The Social World

Tag: England

  • The strange death of England

    The strange death of England

    Whatever happened to Britain, or the UK, or England, or whatever they’re calling it? We can’t even agree on what it’s called. But what happened to England, the England that, if you’re over 50, you grew up learning about, the England that controlled the world, the England that ran the largest empire in human history at the end of World War One? 

    Britain, which is an island in a pretty inhospitable climate, controlled literally a quarter of the Earth’s surface – and not controlled in the way the United States controls the rest of the world with an implied threat or with economic ties through trade, but with administrators and people sitting at desks with eyeshades, counting things. Way more than Rome, way more than the Mongols, way more than anybody, ever, or maybe in the future, ever. 

    Britain was the most powerful country in the history of the world. And then 25 years later, it was this kind of sad, soggy welfare state, which is, to some extent, what it still is, except maybe even a little bit worse. What happened? 

    There are a couple of levels on which to think about this. First is just geopolitical, and I guess they spent a lot of money in these wars and the ruling class, half the class at Eton in 1910 was killed in the trenches. You can think of a lot of different ways to explain what happened to Britain. The fact remains, however, the British won the two biggest wars in human history. They won and yet they’re still greatly diminished and to some extent humiliated. What is that? 

    So again, the first explanation can be described in economic terms. The United States took over. The British Empire just moved west to its child, the US. They just transferred the power and a lot of the gold to this new country, which had its systems and some of its customs. 

    But there’s something deeper. If that were the whole story, then Britain would still be recognizably Britain. The English people would still be recognizably English. They would just be not in charge anymore. They would have less money and less power. But the country would be, by any conventional measurement, thriving, just not running the Bahamas and Hong Kong and Pakistan. 

    But that’s not what’s happened. After winning the two biggest wars in human history, Britain has shrunken not just physically, but in some way that’s hard to describe. Its culture has changed, some might say has been destroyed, and it’s become something completely different. And what is that? And why does it matter what it is? 

    Well, it matters because what’s happened to Britain, to England, is also happening to many countries in the West, certainly its heirs, the Anglosphere: Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Ireland. It’s happening to those countries. It’s also happening to the rest of western Europe all at the same time. 

    A bunch of different profound, never seen before phenomena are happening to all of those countries, and again, including ours here in the United States. So it’s worth understanding what has happened to Britain. So maybe the best image that describes it is the one that we’re about to show you.

    In case there’s no context in the tape, what you’re watching is a woman being arrested outside an abortion clinic. And keep in mind, as you watch this, she’s not being arrested for throwing a firebomb, a petrol bomb, through the window of this abortion clinic in the UK, or even for obstructing access to this abortion clinic. No – she is being arrested and taken to jail for praying outside the abortion clinic.

    Watch this. 

    So what is that? It’s hard to argue that if your government is arresting people for praying that you’re watching a political phenomenon. Because, of course, praying is not simply a non-violent act. It’s not even a physical act. It can’t possibly, at least in secular terms, affect outcomes or harm anyone. Praying for people can never be a crime. But it is a crime in Great Britain, literally a crime. And the woman you saw is not the only person who’s been arrested for doing it. So clearly we’re watching a spiritual phenomenon here. There’s sort of no arguing it once you see things like that. 

    But what is that spiritual phenomenon and what are its effects on the people of this country? Before we go further, we should just say that if you visit the “Yookay” as it’s now called, or London, its capital and completely dominant city, the first thing you’ll notice is it’s actually pretty nice. The nice parts of London are as nice or maybe even nicer than any city in the United States. Certainly nicer than any city in Canada or Australia. It’s a great city, filled with lots of happy people. 

    But broadly speaking, this country has changed dramatically, and it’s changed in ways that are recognizable. Here’s what you recognize. The people of Great Britain are going through a series of crises, and they’re all internal. Drug use, alcohol use. Their appearance has changed. People are no longer as well kept, the streets, the landscape is not tidy anymore. It’s got lots of litter and graffiti in some places. To technocrats, these are not meaningful measures of anything. Who cares if you’ve got graffiti? Does that affect GDP? Well, maybe. Maybe not, but it’s definitely a reflection of how people feel about themselves. 

    People with self-respect do not tolerate public displays of disorder or filth or graffiti or litter because they care about themselves and their family and they understand intuitively, as every human being does, that once you allow chaos and filth in your immediate environment, you are diminished. So you just don’t allow that. No healthy society does. 

    But all through the West, these are not just features, they’re defining features. All western cities are filled with litter and graffiti, and people who look like they didn’t bother to get dressed this morning, but are instead wearing their pajamas in Walmart. It’s not just in your town, it’s everywhere in what we refer to as the West. 

    The point that underlies all of this is a really obvious one, that too few people say. This is the behavior of a defeated people. This is what it looks like when you lose. This is what it looks like when you’re on your way out to be replaced by somebody else. This is what it looks like to be an American Indian. 

    Now, one thing nobody in the United States ever says about the American Indians, except in a kind of pro-forma white guilt way, is these weren’t just impressive people – and no, they didn’t write the Constitution before we did – these were some of the most impressive people, most self-reliant, most dignified. Read any account of early American settlers, people who were pushing west, who came into contact with Indians and yes, were often scalped and forced to eat their own genitals and roasted over open fires. I mean, these were cruel people. But even the people who were in danger of being murdered by them respected them. Because the Indigenous Americans had a great deal of self-respect. They had what we call dignity. And now, hundreds of years later, the opposite is true. The poorest people in the United States are American Indians. Why? Because the federal government hasn’t given them enough. The federal government is completely in charge of the indigenous economy in the United States, and has been for over a hundred years, and it hasn’t worked. American Indians are still the poorest. 

    Why? Because the Iroquois and the Navajo weren’t impressive? No, they were the most impressive. Again, read the account of anyone who dealt with them. Even people who were dodging their arrows thought they were amazing people, because they were. And now they are by many measures, the saddest people in the United States. Why is that? Some inherent genetic predisposition to patheticness? They couldn’t deal with modernity? Well, they probably could. They were defeated. They were defeated. And in some deep, the deepest way, they wound up destroying themselves, and it’s not unique to them. That’s the point.

    And just to be completely clear, all of this is observed with a great deal of sympathy, not scorn. No one’s mocking the American Indians. Everyone should feel bad about it. For real. Again, not in a silly white girl guilty way, but in a real way. These are amazing people. Greatly diminished. And the reason it’s worth remembering is the same thing is happening to the West.

    And it makes you realize, especially if you travel a lot, that the problem is not necessarily the immigrants. The problem is what mass migration does to the people who already live there. They’re the victims of it in a way that, again, is hard to measure and sometimes hard to notice, but totally real. 

    So you walk through this city, London, and it’s been completely transformed by immigration. Completely. And the numbers are really, really clear. One hundred years ago it was 100 percent European white. Now it’s less than 40 percent. OK, that’s massive, unprecedented demographic change. The immigrant areas are absolutely poorer than the traditionally white English areas. There’s just no question about it. But wealth as measured by the government is not the only measurement. Actually, and this is true in the United States, too, lots of immigrants who have a lot less money than the native population seem a lot more balanced and happy, both because this is a huge upgrade for them just in terms of annual income and standard of living. But it’s more than that. They’re not defeated. They don’t hate themselves. 

    And if you have traditional nationalist opinions in the United States, I can confirm this personally, you’re never going to be stopped on the street and screamed at by some Guatemalan who’s like, you are racist for having your views on immigration. No, they’ll probably agree with you. The only people who ever get mad at you are the people who already hate themselves, and it’s always, famously, some private equity wife or somebody who should be happy about how things are going because they’re in the portion of the population that’s benefiting from it. But they’re not happy. They’re angry.

    What is that? That exact same thing is going on in this country. Exact. And it’s part of a very recognizable syndrome, and it’s the most destructive of all. History is just filled with examples of people who get invaded and clubbed to death and have their women stolen from them, and they’re fine. They’re fine. It’s the people who feel defeated inside who no longer exist. And that is happening to the West. And it’s measurable. 

    What other society hates its own national symbols? It’s only happening in the West, only in Great Britain. This is coming to be true in the United States. It’s already true in Canada and Australia. What other country finds it embarrassing to fly their national flag? What are you saying if that embarrasses you? You don’t hate the flag. You hate yourself. 

    And it’s obvious because people who have dignity, self-respect, who believe in their own civilization want to continue it. How do you do that? By talking about it a lot? No. By continuing it through reproduction. No one is preventing the West from reproducing. And people who come up with these conspiracy theories, like, oh, they’re doing it. No, we’re doing it to ourselves. What else is abortion? It’s not empowering for women. Of course not. That’s absurd. Anyone who believes that is an idiot. Abortion is the way to stop people from reproducing. So is birth control, by the way, of course. So is convincing people that their dumb job is more important than having kids. It’s not. It never will be. Any person who can get clarity for a second will recognize that. It’s only about stopping you from having more of you. 

    And is there anything that’s a clearer representation of how you feel about yourself than how you feel about having kids? And by the way, it’s not just because these people are selfish and they want to go on vacation and don’t want to pay for children, or they’re worried about how much it might cost. Notice that none of these impoverished immigrants living on Snap and housing subsidies, they don’t seem worried about it at all because they know it’ll be fine. Most of the time it will be fine. They’re having kids when much more affluent natives are not, because they believe in themselves and their culture, their civilization. They’d like to see it continue. It’s the most basic of all human desires. 

    So here in Great Britain, which has about a 30 percent abortion rate, 30 percent of all conceived children are killed. Who’s doing that? It’s not the immigrants because they don’t hate themselves. They’re not defeated. They’re ascendant. And so they can see the future. They know that they may not live to experience it, but they’re still fully human. And they know you plant the tree not because you can bask in its shade, but because your grandchildren will. This is the most obvious of all human instincts and the most basic. 

    But the native population in Britain is not debating abortion because it’s not even a debate here. Everyone agrees it’s just an affirmative good, of course, to eliminate your own people. Absolutely. But again, no one’s making them do this. They’ve decided to do it themselves. But now their most enthusiastic campaign is for state sponsored suicide. They’ve already done this in Canada. It’ll come to the United States. What is that? That’s an entire people saying we should exit the stage. Our time is done. It’s over. Let’s go. Someone else will take our place. Not the first time that’s ever happened.

    This is what defeated people do. This is what happens when you break people inside. And maybe it’ll just reach its terminus. Maybe there’s no way to stop it.

    So in Great Britain, if you were to say, wait, what the hell is this? This looks nothing like the country I grew up in – guess who’s going to arrest you? Your fellow Britons. The ones whose great-grandparents lived here. The whites. They’re the ones enforcing this. They’re the ones determined to eliminate themselves. 

  • Do Jews have a future in Britain? 

    Do Jews have a future in Britain? 

    I was on my way to synagogue yesterday when I got news that was surprising and unsurprising at the same time. That there had been an attack at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur was a shock, but only the location and the timing. The fact that terror had struck our community felt like the confirmation of our worst fears – and something that was grimly predictable. 

    For as long as I can remember, Jewish life in the UK has been closely guarded and protected. My childhood synagogue in the leafy London suburb of Surbiton was behind locked gates with security guards posted outside when anyone was in the building. My Jewish newspaper office today has similar protections and an address we’re told must never be made public. Every kosher shop in North London has a permanent security presence, twice or three times that of a supermarket in a dodgy area. 

    British Jews are always watching over their shoulders, silently clocking the escape routes out of synagogues and constantly feeling like a target when we congregate. We are a group that, by virtue of existing, is targeted. Jewish schoolchildren are told to change their uniforms when going home on public transport, observant Jewish men hide their kippahs with baseball caps when on the tube, everyone does the little things they can to try and feel safe. 

    All of this of course, was true before October 7 and it will be true for a long time after this war ends. But there has been a remarkable uptick in the last two years. The right-thinking consensus that anti-Semitism was bad is crumbling before our eyes, as the horseshoe theory that sees us hit from the far-left and the far-right becomes stronger every day.

    The Community Security Trust, a Jewish organization that collects data on anti-Semitism in Britain has recorded an unprecedented rise in all manner of attacks on British Jews, from casual anti-Semitic remarks to violent assaults on visibly Jewish people, buildings and communities. Just last month, a man was arrested in North London for a spate of attacks where he smeared his own excrement on synagogues. 

    The reaction to what’s happening in the Middle East is coming home to affect British Jews, making us feel like outsiders in a country that we’ve lived in and loved for centuries. I see it all the time in my own life and work. The social media channels of the Jewish Chronicle are inundated with hateful, anti-Semitic comments every day that have nothing to do with Israel. I’ve seen anti-Semitic graffiti appear all over my neighborhood in south London and I’ve been accused of “killing kids” at a friend’s birthday party by someone I had just met. 

    The nature of anti-Semitism means that it is ever-present, always under the surface. And it has been allowed to fester. Partially by a government that through its own poor politicking is pandering to extremists in its own party, but also by a media so desperate to raise the temperature of debate in Britain, that it forgets that Jewish people’s safety is at stake. Anti-Semites across the UK and in public life have been allowed to grow in confidence, to march on the streets of London, a city that Jews have thrived in, with placards of blood-drenched swastikas and depictions of Jewish leaders with horns. 

    Britain has always been seen as different to the rest of Europe when it comes to Jewish life. For years, our community has looked at violence in places like France, where Islamist terror attacks against Jews are a regular fixture and thought, “That wouldn’t happen here”. 

    But now it has. The events of yesterday will be a scar on Britain’s Jews, in the same way that the Tree of Life shooting, and the HyperCache attack, and the Boulder firebombing forever changed those communities. The Jews of Manchester and those across the UK will remember Heaton Park for years to come. There will also be soul-searching. Does this mean we should all go to Israel, to live among a different type of Islamist threat? What can we do to prevent this happening ever again? 

    There’s a certain feeling among British Jews that in any country other than Israel we are not in control of our own destiny, that our safety in the UK or in any other country is dependent on the government of the day listening to our pleas and taking our security seriously. To the credit of the police, they acted quickly to protect the Jews of Heaton Park. But many Jews today will be feeling that the attack was grimly predictable, and wondering why the government or the police allowed this country to become a place where Islamists’ toxic ideas and hatred of Israel are allowed to take the lives of British Jews. 

    Killing Jews in Manchester or London or Paris or Washington DC will not bring this war to an end. Not a single Palestinian life is saved by the taking of one from a synagogue worshipper. Yesterday’s attack feels like a turning point. If British Jews can be killed simply for being Jewish, then do the rest of us have a future here?

  • Has Trump changed Britain’s stance on Palestinian statehood?

    Has Trump changed Britain’s stance on Palestinian statehood?

    As Donald Trump visited the United Kingdom this week, the press seized the opportunity to confront both him and Prime Minister Keir Starmer about the issue of Hamas and Britain’s posture towards Palestinian statehood. In a rare moment of lucidity, and perhaps influenced by the firm presence of the President, Starmer appeared, briefly, to align his moral compass. Faced with questions over why his government was proceeding with the recognition of a Palestinian state in the wake of the October 7th atrocities, Starmer delivered what may be his most unequivocal statement to date:

    “Let me be really clear about Hamas: They’re a terrorist organization who can have no part in any future governance in Palestine. What happened on October 7th was the worst attack since the Holocaust. We have extended family in Israel. I understand first-hand the psychological impact that that had across Israel. So I know exactly where I stand in relation to Hamas. Hamas of course don’t want a two-state solution. They don’t want peace. They don’t want a ceasefire. I’m very clear where I stand on Hamas.”

    It was also strikingly convenient that, at this critical juncture, Starmer suddenly remembered his extended family in Israel. One wonders how reassured they feel about his use of them in such a moment – deployed as a sort of bauble to decorate a policy that is not only contradictory but potentially dangerous. If they are to serve as moral ballast for his position, they deserve more than to be name-dropped in the midst of strategic incoherence.

    Had Starmer stopped there, one might have mistaken him for a leader with conviction. But in the next breath, he returned to form, assuring the press that his decision to recognize a Palestinian state had been set out in July and had “nothing to do with this state visit.” He insisted that the matter had been discussed with president Trump “as you would expect among two leaders who respect each other and like each other and want to bring about a better solution in the best way we can.”

    The irony, of course, is that just as Starmer found the fortitude to call Hamas what it is, the group was issuing yet another declaration of grotesque barbarism. In a statement released by its al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas promised to turn Gaza into a “graveyard” for Israeli soldiers, to use hostages as human shields, and to ensure that not a single captive would be recovered alive. They referenced Ron Arad, the long-lost Israeli airman abducted by Iran-backed terrorists in Lebanon, as a model for how future hostages would disappear without trace.

    “We have prepared for you an army of martyrs,” they declared. “Your prisoners are scattered throughout Gaza City’s neighborhoods, and we will not spare their lives… you will not recover a single prisoner, neither dead nor alive, and their fate will be the same as that of Ron Arad.”

    So when Starmer finally managed to utter the truth about Hamas, it was as though he had been coaxed into it by the magnetic clarity of the man standing beside him. Trump, sensing the moment, actually grinned with approval and gave him a pat on the back – like a dog that had finally learned to sit when commanded. It is said the two spent around thirty minutes alone before the press conference, with no aides present. One can only imagine what was said, but it would not be a stretch to presume that Trump reminded him of the basics: do not reward genocidal jihadists with the trappings of statehood.

    Yet, despite the bluster, Starmer still intends to confer symbolic recognition upon a Palestinian entity that does not exist in any coherent, lawful or democratic form. He has mouthed the words of moral clarity, but he cannot follow them through with coherent policy. This is the essence of his weakness: he learns to say the lines but not to dance the dance. For all the talk of opposing Hamas, his government is giving succor to its cause by validating the fantasy of a state that Hamas itself openly defines through martyrdom, bloodshed, and the annihilation of Jews.

    Starmer’s rhetoric on Hamas is thus at odds with every other aspect of his posture. He decries their atrocities, then gestures toward recognition of a statehood project that would reward them. He acknowledges they do not want peace, then backs a policy that empowers them. He understands their strategy of hostage warfare, then gestures towards concessions that would only embolden it. And he said nothing of the failures of literally all other mainstream Palestinian leaders and political movements to act with decency, respect for humanity or international law, or indeed any ambition of peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state. If not Hamas, Sir Keir, then who? It is not biased or racist to state these facts, however distressing and undesirable: it is merely looking a hard truth in the eye. Without that, how else can the situation be improved?

    Starmer’s position makes Britain appear rudderless. If the leader of His Majesty’s Government cannot translate his apparent convictions into action, if he cannot resist the theater of international appeasement even in the face of Islamist terror, then he diminishes not only himself but the standing of the nation he represents. One hopes that Trump, in those thirty private minutes, managed to plant a seed of realism. But there is, as yet, no sign that it has taken root.