Right and proper

Have you ever watched those property shows so beloved of daytime TV? In some of them you'll find some couple who want to move to some particular spot such as the Cotswolds and live in a typical Cotswold village. They'll talk about how they want the "traditional" village pub, village community and shops and so on.

The presenter then takes them around 3 or 4 typically Cotswold properties and the couple moan "this isn't what we're really looking for" before going on to explain they wanted something more modern and contemporary.

Duh! What did they expect to find in a typical Cotswold village?

In some of these shows you'll then find some over indulged couple who decide to build their dream home in just such a beauty spot - thus erecting a grotesque concrete and glass carbuncle that looks more out of place than Harriet Harman at an English Defence League meeting.

Although I have no idea what sort of property he lives in, I suspect that Peter Oborne is a little like those people judging by his latest ramblings in The Telegraph.

Mr Oborne, like those people who build monstrous carbuncles in the heart of English countryside or expect to find the latest Wimpey "CopyCat" red brick mock Tudor mansion in the centre of a Cotswold stone village as he seems to think that the environment should adapt to the demands of the newcomer rather than vice versa.

What Mr Oborne - and his kindred spirits in the liberal media - fails to grasp is that if you change the environment you spoil the very thing that made that environment attractive to those incomers in the first place. You can not have a typical Cotswold village if you allow people to build what they want, where they want it.

Similarly, you can not have a modern, liberal (traditional - not progressive) western democracy and give concessions to Islamic demands. They are totally incompatible - and this is the point which Mr Oborne refuses to grasp.

Like any other immigrants, Moslems were welcome to come to Britain as long as they understood that they had to adapt to this country and not expect it to adapt it to them. Once they started coming here in floods rather than dribs and drabs then that changed the whole dynamic and now they expect - not want, expect - us to change to suit them.

Mr Oborne dismisses this lazily as "Islamophobia" which it most certainly isn't - it is a rational response to unreasonable demands made by a group of people who were allowed into this country by a government who never asked us if that was what we wanted.

Well, we don't want it and to tell those who do to get lost is not "Islamophobia" - it is the only sensible thing to do. Just as the incumbents of a Cotswold village will fight tooth and nail to prevent a newcomer changing their village for ever then so the people of England are telling the Moslems newcomers that if they want to live here they adapt themselves AND their religion to suit our culture, our landscape and our traditions.

If we allow them to change it then we will lose the very thing that made it so attractive in the first place - but more than that, we will lose something that our fathers and grandfathers fought and died to preserve and which our ancestors spent a thousand years building.

Wanting to prevent that is not irrational - it is the only proper response.