumps from the "ritual Euro-bashing" of the tabloids to "the sinister evil revealed in the Stephen Lawrence murder" and cites both as examples of "our antagonism and even our hatred for the stranger within our gates."
Like many faulty arguments, this one equates two different phenomena. From opposition to the EU Mr Gummer in one sentence has jumped to "the sinister evil". This "sinister evil" must be racism: the cocktail is complete. But there is nothing that unites disliking the EU, reading tabloids and going about murdering people because they are black. You might as well unite corruption in the City of London to reading the Financial Times.
With one silly phrase Mr Gummer has libelled millions of his fellow subjects who prefer tabloids to broadsheets. Where is tolerance, free debate, a multitude of opinions from which progress is said to flow? Why is it that religious people, or people writing for "religious papers" so often write in these vague, generalised abstractions?
Mr Gummer belongs to that age group among which Europhilia is most rampant. The young tend to accept or tolerate the EU as a fact of life. The elderly tend to dislike it for its corruption, inefficiency, and for its continued assault on those traditions, customs and usages that we have built up over centuries. Those in the 50 plus range are products of the 1960s when it was all the rage to "believe in something big". This is the generation for whom history was only something to be ridiculed and British identity, something to be mocked.
Surely the debate over this country's membership of the EU, let alone any decision to join "Etuoland", must be based on argument, logic and history. As an historian by training I naturally regard the last as most important. I remember that the last attempt at a single currency, the Latin Monetary Union in the late nineteenth century proved a disaster.
The EU is itself a product of history, of French neurosis after collaboration and defeat, of a German drive to European dominance that began with the defeat of AustriaHungary at KonigsgratzSadowa in 1866, and of Spain and Italy, nations who seek to submerge their histories of fascism and instability in a new political order — and a very profitable one it is.
History may be ignored, but it cannot be abolished. This is the circle that needs to be squared, if it can be squared, by men like Mr Gummer. But they must do so by sound arguments, not by mud-slinging.