The English Dystopia

You may have noticed a marked decline in the quality of everything around you. I don't mean mere consumer goods, which are not what they used to be, but in almost all aspects of life.

We can start by looking at ground level. The streets themselves in many of our large towns and cities are of an abominable quality, rough with half-patched potholes, if they have even had a semblance of maintenance in recent years. Over these, dour wanderers from distant lands tramp between the decrepit buildings, side by side with an ever-dwindling number of crestfallen natives.

The walls of the buildings are stained and crumbling when they used not to be. Layers of grime are smeared with streaks over cracked facias. The accumulated and unrepaired damage gives many town centres in England the aspect of an aged and maltreated hovel. No pride is taken in their upkeep, so old buildings—which once were quite charming only a few decades ago—are left to slowly but surely rot.

The town centre, which used to be the bustling heart of any English town, is filled with the boarded-up faces of failed businesses. Many of these were finally killed off by lockdowns after an inexorable process of decline. It seems worse, too, that these abandoned shopfronts are papered over with pictures of thriving enterprises, as a lamentable echo of a recently-vanished past. These wallpaper shops show our embarrassment over this state of affairs; an abandoned shop at least represents some dignity in the attempt of the aspiring businessman to accomplish something and stands as a monument to their effort. It makes a subconscious demand on the passerby and says to them: “Here lies the ruins of a dream. Will you just let this stand? Someone ought to do something about this, and the ugliness of my space contains a spark of opportunity for you.” The wallpaper shops deprive us of this spur to action and imprint a permanence on the end of prosperity: “This is the memory of how things used to be; do not disturb me as I lament a time that has now passed.”

Between the wallpaper shops are the outposts of the new residents of our towns. Strangers with strange languages set up their small businesses to cater to needs foreign to the English population, who are rapidly moving away. They have little choice but to congregate with similar people in their little ethnic islands, focused on their parochial businesses and needs; they can barely speak to any of the other new arrivals, as none have a shared tongue.

The faces of the multitude of new arrivals who walk our streets reveal nothing, as there is no constancy. They do not know one another in the same way that we do not know them, and so they keep to themselves and hurry on with grim expressions as they brace themselves against the weather which carries an unaccustomed cold. “Who are these people?” you might ask yourself, but they think the same about you. The only difference between you and them, when it comes to feelings of alienation, is the level of contempt that one has for the other. They don’t respect us or our culture because there is simply no reason for them to do so: we merit the contempt they show us.

Dotted in the flood of unfamiliar peoples that have washed over our towns are little islands of Englishness, such as a cafe or pub, which remain as the last remnants of a civilization that has almost ceased to be. When you enter one of these legacy institutions, you are met with the familiar sights and sounds of a clientele that is almost entirely English. I have experienced this many times and can't help but notice that in even the most multicultural area of a progressive place such as Bristol, the streets will be filled with the nomads of globalism, but the pubs be filled with Englishmen and women, huddled together from the unconscious desire to be among people like themselves. Of course, we go to the pub; that's what the English do.

Our schools, never a particular point of pride, are terrible, failing, and filled to bursting. English schools are falling behind in various international rankings, and news articles attempt to soften the blow by using language that implies the decline was not as severe as first expected. However, one can look at old footage of students from the 50s, 60s, and 70s to notice the stark difference in capacity that the students appear to have. It is not the ability to pass arbitrary tests like some automaton that is in danger; it is the ability to form coherent thoughts that is in peril, to know why something is and should be, and to be able to critically assess the world around us and draw appropriate conclusions. Should it be surprising that, when broken down by ethnicity, the only group that performs worse in education than the English are the Irish Travellers? We don't respect ourselves or our accomplishments, so why wouldn't we—as people—be in a constant state of decline?

This is to speak nothing of what stands over us. One can't help but notice the increasing diversity of the stratified positions that rise over what remains of our shattered cultural life. Our universities are filled with foreign professors teaching foreign students, in thrall to a foreign ideology which demands that the foreign be prioritized over the native. But worse, the attempt to open universities to all has not improved the quality of the average person but instead degraded the prestige of the academy itself and rendered the student body mediocre. A person goes from a substandard school to an uninspiring university, and we wonder why educational standards are so uninspiring.

The police force is equally unimpressive. The English police force was, once, the envy of the world. The constabulary was filled with big, fit men who kept order. Now, the police force is a shadow of its former self, filled with diversity hires and women who are tasked with subduing criminals twice their size, many of whom are foreign and do not possess the Englishman's habitual respect for English authorities. The ruling principle of the police is no longer to prevent crime and arrest wrongdoers but instead to ensure that the ideological orthodoxy of diversity and inclusion remains untarnished. Almost zero petty crimes are investigated, but every social media post is carefully scoured by the desk job enforcers of this new progressive Sharia.

To consider our offices of state, which once held such sway over such a vast territory of the globe, is a nostalgic embarrassment. Who cares who the prime minister is when it doesn't seem to make a difference to policy? As deposed prime minister Liz Truss put it, the prime minister can be replaced, but the governor of the Bank of England cannot. Power no longer resides where we thought it resided, the people we elect no longer have their hands on the mechanisms of power, so what is the point of electing them? If anything, the false belief in a representative democracy is a barrier to structural change that might benefit the people who live, work, and pay for the upkeep of whatever has slyly imposed itself above us.

Why even call ourselves a representative democracy? In what way does this democracy represent us? Where are the native British interests expressed? Who can look at Parliament and feel that any of their concerns are being addressed when all that is debated are minoritarian concerns? It is clear that our country is simply being mismanaged, and that our futures are being mortgaged out to benefit undeserving people in the present. Have you tried to get an NHS appointment recently? Do you feel that the money in your pocket is worth more or less than it was ten years ago? Are you optimistic about what lies ahead?

You might, at this point, be tempted to say, “No, it is not all like this everywhere! There are still some places in England which belong to the English!” I said much the same thing, only five years previously. This is, unfortunately, the trend, and it shows little sign of abating any time soon—has intensified, and under a Conservative government, no less. Maybe you are right that there is still something left of merry old England, but how long do you think it will last? Already the forces of progress are looking at your shires hungrily for any signs of racism to devour. Already they are stigmatizing you for being what you are.

And so we continue to trudge along with our lives as if we expect someone else to fix these problems for us. It is not just the English that mill around in the perpetual haze of uncertainty of what to do, of course; the Welsh, too, have a preposterously low voter turnout. Scotland is still engaged in their political process, but already the signs of resignation are beginning to show, as the realization that the Scottish National Party is national in name only and is, in fact, yet another organ of a global regime that installs its regional managers to keep the ruling order on the path preordained for it, whether the people like it or not. People feel that the political process has gotten away from them somehow, and that it is not responsive to their needs and they have no power to change it, so they just don’t bother. Above their heads, this new paradigm continues to solidify itself to ensure that future change is all the more difficult.

There is no light at the end of the tunnel, and yet we wait as if a new Richard will return from the crusade and set everything right once again. Who do we expect this new Richard to be? Where do we think he is? When might he return? What do we expect him to do when he finally comes back? In the meantime, we march further into oblivion, resigned to a fate that few people can articulate but everyone feels is inevitable. We have become trapped in the ruins of our own civilization as a new order, which is at the same time distant and yet disturbingly present, imposes itself upon us. We don’t know what to do, and so we do nothing.