ON THE WEB - Marc Sidwell's review of Mark Steyn's America Alone for the Social Affairs Unit

Mark Steyn should not write off Europe just because she has a nasty temperature - Marc Sidwell explains why: America Alone - Mark Steyn

America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It
by Mark Steyn
Pp. 224. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2006Hardback, $27.95

Is demography destiny? Mark Steyn, columnist to the world, certainly thinks so. In America Alone, he lays out a bleak future for European dhimmitude - fortunately brightened by Steyn's trademark wit. He points out our collapsing birth-rates, despite (and perhaps because of) generous welfare systems that rely on a successor generation to pick up the tab. He sets this alongside comparatively high birth-rates among Muslims and increased Muslim immigration to Europe as our politicians attempt to make up the welfare deficit. Shake it together with multiculti paralysis before twenty-first century Islamism and, suggests Steyn, you have a cocktail mixed by Molotov, the kind already being tossed around in the French banlieues.

However, Steyn's argument seems to have been given a remarkably easy ride up the bestseller charts. As his book starts to attract attention in the UK, where its predictions are a matter of vital interest rather a wry joke on a distant and reluctant ally, Steyn can expect a more searching reception. Johann Hari has already attempted a takedown of the book's thesis for the New Statesman, one of the few occasions I recall a critic engaging with Steyn on the data.

So how seriously should British conservatives take America Alone? Is it time to buy a one-way ticket to Colorado, or will Europe, the western motherland, refuse to be bundled into a burqa?

Read the whole article on the Social Affairs Unit's website, here
Also remember the interview Mark Steyn gave to The New Culture Forum last november,
Mark Steyn talks to The New Culture Forum