Values and cultures are so different across the whole of Europe so it was always going to be an almost impossible job to integrate the immigrants – mostly Muslim – in Christian countries.

Throughout Europe, ruling political elites have failed to get to grips with a happy bonding between the indigenous populations and the Muslim immigrant communities. Race relations are in a turmoil because both groups feel victimised – immigrants mainly, because they have never been challenged to adapt to their new surroundings, and native populations because they feel they are being treated as second-class citizens in their countries of birth.

There is only one way forward and that is to take radical steps to promote integration of immigrants into a more enlightened way of living.

Mrs Merkel should be congratulated for recognising that this is the best way forward. Now we must hope that our political leaders are brave enough to do the same.

Letter in Express & Star, 20 October 2010

Should perhaps read “Merkel and Richard Desmond inspire Islamophobia in Devon”. The letter is lifted directly from an editorial in Monday’s Daily Express.

“Angela Merkel has got the point. Multiculturalism has failed, she states flatly, as she surveys western Europe going down under the tide of radical Islam. Rather than liberal society creating the utopia of harmonious cultural pluralism, it is being swallowed whole by the giant predator whose voracious mouth it encourages, in the spirit of tolerance, to open ever wider in the unshakeable belief of western liberals that the jaws about to snap shut around their necks are actually stretched wide in a smile.”

Melanie Phillips at her Spectator blog, 18 October 2010

Mired in guilt over the crimes of the nazis, most Germans have gone along with edicts of multiculturalism. They have not dared even to question whether Flooding their country with immigrants from very different cultures, often with contradictory values, and making little attempt to integrate them into mainstream society was a good idea. now continued migration on a huge scale and a high birth rate among Muslim incomers, mainly from Turkey, have led to a crisis in German society.

The country’s leader, Angela Merkel, has had to break a longstanding taboo by admitting multiculturalism has “utterly failed”. Mrs Merkel has spoken out in defence of a Germany defined by “the Christian image of humanity”.

Almost everything Merkel says about Germany could equally be applied to Britain. in our case it was guilt over empire that was used as the pretext to justify the multicultural experiment.

But all over europe ruling political elites have failed to achieve a happy accommodation between the expectations of indigenous populations and those of Muslim immigrant communities. now race relations are suffering terribly and both groups feel victimised – immigrants largely because they have never been challenged to adapt to new surroundings and native populations because they have been treated as second-class citizens in their own countries.

Radical steps to promote integration of immigrants into a more enlightened way of living are the only way forward and Mrs Merkel is to be congratulated for recognising so. it is time for British political leaders to do the same.

Editorial in Daily Express, 18 October 2010