I was thinking on my afternoon walk this afternoon, why should we cling to the idea that the key to preserving a culture is maintaining state barriers? Some people claim that letting people come here from other countries somehow dissolves our ‘native’ culture, or that something is lost. But, it occurred to me, given that culture is what people create aes indeviduals, there is nothing that innately links one type of culture to one group of people or one place. In fact it seems to me that to try to do so is restrictive, as it would mean imposing a set of rules, saying the Brits do X and the French do Y, and it should always be thus. From this perspective, the state is as restrictive a concept as religion.

Part of my studies involves fans and fan cultures. There, culture is based on common interest and artistic creation; where you come from and what you believe (or what your parents believed) does not matter. Thus we need to escape this reductive, opressive view of culture; we need to allow people to express themselves as indeviduals, and to mix irrespective of nationality. That means abandoning concepts like state and nation, and evolving as one. That’s why I object so passionately to those who want to pull up the drawbridge and quit Europe: theirs, for all their claims, is an isolationist, anachronistic view which gets ud – humanity – nowhere. We need to escape the concept of state as integral to culture, ignore idiots like Farage, and work with our neighbours to evolve culturally.