Home To Roost?

Arguments are not improved by mentioning Andrew Neather. He was a speechwriter, for pity's sake. He was no one important.

This absurd van has toured areas with large South Asian populations while offering translation facilities in South Asian languages only. Yet the biggest overstayers are Australians, New Zealanders, and white South Africans.

Immigration by those last, Afrikaners as well as English-speakers, is a huge unreported story, not necessarily as a bad thing, but simply as a fact; London even has a congregation of the Afrikaanse Protestantse Kerk, which seceded from the Dutch Reformed Church due to "compromise" over theological support for apartheid, and having that congregation in London is a very bad thing indeed.

"Reverse colonisation" by the likes of Mark Carney, Lynton Crosby and the largely South African England cricket team is supposed to be mildly amusing, and more than mildly reassuring.

But the methods of Crosby, in particular, are confronting us with the stark reality that each of the members of the old "white Commonwealth" is a very different country from Britain, and has been for an immensely long time, certainly since well before the War.

Canada, Australia and New Zealand each retains the monarchy for the same reason that each of several West Indian and Pacific Island nations does so: because it suits her, not because it suits Britain. How does it affect Britain? It does not.

Independent countries with the Union Flag on their own retain it for their own reasons, not for ours, since we have none for their doing so; after all, even the Boers' revenge republic managed that, although the purported reconstitution of Rhodesia as a republic did not.

Although it must be said that there was never free trade even within the British Empire, still less within the Commonwealth or even the Commonwealth Preference Area, it is true that Australia (which has a long and living tradition of protectionism) did experience certain hardships after Britain acceded to the European Communities, as did New Zealand.

But that was in the faraway 1970s, and it is fanciful to suppose, as some people do, that they have been waiting for us ever since, like old maids still waiting for their sweethearts to come home from the First World War. Australia, like Canada, is in the G20, and Canada is in the G8. They stopped needing us a long, long time ago.

The Crosby-isation of the Conservative Party manifests just how foreign each of the Old Dominions is. If you do not believe me, then look at that van. Rightly denounced as un-British by UKIP, it is wholly in keeping with what has always been the political culture of Australia, all the way back to the Colonial period, which no one now alive can remember.

"Reverse colonisation" - economic, social, cultural, political, or in any of those cases demographic - is no more to be welcomed than any other surrender of national and parliamentary sovereignty, whether to the Executive or to the Judiciary, to the European Union or to the United States, to Israel or to the Gulf monarchs, to China or to the Russian oligarchs, to the money markets or to the media moguls, to separatists or to communalists.