Now, is Britain an anti-Semitic country? Absolutely not. In the 1930s or in the 19th century, the really shaping influence was national culture, so you could ask, is Britain anti-Semitic? Is France? Is Germany? Today we don't have national cultures, we have a multichannel, global culture. The neighbours of the 7/7 suicide bombers had no idea that they'd been radicalised. We are in an age where ten terrorists in Mumbai can monopolise the attention of the world for a week. In today's information-saturated culture, the most precious commodity is to be able to command people's attention. It's the terrorists who have understood this, and not the good guys. 

Britain must think very carefully, and Europe must think very carefully, if there's to be a future for liberal democracy. Americans are beginning to think about this likewise.

One of the shaping moments for me was the way Isaiah Berlin quoted Joseph Schumpeter at the end of his 1957 lecture, Two Concepts of Liberty: "To acknowledge the relative validity of one's convictions, but to stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilised man and a barbarian." On that [the Harvard political philosopher] Michael Sandel and I asked the same question — if your convictions are only relatively valid, why stand for them unflinchingly? 

That is why I'm convinced that we must find a religious, rather than relativistic basis, for liberal democracy, and for the market economy and for the most neglected of all: for the institutions of civil society, family, community, morality and so on. We have to find a religious base for them which does not stand on relativised foundations, and that was the weakness of Isaiah Berlin's argument. That was Karl Popper's view — why should we have a free society because we don't actually know what's true? Now even John Stuart Mill didn't say that, and they were writing in the tradition of Mill! Even Mill was convinced that there was a truth out there that we could find through experimentation: he was not a relativist. 

So this is what I fear for. In America, they say a liberal is someone who can't take his own side in an argument. I sometimes feel that Britain is like that. We love the guys who lose in the semi-finals. But there are some battles where you can't lose in the semi-finals — you have to win. And we have to win this one. And that means we have to take a stand, not with buzzwords like freedom and democracy, but with buzzwords like human dignity, sanctity of life, the integrity of the individual, the nature of societal freedoms such as that my freedom is not bought at the cost of yours.  

The danger to Britain and Europe today, to come back to your original question, is the danger that was first set out by J.L. Talmon in his book Totalitarian Democracy, and quoted by Hayek in his Constitution of Liberty, where he contrasted two different kinds of liberalism: the British liberalism that went with the grain of institutions and traditions and the Continental tradition which was abstract and atomised (basically the distinction first and best made by Edmund Burke). That is the danger: we have incorporated a main, Continental European version of human rights into British law. We see from the recent Appeal Court ruling on JFS [the Jews' Free School], this highly atomised concept of the rights of the individual without any respect for the traditions and values that sustain individuals as members of a community: that is the great danger that will eventually lead, God forbid, to Europe's loss of its own freedom and its own heritage.