Out of the Fire of Leeds

'England must see a change now or it will be lost forever.' Dr Morello muses on the riots in Leeds and what it means for Britain.

From The European Conservative

By Sebastian Morello, PhD

England must see a change now or it will be lost forever.

Yesterday, smoke rose from a city of just over 500,000 inhabitants in West Yorkshire, namely the city of Leeds, around 10% of which is now Muslim. A very large number of the Muslim minority took to the streets to riot. A bus was set on fire; buildings and cars were smashed apart; and police personnel were attacked, with many of their vehicles being damaged, including at least one police car being overturned. Police were forced to flee the area in which the violence was erupting, and thereafter, the rioters were seemingly left in peace to continue their rampage.

The proximate reason for this explosion of violence remains as yet unclear, though the media have been reporting that it began with some sort of “family incident.” The general reason for this riot, however, is certainly known to the whole country. For decades, the ordinary English inhabitants of England have witnessed their country being transformed by the colonisation and repopulation of their towns and cities by arrivals from abroad. They have looked to the media and the political class for some critical consideration of what has been taking place, and they have heard nothing but the sound of crickets. If anyone was unwise enough to speak out about what was happening, he was subjected to accusations of ‘racism’ and ‘xenophobia’ and his career was put at risk. This culture of censorship, that soon gave rise to a culture of self-censorship, has been extremely effective.

To the English, England no longer feels like their home in a vast number of places across the land. The bourgeois liberals who have long championed multiculturalism and ethnic pluralism—deploying the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion—have now largely moved to the rustic villages of the West Country to avoid living amid the degradation that they helped to create. A great many Muslims—who form the core, most problematic, and most troublesome contingent of a wider category of imported peoples that have taken over swathes of England—feel neither English nor foreign. Many of these people were born in the UK, and may even be the grandchildren of immigrants, having always belonged to large communities that were never inducted into the national, indigenous culture of the land in which they live. 

If there ever was a time in which a robust but dispassionate policy of repatriation for a growing immigrant community could be entertained, it seems that time has now passed. Perhaps there was a moment in our history—maybe in the late 1960s—when large amounts of money could have been given to immigrant communities to return to those countries with which they still felt some connection or attachment. Given that many of their members do not work, claim large benefits from the state, and have a habit of marrying close relations and birthing children that require extensive ongoing healthcare for the congenital ailments that arise from consanguinity, such pay-outs likely would have been much less demanding on the taxpayer in the long run. But so much time has passed, and the population of uprooted settlers has swelled to such a massive size, that it is apparently too late now for such a measure, even if most of the country endorsed it and a government was willing to advance it. It might work for the millions of new arrivals who have come in the last few years, but that wouldn’t suffice to fix the problem of which the fires of Leeds yesterday were mere symptoms. In turn, England appears to be stuck in a rut. 

In very general terms, it is fair to say that in England, we do not have a population, but two populations. We have the natives who feel that England is English no more. And we have the settlers and their offspring, who feel neither English nor foreign. In turn, we have the worst of all situations from the perspective of cultural stability and social cohesion. Across the land, side by side, live two displaced peoples between which there is little communication or sympathy: the unsettled natives and the uprooted settlers.

The unsettled natives are still heirs to a national culture, a set of habits and customs, and a mode of political and civil participation. But as we saw from the riots in Leeds yesterday, the uprooted settlers may be uprooted from those lands where little grows in any case, but they have brought with them the violent politics of the desert and the hysterical habits of the tribe. Their way of behaving is utterly alien to the land in which they have settled, from whose culture they have firmly set themselves apart. And their widely held assumption, as the county of Yorkshire has well learned over many years of Muslim gang warfare and the rape of English girls, is that disdain for the native population is perfectly respectable.

Very little time is left for England, if any time is left at all. Control of the situation—with prudent, incremental steps to stop England’s disappearance and reverse the transformation it has undergone—must be seized now, or England will be lost forever. After all, it is not the unsettled natives who are having all the children, for they are too busy breaking up their own families by divorcing and contracepting and aborting themselves off the face of the planet. It is the uprooted settlers that remain together, have children, and win territory. In turn, if the English do not morally reform themselves, take stock, and act now, they will wholly deserve to lose their shared home. Soon, whatever we’ve meant till now by the word ‘England,’ with all its institutions, art, poetry, music, rural customs, and glorious townscapes, will not exist, and the country’s doom will include the bucolic villages of Devon where self-indulgent liberals have fled and hidden themselves from the arriving settlers.

To be clear, for I know my words will be twisted by those with malign intent, by ‘native’ and ‘indigenous’ I do not mean anything racial. I mean those, whatever their race or religious commitments, who see themselves as part of England, as belonging to Albion, as members of a corporate whole with all its history and culture. I am neither Anglo-Saxon nor a member of the established Church, but I am English and the English are my people. Anyone who comes to England to stay should feel obligated to induct themselves into its national life. But few have felt the weight of that imperative on their shoulders, and that is why we are where we are: at a stage in which the country is divided between two displaced peoples and its cities are on fire.

The new Labour government will, of course, only intensify the problem I have highlighted. And that is why, in five years, the only hope for the UK will be a Reform government or a Conservative government fully conformed to the political agenda of Reform, with Nigel Farage at the Tory helm—beginning with withdrawal from the European Court of Human Rights, so that the process of salvaging England can actually begin. For the underlying problem over which I’ve been looming is that of a leadership which is not patriotic, and thus has developed no policy or legislation, or utilised its legal organs at all, to prevent the erosion of England. 

At present, Reform appears to be the only party for whom patriotism does not have any malevolent connotations. At the recent national election, millions voted for Farage, and five years from now, millions more will vote for whoever advances the principles on which his short campaign stood. England must see a change or it will be lost forever, and this is far from trivial, for the vast majority of our unsettled natives have nowhere else to go.