A yob is pissing up the wall of a Church, can of beer in one hand, the other scratching his empty cropped head. The yob in question is a member of the post-working class found in all major European cities. This is not England. This is Lyon, France. Le Monde reports this week that France too has a problem with alcohol abuse and public drunkenness; perhaps that explains the pissing on the church. Over the Summer, the Ville de Lyon banned the sale of alcohol after 10pm, even to adults, because of ‘l’alcoolisation massive et brutale sur les espace public’. Nothing wrong with a good drink though. I know it’s in my English DNA; as Shakespeare has Iago put it in Othello ‘I learned it in England, where indeed they are most potent in potting. Your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander-drink, ho!-are nothing to your English’. The Scots might demur.

Fine. No problem if the French want to have a go at real drinking as well. Islam forbids it which gives it an added value. The great Englishman Samuel Johnson quaffed wine by the bottle as well as upholding his culture and identity. One wouldn’t find him pissing on a church; he knew that what constitutes a culture and identity runs far deeper than drinking and eating habits and would have considered such an act sacrilegious.

But let’s not be too hard on the French yob. He is misguided, but is only really doing what he’s been taught to do by the political elite and middle classes who should uphold civilization but have decided to abnegate that responsibility. The politicians, the teachers, the media personalities; they have taught him to piss on his culture and history in schools and on television instead of offering the direction the elite should offer.

Because, on the whole, the French elite no longer uphold civilization and culture, but relish in a mode de vie, a lifestyle; or the froth of a culture. Though a rather pleasant and convivial froth, fine wines and French cuisine are no bulwark against the Islamic onslaught. Les Guignols de l’info is no match for the Koran. One is a divertissement, a piece of entertainment, and the other is a guide to governance and how to live; they are not two equally powerful cultural expressions. Muslims have a sense of rootedness, piety, the eternal verities, the importance of family and tradition, and demography on their side. Sarkozy can posture about being firm on Islam, he can legislate against it from a position of free-floating liberalism, but it isn’t going to go away. Unless he can offer a more meaningful alternative, the Fifth Republic is likely to be swept away by its stronger and deeper-rooted rival, first in the Banlieues, then in the centres of historic cities where the liberal elite actually inhabit. Take the non-event that is the burka ban. This law has had absolutely no effect. Walking around the banlieues of Lyon I saw innumerable Muslim women scurrying about the shops in them. Personally, I’ve no problem with this item of clothing anyway; it represents an unbridgeable difference between the Muslim immigrants and the indigenous population, so why try and legislate for them to be like the French. They are not like the French because they’re mostly African Muslims’; that’s the point. The problem is that the idiotic leaders of France-like the rest of Western Europe- have swamped the country with immigrants in the first place, not what items of clothing those immigrants wear. If the French really do want to reintroduce sumptuary laws though, why not start with tracksuit bottoms, they are far uglier.

France cannot hold Islam at bay with empty ineffectual laws. It needs to reaffirm its traditional identity, which is rooted in Christianity, Monarchy, and a noblesse which exists outside the ravages of economic globalization, and upholds fundamental, national values, the importance of honour, glory, strength and such like. The yob I saw pissing on the Church in Lyon is what happens when the working classes are denied a form of meaningful employment, and when forced to exist in a valueless global economic system instead of flourishing in a purposeful nation state where the market is controlled and secondary to identity. Religion is probably the core civilizational value; when it dissolves, stupid ideologies like globalization and feminism usurp its place. And what have they given us? Fragmented families, increasingly broken societies, mass immigration, foreign wars, spiritual desolation, an unhealthy birth rate, increased drug abuse, global capitalism and its concomitant booms for the few and crashes for the many, a cult of frivolity and a cult of ugliness. Perhaps we should even feel sorry for the yob. He’s no longer even able to live as part of a respectable working class community where everyone speaks his language. He is usually without secure employment and is on the front line of the multicultural onslaught implemented by liberal elites who don’t have to live alongside and compete with immigrants for low paid jobs. In France, the tacit cleansing-social, cultural, ethnic, call it what you will-is more pronounced than in England. I’ve noticed it in Paris, and it’s the same in Lyon; the legislators don’t mind flooding the country with immigrants, creating mass unemployment, and destroying traditional cultures, as long as it is confined to swathes of land on the outskirts of cities where they will never have to live themselves. Their liberal policies have produced graffiti, drugs, and obese misshapen creatures blasting RnB noise out of their cars. The people who most need to see this are the ones who rarely do. They are sheltered from it in a liberal bubble. But this bubble is fragile, the pressure on it is strong and growing. Wake up France! Wake up Europe! The bubble is bursting! As my spiritual guide put it ‘Where are the Camelots du Roi when you need them’!