A big welfare system also attracts the wrong kind of immigrants for the wrong kind of reasons.
Instead of being attracted by the opportunity to work, some immigrants are attracted by the opportunity not to work but still to receive money for this.
This is especially so if the only part of its tradition a society has retained is its class distinctions, or some echo of them.
Western Europe is also perhaps the least religious society on earth. Christianity, in Britain as in much of Europe, is forever "subverted", which in truth means it is defamed, reviled and mocked.
This is another dimension in which Europe flatters itself as being ahead of the rest of the world, whereas in truth it is merely out of kilter with the rest of the world, with its own history and with the vast preponderance of human reflection.
Schools, universities, local councils and an endless array of quasi-government bodies preach a bowdlerised, ersatz morality, policing language for sexist anachronisms, censoring Enid Blyton, preaching a detached, sterile ideal of tolerance. But amid normal people these blandishments have no authority.
The secular mind may rejoice at the post-religious moment of Europe, and especially of Britain. But an unemployed youth, with no tradition and no real education, with enough money more or less but not many prospects, with no source of moral authority and no help in understanding any basis for right and wrong, nothing to control an impulse, and knowing nothing of British history except that it was shameful and sexist and racist -- how exactly does this youth become integrated and whole, and indeed happy?
Why exactly is it that he doesn't help himself to a night's entertainment attacking ambulance officers and stealing TVs?
The British malaise, the European sickness, have no single, simple cause and no obvious answer.
But whatever it is that the gnomes of Brussels have been selling these past few decades, it doesn't work and it has toxic side effects, as Europe shows.
