Last year, the American author Christopher Caldwell wrote an essay for the Claremont Review of Books in which he gave an overview of the state of Britain.
He described a country that had been transformed under the feet of its inhabitants into something unrecognisable – as if much of the furniture in our home had remained intact, but the ownership had been transferred, leaving us with little say over renovations or who may come or go.
Of the political repercussions of this transformation, he said:
“The baby boom leaders who presided over an uncompensated dismantling of English customs now struggle to find euphemisms for what they’ve done.”
What exactly have they done? And how can it be described without resorting to euphemism?
They have created a country where the following scenario, with superficial variations, is an inevitable and routine occurrence.
On 16 August last year, a young girl was gazing at the stars in Barking park, while her date serenaded her with his guitar. Two Afghan asylum seekers approached the couple, and held a knife to the man’s throat, while each took a turn raping the woman. One of these illegal migrants, Noorullah Ahmdzai, later falsely claimed in court that he paid the girl £20 for sex and that it was consensual. The other, 19-year-old Khan Agah, claimed he was 16 to get a more lenient sentence. Both men arrived here on small boats. Their first act on British soil was to break the law. Their second was to be housed at taxpayer expense.
Stories like this are made more horrific by the fact that they occur on a near weekly basis. For decades, our media has preferred to ignore or downplay them, and we have been encouraged to shrug them off as an inevitability, like the weather. More men like this are almost certainly arriving as we speak. They might be greeted with literature from the Home Office informing them that in Britain, it is wrong to rape, and that raping could even affect their asylum claim. That seems to be the extent of the government’s concern.
It is also an admission they know exactly what they’re doing, and who they’re admitting into the country. Another clue is that the Foreign Office advises against travelling to Afghanistan, while the Home Office tells us: here are your new neighbours. The same week an Eritrean man raped a male pensioner outside a church, the Prime Minister announced he intends to send asylum seekers to middle-class areas as a “point of principle.” That might qualify as a threatening communication to everyone with a Waitrose clubcard.
Our porous borders are only one tile in a larger mosaic of entropy and dysfunction. The British state’s greatest sin, though, has been presiding over the mass rape of English girls over many decades, while attempting, until as recently as last year, to divert attention away from the most monstrous crime committed on British soil in a millennium.
The Romans believed their Republic had been founded in response to popular outrage over the rape and subsequent suicide of the noblewoman Lucretia. The British people, however, do not have a Lucretia. There is not one household name among the thousands of English girls who were raped and abused by predominantly Pakistani rape gangs. This crime is almost too vast and painful to put into words, inspiring the sort of dumb silence only a war memorial obelisk can hope to express.
As I wrote last year, if you want to understand the value of a belief, consider what people are willing to sacrifice for it. We, in Britain, were willing to throw the most vulnerable in our society onto the pyre of a multicultural ideal – an ideal that proved to be a mirage. Onto this pyre we also threw equality before the law, after the Macpherson report found – on grounds more spurious than those of the Salem witch trials – British police to be “institutionally racist.” On Macpherson’s recommendation, this diagnosis was later extended, as a baseline assumption, to every institution. Thus fed, the flames became greedier, and the pyre continued to grow. It can now be said of the land that birthed Milton’s Areopagitica that we arrest 12,000 people a year for social media posts, largely related to so-called hate crimes.
The administrative order that has perpetuated these horrors was incubated by the very liberal-democratic norms it has since diminished. Which raises the question: is it possible for anti-establishment parties to dismantle that order while upholding those same norms? In other words, can democracy save democracy?
To answer that, we must first clarify what we mean by the administrative order. Broadly, it is the apparatus through which the preferences and prejudices of our governing elite – the Lanyard Class – are given institutional force. People, often with plum state pensions, who hold correct and fashionable opinions. Have I got News For You at prayer.
The state they’ve constructed, since the Brown-Blair revolution, overturned half a millennium of English constitutional history – in which Parliament, as the voice, however imperfect, of the people, was sovereign and more or less unassailable. If Parliament wanted to abolish the BBC, the monarchy, even cyclists in Zone 1, it could do so with the stroke of a pen. However, the Blairite changes to the constitution diminished that sovereignty, with the establishment of laws, courts, quangos, and devolved administrations that can subvert or override the programme of an elected government.
Yet attempts to remedy this democratic deficit are routinely described as illiberal or anti-democratic. But is the charge legitimate, or simply the blob protecting itself?