Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Woke

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams – very much one of The Good People, always keen to let the rest of us know where we’ve gone wrong – has penned an article in the Guardian about the artistic talents of migrants (and asylum seekers in particular). Somehow, this is supposed to override any doubts we might have about mass uncontrolled immigration.

In an attempt to answer any objections before he makes this extraordinary argument, Williams, in his opening paragraph, serves up some perfunctory remarks about the grooming- or, more accurately, rape-gangs scandal – ‘an undeniably appalling series of events, institutional failures and victim-blaming’. With that tidied safely out of the way, he lets rip. I don’t think I’m being unfair or misrepresenting his intent when I boil down the hot take that follows as ‘but look at the nice stuff some migrants make’.

As the ‘progressive’ world collapses, we must spare a thought for those, like Williams, left gasping in the rubble. They’ve had such a long run of criticising others – sometimes not altogether unreasonably – for being trapped in longing for a never-never golden age. Now the boot is very much on the other foot. Time, the old ratbag, will do that to people.

What we are seeing here is, I think, the slow demise of the long 20th century (and about time too, as we slide into the second quarter of the 21st). The Rowan Williams iteration of Anglicanism, a kind of less subtle version of one of William Shatner’s speeches in Star Trek, or of the lyrics to ‘Ebony and Ivory’, was never much of a goer even in the years that started with a ‘1’ and a ‘9’. It is blatantly laughable now.

‘According to this picture’, says Williams, referring to the ‘narrative’ he thinks is being nefariously spun, ‘migrants are eager to experience the benefits of our society, but they are also out to undermine it, because they come from cultures whose values are dramatically different from our own’.

While I’m reluctant to take a pot at ‘Boomers’ in general, this stance is very clearly that of somebody who was 18 in 1968. Ironically, the article demonstrates the inability of the progressive mind to understand the vital importance of culture. People don’t commit crimes because of their ethnicity, after all. But cultural background can play a role. Where does Williams think the rape gangs originated? Clue – they weren’t Buddhists.

But fear not, because migrants are bringing cultural enrichment. Yes, some of them do bring some nice baubles. Yet for Williams that somehow trumps the problems caused by the current immigration crisis. He persistently conflates the genuine refugee fleeing persecution with the illegal economic migrants and chancers arriving on boats from the barbaric hardships of, er, 21st-century France.

The peppering of progressive buzzwords and phrases in the article is telling. The rape-gangs scandal has been ‘transformed into a narrative’, apparently, by nasty demagogues. And there’s been lots of ‘myth-making’ and ‘rhetoric’, of course.

The piece is a fascinating example of a blinkered mind, trapped in the class-fuelled prejudices of a vanished age. It has far less to do with migration as such than the fact that high-status whites – that is, people like Williams – despise low-status whites. Everything is passed through that filter. The most important factor in Williams’s calculations is that low-status whites are being horribly gauche again. As always, they are being misled by myths (because they supposedly don’t have minds of their own, just putty moulded by nasty ‘rhetoric’).

I could feel this kind of disdain radiating off these types when I was a child, and it’s only got worse since. Much worse, in fact, over the past decade. When it’s allied to the piety of the Christian church, Williams’s classist disdain is even more enraging, particularly when he starts wibbling about an art installation he recently enjoyed, ‘based on an ancient Syrian model boat carrying the small images of three goddesses’.

‘Look at these pretty trinkets’ is not an appropriate response to Britain’s mass-immigration crisis and the problems it has caused. The progressives’ obsession with exotic food and finery is not only deeply glib – it is also patronising to the migrants themselves. Humans make nice grub and aesthetically pleasing things everywhere in the world. So what?

As he warms to his theme, Williams starts rambling bizarrely, telling us: ‘Many of the most characteristic forms of Western Medieval architecture – the shapes we see in Westminster Abbey or the Houses of Parliament – owe their development to the to-ing and fro-ing of engineers and architects between Western Europe and the Middle East during the Crusades.’ Does our Rowan really consider that a massive invasion of the Middle East and loss of life in centuries of bloody strife was worth it for some natty architraves?

He goes on: ‘And we find it easy to forget that most of the stylistic repertoire of modern Western popular music would be unthinkable without the black American tradition that itself adapted and reshaped African idioms in the new and terrible world of enslavement’. What is the old fool blathering on about? If we were all sticking our fingers in our ears and jigging along to ‘John Barleycorn’, it would certainly be different – but surely neither necessarily better or worse? And what does it have to do with the small boats on England’s south coast?

Appealing artefacts carry no moral or political weight whatsoever. Some of the most horrible cultures have knocked out some of the most spiffing art. There has been gruesome human suffering inflicted under really nice mosaics. Quite what this is supposed to tell us about the state of borderless Britain is really anyone’s guess.

It’s a sad and desperate hole that progressives like Williams now find themselves in. Expect to see a lot more of this kind of wild flailing as reality reasserts itself. It ain’t gonna be pretty.

Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter, author and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.