Self-hatred is neither attractive nor constructive. It is not only insincere but unjustified

The British, Dalrymple writes,

are fortunate enough to be the inheritors of a tradition as great as (though not necessarily greater than) any. Why reject it?

He writes from India, where he says

it is far easier to find genuine and knowledgeable admirers of British culture than it is among Britain’s own political class. This is the saddest commentary on the condition of England.

In Great Britain, says Dalrymple, you find

officially-sponsored indifference or hostility to anything which might be considered part of the European and British cultural and religious heritage.

This is combined with

a tender regard for any non-European and non-British cultural heritage.

For example,

no British minister would go to Brick Lane in East London and say it was horribly Bangladeshi; but a British minister had no compunction in complaining of an institution that it was horribly white.

English intellectuals, Dalrymple points out,

have long harboured a hatred of their country and its culture. The attitude has deeply infiltrated the political class, and has come to affect legislation.

Moral exhibitionism

But it is

insincere. Those who adopt it are not admirers of other cultures, for to admire other cultures it is necessary to study them. To know another culture is not a matter of slipping down once in a while to a restaurant that serves its cuisine: it is very hard work indeed, and the more different that culture is from one’s own, the harder the work it is.

When members of Britain’s political class express their adherence to multiculturalism,

they are not expressing their love of other cultures, they are expressing hatred of their own. It is this which explains the discrepancy in the way a Christian who derides Islam can expect to be treated by comparison with a Muslim who derides Christianity.

The hatred of that section of the political class for their country’s culture, traditions and past is insincere in another sense, Dalrymple notes.

By expressing that hatred, they imagine themselves to be exhibiting their moral superiority for all the world — and especially the intelligentsia — to see.

Rubbing their noses in diversity

Another factor in the political class’s hatred of their culture is that it is politically advantageous. Mass immigration,

with the concomitant ideological glorification of the multicultural society, has had as its purpose the production of a permanent change in the nature of the British population, which can be relied upon to vote for ever for the kind of politicians who brought it about. It is one thing to encourage immigration because your commerce is so strong that there is a labour shortage; quite another when neither of those conditions obtains. Britain’s commerce was never strong and there never was a labour shortage. The country imported people while there was still mass unemployment (disguised as sickness) to create a vote bank for those who brought this about.