The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. By Douglas Murray. Bloomsbury; 343 pages; $26.00 and £18.99.

“EUROPE is committing suicide,” says Douglas Murray in the opening words of his book. The British journalist thinks cities such as London or Malmo in Sweden have been irrevocably changed by migration. European culture has been diminished by a mixture of self-abnegation and political correctness, while declining Christian values have left most western European countries unmoored. Strands of Islam, he feels, are bringing with them the kinds of prejudices any liberal society should abhor. Terrorism, sexual assault and female genital mutilation are, in his telling, all on the rise.

Mr Murray backs up this bleak vision with reporting from squalid refugee camps in Greece; from asylum shelters in Germany; and from a conference held by the Sweden Democrats, a right-wing political party. The central event in the book is the migration crisis of 2015, in which over 1m asylum-seekers from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere came to Europe (most to Germany and Sweden). But Mr Murray’s views have also been formed by four decades in Britain. The Muslim population of England and Wales increased from 1.5m in 2001 to 2.7m in 2011.

The author does hit on some unfortunate truths. The migrant crisis of 2015 was unexpected, but also badly managed by the European Union. Laws to combat anti-Islamic hate speech tend to clamp down on free expression, and worsen the tensions. The policy of isolating anti-migrant parties tended to make them even more popular: when the Sweden Democrats were first elected into parliament with 5% of the vote in 2010, other politicians “treated the new MPs as pariahs”. The party is now one of the most popular in Sweden, scoring 24% in recent opinion polls. In some places the police or social services have indeed failed to act against pathologies in Muslim communities, fearful of being tarred with racism.

The book would benefit, however, from far more reporting. Meeting an Afghan asylum-seeker who had been tortured and raped by the Taliban, Mr Murray momentarily seems to understand the “generous instinct” that led European politicians to welcome refugees two years ago. But in support of his idea that Islam has no place in Europe, he lets fear trump analysis. He cites polls showing that voters worry about the number of immigrants, but not those showing that people vastly overestimate those numbers. He is prone to exaggeration: housing shortages in Sweden are “largely caused by immigration”, rather than decades of under-construction; NGO boats rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean do so “minutes” after they leave the north African shore (in reality, it takes hours or even a day for refugee boats to be found, which is why around 5,000 died or went missing on that crossing last year). He puts nearly all of the blame for the migration crisis on the shoulders of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who in 2015 “opened a door that was already ajar”.

As a result, he shows an incomplete picture of Europe today. Mrs Merkel was indeed temporarily damaged by the migration crisis, with her poll ratings falling. But her party still looks set to win the elections this autumn, and allies have won local elections, while support for a far-right party has fallen. Mr Murray argues that Marine Le Pen’s National Front, one of a handful of “thoughtful and clearly non-fascist parties” often described as on the “far right”, should be accepted into the mainstream. Yet Ms Le Pen’s bleak vision did not convince France’s voters to make her president, while her party now looks much diminished. Mr Murray is right to point out that many European politicians have not yet come to grips with how to manage migration in the coming decades. But Europe is a long way off from its last gasp.

We have changed the photograph accompanying this article after a complaint