Time to Emigrate?, by George Walden

After this review, George Walden and I will never again chat companionably or break bread together, as we have done, at a posh restaurant in Cheltenham. He paid and was courteous and stimulating. But he seems not to respond civilly to people who disagree robustly with his Grand Ideas. Before he jumps to assumptions, let me say at once that I don't believe his latest book is racist. Walden is a civilised man with a cosmopolitan shine. This, however, is a deeply felt, savage (as in primitive) protest against the racial and cultural mêlée that is London and Britain today.

One could dismiss Walden's polemic as a dump by a grumpy old man, which it is at a first read. It lacks the authenticity of, say, Peter Hitchens, a more evocative, nostalgic romantic. But Walden's forlorn and miserly tract catches the zeitgeist, and for that reason will be lauded more than it deserves. For that same reason, it behoves his opponents to provide a credible critique. I can understand some of Walden's fears but refuse to endorse his pessimism or inhabit his Armageddon.

Time to Emigrate? is written as a loving letter to a son who is thinking of leaving these isles to protect his idealistic young wife and child. They lived in a multiracial borough, bought into the metropolitan hub but were broken by endemic disorder. London, for Walden, was once a cultivated place with benign "natives" and is now a jungle overrun by immigrant barbarians. He tries hard to appreciate the good immigrants who serve him so politely at Waitrose but when a cab driver tells him "they have hi-jacked the place", Walden experiences one of his many epiphanies and realises that native sons and daughters do need to seek out genteel new pastures. The presumption is staggering - his discomfited white family has the right to emigrate, but more non-white migrants fleeing wars and famines are not welcome.

Walden never explains why he has included incidents "that did not necessarily happen" to his family. James Baldwin wrote a brilliant salutary "letter" to his nephew in The Fire Next Time, warning the boy about US racism. It was the real thing and didn't play mind games with readers as Walden has chosen to do. Was his grandson attacked by hoodies in some lawless borough? Is it true nobody came to his granddaughter's party because she was white? If this happened, Walden has a duty to let us know. If not, this is very poor fiction, an inferior Blade Runner.

Agreed, at times we all wish we could leave Britain, including immigrants. Overpopulation, coarse behaviour, exorbitant prices, filth and crime take their toll. The chasm between extremist Muslims and all other Britons is unsettling and scary.

Some crimes are committed disproportionately by incomers and their children. But criminals, as Walden admits, come in all colours, and yet there he is, on his soap box: "there can no more be any question of a politician stating openly that there is a link between crime and immigration than you can get up at a family Christmas and say your mother-in-law is a mean-spirited old bitch". Coming from Richard Littlejohn, you wouldn't flinch at the sentiments or writing. But Walden is a self-declared elitist intellectual.

He repeats the tiresome refrain that such views are never allowed in the public space, when anti-immigration experts are never off the media, telling us how they are not allowed to express their "honest". views. It is pathetic, this self-victimisation - especially for a High Tory.

He shoves aside any responsibility for the nihilistic landscape, partly the result of his government under Thatcher. The Leeds bombers are British men, as are white thugs who ruin our lives - all fruits from trees planted by Thatcherites and nourished by Blairites. Walden is dislocated, and reminds me of Peregrine Worsthorne who wrote in 1997 that "Britain is beginning to feel like a foreign land and not a very familiar one either." These men are out of time and place. They cannot cope with the Britain modernists are making, tough but exciting and creative. They could emigrate but that will not bring relief. There is no place on earth now that can reproduce Walden's "golden era" of no immigrants, no Muslims, no terrorism, no drunks, no crime and no diversity.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's 'Some of my best friends...' is published by Politico's