England Is Lost Forever

And it breaks my heart.

Lately I have felt a strange pain in my gut. A tight, sick feeling that is nothing to do with my physical health.

It is the feeling that my home is lost forever.

And it is not just me.

I saw a comment the other day on the YouTube channel for ‘The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters’ that summed it up perfectly:

This terrible feeling of mourning, so aptly described here, is not merely confined to right-wing corners of the internet. All kinds of real life people I have discussed this with feel exactly the same. Men and women of various political persuasions. Normal, nice people who have all come to the same conclusion: that our country is gone for good.

Where does this feeling come from? It is probably not one thing. Rather, it is a mix of mass immigration (legal and illegal) and the collapse of Christianity (both of these confirmed by recent census data), combined with the relentless self-loathing of our liberal culture.

Plus we can throw in economic decline (Britain is now poorer than every single state in the US), the housing crisis, and the fact everyone is on strike and absolutely nothing works.

Immigration is the main one. And it is not about race. Or certainly not solely about race, though there is a Venn diagram that cannot exclude it entirely. Roughly speaking, there are many people we think of as English who are not white, and lots of white people who are clearly not English (the many French and German people in London, for example).

Though obviously we can say that someone not from England, who barely speaks the language, is not English. And if this person also holds beliefs that are counter to English values, or actively despises said values, that compounds the problem.

A pretty innocuous statement, yet the familiar caricature of the English racist/xenophobe afraid of immigration creates a permanent tension around the issue.

Hovering over the debate is the spectre of Enoch Powell, who still haunts the British imagination whenever this topic is raised, a kind of bogeyman invoked to inspire fear and repulsion. If, as Michael Knowles has claimed, Hitler essentially represents the devil in our culture, then Powell is probably one of his demonic helpers.

In reality Powell was a highly intelligent, beloved politician, praised by everyone from Margaret Thatcher, to Tony Benn, to Tony Blair. He revered certain Indian cultures above all others, and spoke twelve different languages.

And, as I perhaps unwisely joked on the telly the other day, Powell was actually a bit of a lib, as he massively underestimated the sheer numbers involved in the mass immigration we have seen in recent decades, especially since Tony Blair came to power in 1997.

None of this matters in the shrieking culture war of Twitter, of course, and GB News’s Calvin Robinson was recently attacked by online leftists for changing his banner picture to an image of Powell. I am told this also cost GB two advertisers. Not quite Kanye’s ‘2 billion dollar tweet’, but not ideal.

Yet you do not have to be Enoch Powell to have misgivings about where England is headed. Following the recent census figures revealing that ‘white British’ people are now a minority in London, Manchester, and Birmingham, even the ultra-liberal, conservative in name only Andrew Sullivan expressed concerns, admitting ‘this is little short of a cultural revolution in a tiny, already densely packed island, which knew minimal immigration for centuries until the 1950s and 1960s.’

Sullivan claims this has all happened by accident, which anyone who recalls former Labour adviser Andrew Neather’s boast that this was deliberately done to 'rub the Right's nose in diversity’ may question.

For Sullivan this trend is not deliberate, yet still somewhat disturbing:

But an accidental revolution is still a revolution. And I would just ask those who rightly denigrate the term “great replacement” to provide an alternative phrase to describe a city which was 87 percent “White British” a half-century ago and 36 percent today? It’s the kind of demographic change only previously seen in other parts of the world in times of plague, invasion, or campaigns of ethnic cleansing.

He contrasts this with Orwell’s belief that ‘England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.’

I had this same debate with Toby Young on our recent episode of The Weekly Sceptic podcast. I argued that England was lost forever due to excessive amounts of immigration, fundamentally changing the character of the country, and risking the loss of English values such as free speech, civil liberties, and fair play, which are sadly far from universal.

Toby countered by saying we now have better food.

There was more to it, I’m sure, but I am finding it hard to ‘steel man’ Toby’s argument, as it was just so bonkers to me. I suppose it was broadly Orwell’s point that there is always change, yet England’s core will somehow remain despite it all.

When I questioned Toby about the potential loss of things like free speech and civil liberties, he said he ‘hoped’ that wouldn’t happen. Well, that and £400k will get you a one bedroom flat in London.

Speaking of London, the most infuriating part of Sullivan’s article concerns our fallen capital:

Some of the friends I saw last week love this. “I cannot tell you how happy it makes me,” one told me, “that I can go around London and never hear English spoken!” And there are times I see her point.

That Sullivan can present this as anything other than extreme liberal derangement baffles me. Either these people are not English, and they are creepily celebrating the eradication of a people from their own capital city, or (more likely) they are English middle class liberals, filled to the brim with suicidal self-loathing.

Who would go to Lisbon, for example, and say ‘Yay, I’m so glad no one is speaking Portuguese here!’ If anyone did say that, you would immediately recognise they were mentally ill, and find a way to avoid them for the rest of the holiday.

But for some reason this self-hatred is normal when applied to England.

And, as shocking as the census numbers are, it really is about the English, rather than ‘white English’. There is of course a racial component, in that most people on this rainy island still happen to have white skin. It’s why we don’t all get rickets, despite going years without seeing the sun. It’s also why I got skin cancer when I went to Dubai.

But no reasonable person is going to claim, for example, that Calvin Robinson is not English. As it happens his mother’s family are from England, which as he jokes makes him 52% English. But even without that, it would be clear to anyone. I mean, for one thing he likes posting pictures of Enoch Powell.

Yet the icky feeling around race is presumably what drives much of this bizarre liberal hatred for England, a mania that will ultimately destroy this country. Or, to the more pessimistic amongst us, has already destroyed it.

I return to that solemn YouTube comment, and the feeling that we are slowing dying. To me, the poster was optimistic with the ‘slow’ part, as in fact this is all happening incredibly rapidly. Where he was bang on was the appalling fact that we are told to ‘celebrate’ this.

But then, isn’t there always celebration when a despised culture is conquered?

When the American Indians were crushed, there were cries of victory throughout the land. This was the ‘Manifest Destiny’ of the American settlers. That’s how it goes. Only decades later does one receive the empty guilt of the victors, along with some social housing and a few independent movies.

Perhaps some will find that an absurd analogy given that, for a while there, it was largely England doing the conquering. Perhaps much of this is a case of ‘the empire strikes back’, as tweets like this one from Sathnam Sanghera seem to suggest:

Sathnam Sanghera @Sathnam

Brown people didn't get a vote when their nations were colonised by the British. We are here, because you were there.

Douglas Murray @DouglasKMurray

I see many commentators on the census results saying, ‘So what if people who identify as “white British” are a minority in London, Birmingham, Leicester, Manchester, etc?’ Just one answer to which is ‘Because we never voted for this. Quite the opposite in fact.’

Perhaps none of this matters, like Savid Javid implies when he says ‘So what?’

Though that seems to me at very least a betrayal of his constituents, who are very much bothered about all of this, just as they were at the time of Powell. But now, as it was then, the political class do not dare tackle the issue. Or worse, they have active contempt for anyone expressing their concerns on the matter.

Of course, there is a larger conversation to be had about birth rates, and the West’s odd reluctance to replicate itself. Italy’s birth rate is the lowest in Europe, at a mere 1.23 ‘births per woman’, while the UK barely tops them at 1.56.

I haven’t looked into it enough to know whether this is down to climate propaganda, the selfishness of liberal culture, pure economics, or God having some greater plan beyond our understanding. There does seem to be a kind of Laffer Curve whereby the poorer people of the world still bash out babies, while the middle class midwits manage 1.5, and only at the ultra high IQ, Elon Musk end of the curve does one start having 20 children again (and giving them all mental names).

Either way, we’re done. England is finished. Europe too.

Douglas Murray summed it up beautifully with the phrase The Strange Death of Europe. I will confess I haven’t bothered reading the book yet, and I don’t really need to. I’m living it every day. I’ve got the t-shirt.

When I ask friends what we can do about this, they all say the same: nothing. ‘We just have to solider on’, as one put it. And in a way, what could be more English?

As Churchill said:

If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.

Obviously I’m using blood as a metaphor here. Then again that argument didn’t help Enoch Powell much.

There is always a danger one can get ‘cancelled’ for even discussing this topic in anything but the most left-wing, celebratory terms. Still, when your whole country is already cancelled, does it really matter?