Will There Always Be an England?

'There will always be an England, but only if there are Englishmen. There will only be Englishmen if Englishmen are willing to struggle for their identity as a people.'

From The European Conservative

By Rod Dreher

There will always be an England, but only if there are Englishmen. There will only be Englishmen if Englishmen are willing to struggle for their identity as a people.

Most Americans are Anglophiles. It’s in our blood. Yes, our ancestors fought a bloody revolution to free ourselves from the British crown, but outside of the United Kingdom itself, you will find no people more eager to swoon over British royalty than Americans. More substantively, our love and admiration for the British has to do with a heady mix of Churchill, Wilberforce, Tolkien, Lennon and McCartney, and other extraordinary examples of courage, wisdom, and creativity.

For an American, it’s not only shocking, but also painful, to see what is happening to Britain today. The country of the Magna Carta, the nation that gave the world liberal democracy, and a people who stood indomitably against the Nazi totalitarian menace, succumb to utter demoralization and soft (for now) totalitarianism imposed on them by a corrupt ruling class. How far away seem the lyrics to the popular 1939 patriotic song “There’ll Always Be An England,” which lifted spirits through the Blitz:

There’ll always be an England,

And England shall be free

If England means as much to you

As England means to me.

It has become possible now to doubt that sentimental claim—precisely because England has ceased to mean much to its ruling class, and to many Englishmen. A friend who is a respected member of the British establishment wrote to me last week in despair.

“No sign it’s going to get any better, or that there is any way the country can come back from this,” he said. “We’ve faced wars, recessions, and pandemics for centuries, but this is different. You can’t reverse the slow dissolution of an entire culture and people, which is what is happening to the English.”

What prompted those black-pilled lines was my telling him of a dinner conversation I had had the night before in Budapest. I dined with a middle-class English couple in the Hungarian capital to take possession of a flat they had just bought as a kind of bolthole, to escape their native land if it becomes necessary. One of them had been born in the UK to parents who escaped the 1956 Soviet occupation of Hungary. They had gone west seeking ordered liberty; now their son and his family were contemplating reversing the course for the same reason.

The wife told me that she is friends with a white British couple who lost their daughter for a couple of years to a Pakistani grooming gang. The mum and dad went to the police, begging for help. As with so many white British people in similar circumstances, they received none. Celebrate diversity! My dining companion fought back tears telling me what the gang did to this 14-year-old girl, and how indifferent the police were to it all.

Later in the evening, the lady spoke with pride and affection of her ancestors, and their accomplishments. One had been a historian whose memory is cherished today for his labor to preserve and promote a particular aspect of folk culture. It’s all gone now. The ruling class in Britain, since the end of the Second World War, has worked to erase these achievements, and to instill in the hearts and minds of the British young shame and even contempt for their history.

When the National Gallery in London recently put up a sign describing J.M.W. Constable’s iconic and beloved 1821 painting The Hay Wain as “contested”—here the BBC explains why Brits should deride the canvas as an expression of “privilege”—nobody seemed much surprised or offended. This is just how it goes in modern Britain.

Since the start of the recent rioting, Britain and the world have seen the appalling spectacle of the Starmer government and the justice system arresting Britons who are alleged to have participated in the violence—even if it was only by retweeting information the state regards as problematic, and even, as in Belfast, you simply stood peaceably by, watching.

It is by now widely known that the British are subjected to a two-tier justice system (Ed West detailed only a tiny number of incidents in this Spectator article. The examples are endless, though. The mainstream UK media are not interested in this story, though, further demonstrating that they exist not to report the news, but to manage a narrative. If not for Elon Musk’s indispensable X—which shows things like this British police woman restraining a white Briton while a Muslim mob attacks him (she then runs away)—no one would know what was really happening on Britain’s streets.

Naturally the British state and ruling-class allies in the media are demanding that X be stifled. Sometimes media lickspittles stifle themselves. Alex Thomson of state-owned Channel 4 News posted to social media videos of “Asian” (Britspeak for Muslims) men attacking lone whites—then deleted them without explanation. Shooting the messenger is a tactic as old as Plutarch. Bad news for the messenger in the short run, but worse news for the shooter, who denies himself real-world information he needs to make policy.  

It’s going to get much worse, one fears. Mick Hume, writing in The European Conservative, notes that the Starmer government has announced wider use of facial recognition technology. Given that Britain is already swamped by closed-circuit surveillance cameras—London has more per capita than Beijing, capital of the world’s mightiest techno-totalitarian state—the implications for privacy and liberty in the United Kingdom are extremely dire. Don’t doubt for a moment that the previously disparaged policy of “de-banking” Britons over their political views is due for a strong comeback.

Will the British find it within themselves to resist and reverse colonial subjugation by their own ruling class? Or is my despairing English correspondent right, and the “dissolution of an entire culture and people” too far along to stop?

If you wanted to dissolve a nation—that is, a distinct people—it would be hard to beat the formula the British ruling class, both Labour and Tory, have implemented. Among them:

• Deny in culture and policy that there is much of anything worth celebrating about the historic peoples of the United Kingdom, and handing down (tradere) to the next generations

• Create institutional systems that promote those who accept these anti-cultural, anti-national standards, and that marginalize, even demonize, those who disagree

• Open the borders to mass migration, supported by propaganda that attempts to convince the native population that this process is both historically irresistible and morally correct

• Make fidelity to the new ideology an unstated requirement for entry into the professional classes, and rejecting it a mark of lower-class vulgarity and bigotry

• Practice a governing approach called “anarcho-tyranny,” in which the authorities use their power to punish the innocent and the law-abiding, while allowing criminals and anti-social elements to roam free

You can see the anarcho-tyranny principle on display not only in Britain’s two-tier policing, but also in the way the injustice of “social justice” manifests itself throughout the country’s institutions. For example, former Scottish prime minister Humza Yousaf, the son of Pakistani immigrants, once gave speech in which he denounced Scotland (which is 96% white) as racist for having too many whites in positions of power. Elon Musk publicly called him racist over it.

Last week, in public remarks in Edinburgh, Yousaf denounced Musk as “one of the most evil men on the planet,” and responsible for “wicked evil.” Musk replied by calling Yousaf “super, super racist.” Now Yousaf is threatening to sue him.

This might seem like a small thing, a spat between two public men with large egos, but it illustrates something we have all become used to. Non-white people, and their white progressive allies, can make arguably racist claims and statements without fear of serious criticism by anyone in the establishment. There is, of course, a very different standard for whites. This illiberal double standard has become so ubiquitous over the past two or three decades that it’s hardly worth remarking on anymore. Again, though, if you want to demoralize a people, forcing them to live as second-class citizens in their own country, by virtue of their skin color, is a good way to do it.

Think of the Englishwoman fighting back tears telling me the story of her friends’ fight to save their daughter, gang-raped by grooming gangs, and the indifference of the police to that family’s plight. As we have seen from the infamous Rotherham case and others like it, this is entirely because the victims are white (and usually working class), and the victimizers are “Asian” (typically Pakistani Muslims). Why shouldn’t she leave Britain? She can see with her own eyes that the British live under the thumb of an anarcho-tyrannical ruling class that see law-abiding, patriotic people like her as the problem.

Two summers ago, I stood with a white South African student at a window overlooking a courtyard of his Oxbridge college. He had been showing me around the place, and talking about how proud he felt to have been allowed to study in an institution that had formed the minds of so many great Englishmen over the centuries. As we looked out at a group of undergraduates sunning themselves, the young man told me how difficult it was to deal with the contempt his classmates had for Britain – its history, its culture, and many of its people.

He said that they come to university carrying in their heads all the idiotic leftist bigotries promulgated by the British establishment, and most go through their college years without having any of it seriously challenged. They emerge with all the privileges of an Oxbridge education, determined to use it tear down what so many previous generations gave their all to build. The sad young man told me he had real doubts that Britain would be able to survive much more of this learned contempt for the country’s very foundation.

Britain’s tragedy is no doubt being closely watched all across Europe, especially in countries facing the same challenges from migration, crime, and national identity. It was a bit surprising that the first serious migration-related race riots happened not in France or Germany, but in the UK. Nevertheless, what’s happening in Britain today is likely to happen in several continental European countries tomorrow. We should expect governments to react with the same contempt for free speech and patriotism as the British government has. Remember that EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen told the mandarins of Davos earlier this year that the greatest challenge Europe faces today is “disinformation.” Not uncontrolled migration, not migrant-related crime, not Islamic extremism—but disinformation, which the EU ruling class no doubt considers to include noticing and complaining about all these things. Brussels and other European capitals will watch closely to see how well Starmer’s methods work.

Western European leaders aren’t the only ones keeping an eye on Britain’s troubles. Eastern European capitals are also watching the drama play out, no doubt thinking about how they can avoid the same fate for their countries. A clip of a London busker singing a song praising the safety of Poland’s streets made the rounds on X over the weekend. We all know why the Visegrad Four countries—Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and Hungary—are so safe and stable: all have relatively few non-European migrants. For cultural and linguistic reasons, Poland, which has received roughly one million Ukrainian war refugees, finds it easy to integrate them. Here in Budapest, one hears talk that the movement of French, Germans, and others from points west is picking up. These are Europeans who want to live in Europe again.

Ukrainians who settle in Poland will be culturally Polish in the second generation. This has not worked out for large numbers of non-European migrants to European countries. Yet they aren’t going anywhere. In his 2013 book L’Identité malheureuse (The Unhappy Identity), French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, himself the Paris-born son of Jewish refugees, wrote about the process through which the French become aliens in their own land:

The native French have lost the status of cultural reference point that was theirs during preceding periods of immigration. They no longer influence anything. When the cybercafé is called “Bled.com” and either the fast-food restaurant or the butcher shop or both are halal, the longstanding inhabitants experience a disconcerting sense of exile. When they see conversions to Islam multiply, they wonder where they are living. They haven’t budged, but the world around them has changed. Do they fear foreigners? Are their hearts closed to the Other? No – they feel like strangers in their own homes. They used to embody the norm, but now they are on the margins. They used to be the majority in a familiar environment; but now they are the minority in a place they no longer control. This is the situation they are reacting to when they go live elsewhere. It is because they no longer want to feel exposed that they are hostile to the building of new housing projects in the communities in which they’ve chosen to take up residence. The more immigration increases, the more the territory splinters.

This is what one means when one speaks of the “dissolution” of England. What my establishment friend, whose cultural conservatism makes him a traitor to his class in Britain, is pointing to are his growing doubts that his own people any longer have the capacity to fight for their right to exist as a distinct, historically continuous people, in a particular place. He is a patriot who plans to go down with the ship, if it comes to that, but for the first time he is starting to think that his children, as white English, might be better off living in another country.

Why not? If Englishmen are compelled to live as minorities in a place they no longer control, and indeed at the mercy of a hostile, anti-Christian (both secularist and Islamic) majority, why should those who can leave stay? And for those who stay, either because they lack the desire or the resources to migrate, how will they live as a distinct people? Their own ruling class despises them, and uses the power of media, culture, and social pressure to teach their children shame.

There will always be an England, but only if there are always Englishmen. There will only be Englishmen if Englishmen are willing to struggle for their identity as a people—that is, if being English means as much to them as it meant to their ancestors. Does it? For the first time since the 10th-century emergence of the English as a nation out of the chaos of Anglo-Saxon tribes, that is the question.

Pictured: The Hay Wain (1821), a 130.2 × 185.4 cm oil on canvas by John Constable.