The UK Is a Window to Our Dystopian Future

 

Editor's Note

The ideology of our enemies has the potential not just to alter our way of life but to destroy it, and our nation with it. While much of the American crisis is unique, there are parallels in other imperiled democracies from which we might learn. The UK, argues British writer Poppy Coburn, provides a glimpse of what happens to a nation that erodes its own self-understanding while restricting the means by which citizens can make their objections heard. The result, Coburn suggests, is not just decline but disorder, violence, and the real danger of collapse — none of which, when we consider the path by which Britain arrived there, seems too far off for the United States if we cannot correct course.

Take a walk down my street. There aren’t enough warehouse venues and gang-related killings to warrant the label of “edgy,” and there are far too many two-parents-kids-and-a-dog residences for the “up and coming” label to make any sense. It’s suburban London — those “invincible suburbs” — and predictably predictable.

But look closer. How could there be four solicitors’ offices on a single road? Clearly, they aren’t wanting for customers. Queues of men (only men) spill out onto the pavement. You can see them at all times of day, smoking and shuffling and checking their cracked phone screens incessantly. The buildings they loiter outside all seem to have the same branding. The services advertised are certainly the same: “Immigration law, visa services, overstayers, failed asylum.” You’ll notice that “Rashid & Rashid Solicitors,” the office with the distinctively garish green lettering, has been shuttered. A note on the door tells you it has been closed on orders of the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Googling it takes you to a news article, suggesting it was part of a “visa scam.” A brick has been thrown through the glass window. 

Travel further. Visit Oxford, the seat of English advanced education — and site of a notoriously prolific child grooming ring. Go north to Bradford, which has its own university. Like so many others, it has fallen on hard times. School graduates feel that the fees just aren’t worth it anymore, turned off by a depressed job market and post-Covid learning “modernizations” that somehow manage to make a bachelor’s degree an even bigger waste of time. The one year master’s course is still popular, though. It’s relatively cheap, but the university has still set up two recruitment offices in South Asia. It brings students, some of whom don’t seem to ever turn up to class. But they pay. If the university closes, the town will lose a quarter of its jobs. 

And you don’t want to lose your jobs. Walk through Rotherham. Shuttered buildings. Food delivery rental bikes cluttered in the town center. People sitting in their homes, long-term out of work, obesity, mental health, sickness. The immigration lawyers are here, too, and they’re joined by money-laundering barber shops and cash-in-hand takeouts. Welcome to Great Britain, the You-Kay, land of hope and glory, the sceptered isles, cradle of parliamentary democracy, graveyard of liberalism. 

On the morning of July 29, a masked man hailed a cab from his home to the “Hart Space” in Southport, a studio hosting a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. Twenty-five children, most under the age of ten, were taking part when the man entered through a backdoor armed with a knife and began to stab them. Nine children and two adults were injured. Three girls — six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar — were killed. The suspect was arrested at the scene. 

This attack, unfathomable in its brutality and senselessness, was a catalyst for the greatest unrest seen in Britain since 2011. Freshly elected Prime Minister Keir Starmer attended a memorial service for the deceased, only to be heckled by locals. A protest in town the following evening saw police officers clash with Southport residents shouting, “No surrender.” The disorder spread: by August 5, violent demonstrations had erupted in Hartlepool, Aldershot, Sunderland, Nottingham, Leeds, Blackpool, Stoke-on-Trent, Bristol, and Rotherham. As of the time of writing, 1,280 arrests have been made. To understand what drove these rioters, we need only look to where they congregated: outside mosques, asylum hotels, processing centers. These were ethnic riots, led by white Britons. What happened?

The brutality of the crime was not a guarantee of reactive violence. The Manchester Arena bombing of 2017 was targeted directly at young girls — fans of the pop star Ariana Grande who had come to see her perform — but did not result in riots despite having an even larger death toll. The terroristic motive was made quickly obvious, with the perpetrator’s refugee family implicated in the atmosphere of Islamic radicalization leading to the attack. And yet, there were no retributive calls for deportation. Indeed, the only legislative change to result from the attack was the implementation of “Martyn’s Law”, which mandated safety training for entertainment venues across the country. This response was no accident; rather, it resulted from an unofficial policy of Controlled Spontaneity, a theater of coerced togetherness attempting to displace natural feelings of anger and demands for change into depoliticized grief, much as one would respond in the case of an earthquake or a flood.

The summer had already proved a disturbed one before the Southport murders. Harehills, a region of Yorkshire where 43 percent of residents were born outside of Britain, had rioted two weeks earlier when social services removed four children from a Roma family suspected of child abuse. The local community set a double-decker bus on fire and attacked police cars, with videos of officers seeming to have quickly lost control circulating on social media. A Romanian national charged with setting a vehicle on fire followed court proceedings with an interpreter due to poor English language skills. Hundreds gathered outside Rochdale police station the week after, this time protesting police brutality after a video of armed officers aggressively breaking up a fight at Manchester Airport went viral. A longer version of the video showed one of the alleged victims breaking a female officer’s nose. Assistant Police Constable Wasiq Chaudhry sympathized with the protesters, promising to continue “to engage with communities and…understand local views.”

There is no doubt that the rioting in Southport was motivated by racial hatred. The attempt to set alight an asylum hotel with people still trapped inside rightly horrified the nation, including many of those strongly opposed to the existence of the processing hotels. But the steadfast refusal to consider the protests in the context in which they erupted leant a certain unreality to mainstream analysis. Online misinformation, Russian interference, a right-wing media bias, knife crime — itself a euphemism, as noted by the journalist Aris Roussinos — were all grasped at as explanatory tools. 

The “misinformation” canard, provoked by the false naming of an ethnically Muslim perpetrator, indicated the wrong-headedness of the mainstream analysis. It is evident that the rioters responded in the context of the many previous terror attacks that had a non-British perpetrator. A feeling that authorities withhold such information, engendered by years of trust-breaking Controlled Spontaneity, set the ground for a pervading atmosphere of paranoia. The decision of a Liverpool Crown Court judge to name the suspect as Axel Rudakubana, born to Rwandan refugees, failed to restore order.

In truth, the British state has become ideologically and practically incapable of addressing the ethnic tensions that cause not just the Southport riots, but the riots and disorders that have become a fixture of  life. Would a liberal British observer to the Intifada or the Maidan uprising not tell you that such actions were the predictable outcome of a people, driven to desperation, violently responding to a sense of perceived powerlessness? Are the occurrences in our own nation not the same in embryonic form? Such a proposition cannot be countenanced. 

Britain, which for so many years avoided the endless ethnic chaos that plagued its Continental neighbors, is buckling under pressure. Ignorance to the urgency of reform is pointed in establishment thinking that cannot divorce its humanistic impulses from the material demands of statehood. One official articulated a widely held view of immigration, stating that “we’re all human beings, we’re all mammals, we’re all rocks, plants, rivers.” Borders, he continued, are a “pain in the arse.” Such a comment may have been easily dismissed as the post-Hippie ramblings of an old bureaucrat, had they not been made by Paul Lincoln, the former head of U.K. Border Force under Boris Johnson. 

The release valve of Brexit was not followed through by policy making: a vote for border control resulted in the reverse. The entire economy seems to be built upon a fragile reversed pyramid. Census data tells us that ethnic segregation is still common. Jails are full to bursting, and the new government appears even more comfortable than the last with imposing authoritarian controls on free expression. These are the conditions for a perfect storm of ethnic tensions, and there is little sign things will get better. Nobody knows how to staunch the sense of decay, least of all the people in charge of government. Understanding the historical circumstances that led Britain down this path are essential to anyone who wishes to change course.

Britain was once so restrictive that, in 1994, Gary Freeman felt able to describe the country as a “deviant case” in European migration policy. For over three decades, the state managed to balance a liberal approach to capital and trade flows with harsh limits on the flow of new immigrants. 

Liberalizing reforms were an unprecedented policy reversal. Migration dramatically accelerated after 1997, with the Labour Party greatly expanding John Major’s attitude to immigration, which had been comparatively open for a Conservative government. In the 25 years leading up to Tony Blair’s election (1973-1997), cumulative net migration was 68,000. In the subsequent 25 years, it was at least 5.89 million — almost 100 times the preceding period.

Changing border policies required a change in attitudes. The New Labour government was keen to promote the then-fashionable ideology of “multiculturalism” as an alternative to the now-defunct concept of “Britishness.” In 1997, the Runnymede Trust (“Britain’s leading race equality think tank,” founded after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.) commissioned a report that would be published in 2000 as “Rethinking Multiculturalism.” Britain’s problem, author Bhikhu Parekh suggested, was precisely the island homogeneity it had always celebrated. What was required was nothing short of a “cultural revolution,” where a more advanced society could be reached through dialectical interchange between groups. If a culture is accepted to be inferior, a strong coercive mechanism is required to remove it. Such a process would be constant, overbearing, and centralized — “social fascism.”

New Labour were horrified. The report seemed to suggest that the needs of diversity should be allowed to trump the requirements of liberalism — requirements that Parekh asserted had always been “changeable.” The then-Home Secretary Jack Straw distanced the government from the report, refusing to endorse it. But, absent other ideas, the recommendations would be quietly accepted as the only way to manage a changing demographic profile. Laws suspending habeas corpus, removing the right to free association, and restricting speech followed, in time accepted and expanded by Conservative politicians.

Removing normal democratic mechanisms to express dissatisfaction failed to prevent public disorder. The British state has struggled to keep up with the complexities of modern technology, fearing social media as a vector for the spread of unregulated speech most of all. Control has proved a quixotic task: while police can still arrest an English-speaking Facebook poster threatening to protest outside a hotel hosting asylum seekers, they have little understanding of the communal politics of the Indian subcontinent that caused Pakistani Muslims and newly settled Hindi nationalists to riot in Leicester in 2022. The post-colonial hangover of “community-based policing” (as previously mentioned in the example of the Rochdale police station protests) is selectively applied. There is no role in the millet system for the white British population. 

The riots are over, but the conditions that allowed them have not gone away. The deep, roiling tensions bubbling under public life for decades will only worsen as British decline continues apace. The new Labour government, barely past 100 days in power, is now polling neck-and-neck with the moribund Conservative party. Sympathy for the wretched of the earth cannot disguise the moral shallowness of the governing classes, who pay no heed to the consequences that arise from enforced generosity. The lever of migration has long since broken off: the machine can continue operating without intervention. Great Britain is sullen, untrusting, and divided. There is no telling what fresh misery the future will bring.

Poppy Coburn is assistant comment editor of The Telegraph, a British daily newspaper.

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