Meanwhile, across the Channel, the English and Irish are rioting on behalf of a contrary sentiment. A son of Rwandan immigrants (did his parents come to the UK to flee machete violence?) went on a stabbing spree against little girls in Southport, and protestors are taking this as emblematic of mass migration. The attack was not accompanied by any terrorist manifesto, but nonetheless it is being “interpreted through the prism of race and ancestry. It wasn’t simply regarded as a horrible crime against particular individuals in a particular place, but instead as an attack on the white English community as a whole,” as Ralph Leonard writes. To not interpret such episodes in this way requires Western populations to do ongoing emotional work on themselves, an effort of political asceticism to deny themselves the natural tendency to “tribalism”. Love of one’s own is highly suspect among us, and this self-denial can shade into an “ethnomasochism” that is peculiar to the West. But people seem to be tiring of the effort.