This past March, I linked to a Theodore Dalymple essay in City Journal on England's Virginia Woolf, in which the good doctor wrote:

Mrs. Woolf’s ideal college—the kind that would prevent rather than promote wars—would not be in any way elitist. It would “not [be] parcelled out into the miserable distinctions of rich and poor, of clever and stupid.” It would, rather, be a place “where all the different degrees and kinds of mind, body and soul met and co-operated.” It would be entirely nonjudgmental, even as to intellect. For her, the urge to compete does not inhere in man’s nature, nor does it result in anything other than violent strife. Henceforth, there is to be no testing oneself against the best, with the possibility, even the likelihood, of failure: instead, one is perpetually to immerse oneself in the tepid bath of self-esteem, mutual congratulation, and benevolence toward all.

Of course, it is a mistake to suppose that a hypothetical future state of perfect toleration means toleration in or of the present: far from it. Mrs. Woolf would not let her opponents, or those who think differently, live in peace: on the page after the last marked by Michel Leiris, she gives full expression to her slash-and-burn concept of cultural renewal: “No guinea of earned money should go to rebuilding the college on the old plan. . . . [T]herefore the guinea should be earmarked ‘Rags. Petrol. Matches.’ And this note should be attached to it. ‘Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance round the fire and heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. And let their mothers lean from the upper windows [before, presumably, being burned to death] and cry “Let it blaze! Let it blaze! For we have done with this education!”’”

This incendiary passage, Mrs. Woolf insists in her very next sentence, is not mere empty rhetoric: though she subsequently retreats a little from her incitement to arson by pointing out the self-defeating nature of that crime, insofar as the college she was proposing to burn down was necessary to train women to be able to earn the guinea of discretionary income with which to buy the materials to burn it down in the first place. What a dilemma! The passion, if not the logic, of her argument is clear and perhaps casts a new light on the deliberate destructiveness of the motives that lay behind her literary innovations. She was nothing if not a great hater of all that had gone before her.

She was far from alone back then in her hatred for tradition, of course. And seemingly little has changed since Woolfe wrote her "Rags. Petrol. Matches." manifesto back in 1938. In yesterday's The Australian, Simon Nixon writes that British "progressives" have largely been marking time since. Of course, these days, they've been getting help from some allies who'd like nothing more than to finish the job that Woolf and company started:

Plenty of people in Britain feel angry about Iraq and Lebanon but don't feel the urge to blow themselves up in planes and trains. Even allowing for the anger felt by fellow Muslims, it is still a big step to volunteer to strap on a suicide bomb.

The British political system offers a far more effective way to change government policy. You can vote the government out. So why do young Muslims embrace terrorism rather than democratic politics? How can people born and educated in Britain feel so alienated from its culture and values? The snag is that many never fully engage with British culture and values. Muslims make up the majority in many towns and in most big cities there are large Muslim enclaves. Even if the multiculturalists were to change their minds on the need for integration, it would be too late. Muslim leaders are demanding more separation from mainstream society, not less.

They want bank holidays for Muslim festivals and sharia law courts to rule on family matters. They may well get it. They are helped by the remarkable ambivalence of the liberal Left towards British culture and values: to Christianity, British history, free markets and free trade.

Above all, the Left is deeply suspicious of the institutions in which those values are embedded, starting with the family and extending via churches, schools, businesses, clubs, right through to parliament and the monarchy. To the Left, Britain's social institutions are bastions of privilege that must be remodelled or destroyed to make way for multiculturalism. The resulting cultural war has left British society brutalised and infantilised, and wide open to attack.

Why should British Muslims respect a culture that has no respect for itself? They are quite rightly horrified by the degeneracy of much of what passes for British culture today - the soaring teenage pregnancies, the rampant drug use, the violent city centre no-go areas on a Friday and Saturday night - and they don't want any truck with it. They see that multiculturalism quickly becomes no culture, which makes them all the more determined to hang on to their own.

And they see - as I saw in Birmingham last year - a Left-liberal elite that is so craven in its desire to appease minorities that it has lost the resolve to confront the dangers it has unleashed.

In Tech Central Station this weekend, James Pinkerton wrote, "as we have seen so often in the past century, lefty politics have a way of boomeranging, generating unintended consequences of the bitterest kind". Nowhere is that more obvious than England's multicultural meltdown.