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How interesting that this harmless-seeming slogan is now seen as in some way ‘extremist’ or ‘far-right’. What is wrong with it? What, above all, is ‘extreme’ about it? If we are a country at all, then surely we must put our people first? If we don’t, then what exactly is a country? In fact, if we don’t, can we consider ourselves even to be a country?

The whole idea of a nation is implicitly based on the truth that we care more about some people than we care about others. It is only possible to be effectively unselfish within a group of people that has some sort of family feeling. Such a feeling comes from a shared language, a shared history, a shared sense of humour, and is often also rooted in a shared faith and (in exalted moments) a love or reverence for landscape, music, tradition and other such things, often underestimated in their power to move and bind. A shared law helps.

That is not to say that we do not care about people in other countries. A strong and wealthy civilisation can and should do what it can (NB, what it can, practically and effectively, not what makes it feel good about itself) to help the oppressed or the impoverished of other lands. It should also be prepared to take in refugees, though by definition refugees are fleeing from something, not towards something, and cannot simultaneously be refugees and choosy about where they find asylum
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In fact, any country that is no a self-confident family, bound together by such ties, will not long be able to do any good either to its own people or to any other people. Britain is a telling example of this. As our national feeling for each other declines we become less able to look after ourselves. Step by step, this leads to national economic, social, cultural and military decline, and we cease to be able to look after others as well.

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