The Beatles first visited the United States in 1964. They were the tip of the spear of the so-called British Invasion, the first of several pop groups to take America by storm. Fifty years later, Britain would export another boy band also named the Beatles. However, instead of touring the United States, they travelled to Syria, where they beheaded journalists and aid workers in cold blood. You could not invent a better signifier of British decline.
This cultural transformation does not reflect British hearts and minds. As a nation, we weren’t persuaded by fist-banging muftis or gun-toting clerics. On the contrary, the shift in our society has been imposed from the outside. A cocktail of involuntary impositions, mass legal and illegal migration, a Pravda programme of censorship, and the cowardice of our leaders have rendered swathes of British society unrecognisable. In this regard we stand apart from our European neighbours for our exceptional naïveté. We all know of Jihadi John, but as the Italian comic Nicholas De Santo remarked “nobody has ever heard of jihadi Pavarotti.”
