Why Don't The English Revolt?

In the wake of the revived attention placed on the Pakistani rape gang scandal in British media, the overwhelming understanding that the vast majority of the victims are vulnerable English girls, and the complicity with which many local councils, police forces, and MPs appear to have in these crimes, many of our American friends and well-wishers are asking themselves: “why don’t the English revolt?” 

This is a very reasonable question to ask and one that is not straightforward to answer, but I think that some of the following factors contribute to the torpidity of the English nation. 

The Moral Unity Between the English and the State

After the victory of the Allied Powers in World War 2, there has been a moral harmony between the English people and the British state. The British state and the people of England fought a total war against what they perceived to be an existentially evil enemy and emerged on the winning side. This has made the English feel that their democratic state is authentically representative of them, and a means by which political accountability can be exercised. 

This is not to say that the English have agreed with each policy successive British governments have imposed upon us, nor that there have been no social issues which would cause unrest or riots. What I mean by this is that the moral culture of the British elite class, and therefore the state, has been in harmony with the general moral culture of the English people; that is, they agree fundamentally on what right and wrong is, and so any breaches of this moral code are widely accepted, and punished accordingly. Nobody is on the other side of moral corruption, and the person who is caught is shamed. 

The English people have yet to properly grasp that a new moral culture has taken control of the British state and is using it to advance moral agendas with which the English themselves do not agree. We can see that the country is being immiserated by deliberate state policy and that our towns and cities have been flooded by foreigners who are protected by law, but we tend to take the view that this has been done by accident because of the incompetence of our governments, and not that this has been a deliberate policy that was consciously enforced because the enforces view it as moral. 

This new morality is not shared by the majority of English people, but the understanding that the state has set itself fundamentally against the English is yet to sink in, and so we remain in a kind of moral holding pattern, unable to form a collective resistance to what is being done to us and unsure of what else we can do. As it stands, Reform voters are closest to understanding that the elite—and by extension the state apparatus—has been captured by a new form of morality and that they must vote against the liberal parties (Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Greens, SNP), who could never provide suitable solutions because they themselves are the problem. 

A Lack of Coherent English Identity

It has been a long time since Nelson famously telegraphed “England expects every man will do his duty.” Yet the English of today find it very difficult to collectively identify themselves and connect their modern community to the historical continuum of England. Generations of education into “British values” have rendered the parochial sentimental attachments of England and Englishness as something that is outside of the personal self-knowledge of many young people today.  

We have few English national celebrations, and our celebratory days have been–for as long as I can remember, at least–muted and done half-heartedly. It isn’t common to have a large event on St George’s Day, for example, where perhaps people do anything of note to celebrate their national saint. 

The very nature of the English identity is very thin and ephemeral when compared to the more robust Celtic or Continental identities. Throughout the 20th Century, the English ethnic identity gradually became subsumed into the broader British civic identity to ensure that the far less numerous Celts did not feel excessively marginalised within the Union.

In addition to a lack of coherent identity that could form the nucleus of an us-vs-them mindset when it comes to foreign groups with predatory tendencies, modernity has taken its toll on our social groups. The English, famous for being a “clubbable” people, as Scruton put it, have become withdrawn and antisocial. In the past 50 years, England has lost three quarters of its working men’s clubs and more than 20,000 pubs have closed. These are just two examples that most strongly signal the collapse of English community life. Where the English and American revolutions began in the Pub, it's hard to imagine where such a nucleus of community life would manifest strong political group attachments in 21st Century England. 

We are a country which has been worn out by modernity and multiculturalism, unable to grasp the centre stage of our own public life, or even articulate that there should be a peculiarly English locus of affairs. The result of this is that minority communities run roughshod over the public discourse, being consistently and almost exclusively the topic of conversation on all political shows whenever the concept of dealing with internal ethnic questions arises. 

We have no community life in which to begin nurturing such feelings, and so our ethnic identity has withered and faded so that the very notion of discussing England or Englishness is essentially alien to our political existence, as Robert Jenrick discovered when he attempted to raise the issue during his bid for the leadership of the Conservative Party–which eventually went to a Nigerian woman of Yoruba heritage, which hammered the point home quite bluntly: there will be no top-down revival of English identity and no institutional support for the English community. 

We Don't Know How To Deal With Minority Communities

The British state interpellates all people as atomised individuals until a member of an ethnic minority group claims a coherent ancestral identity. Once this occurs, the state treats the people holding this identity as a gestalt collective entity called a “community”, which it considers to have a sentience of its own. These communities are given special deference, protection, and courtesy by the state over the ethnic majority English, who are forbidden from collective political action and treated only as atomised individuals. 

The Englishman is, therefore, set against an entire organised group when he has an altercation against his ethnic-minority neighbour. He stands alone before the extended network of the foreigners, and his only recourse for support is to an uncaring bureaucracy which is already primed by their own internal cultural biases to see him as a troublemaker. The minority “community” is viewed as suffering a kind of intrinsic victimhood by virtue of their being outnumbered by the disorganised English majority. 

This is also what establishes the environment for the “two-tier” society that has come into effect. The laws are purportedly universal, and applied without favour, but in reality we know that isn’t true. Laws which are designed to prevent discrimination based on race, for example, are selectively applied against the majority white English population and rarely applied to the foreign minority non-white population.  This is particularly egregious in the cases of the Pakistani rape gang scandal, which has been shown many times to be an expression of a kind of ethno-religious hatred of white non-Muslim girls. In some cases, the rapists claimed to be part of a “supreme race”, and yet this racial motivation is not enough to find their actions to be based on racial hatred and draw appropriate convictions on that basis. By contrast, the British state is on constant watch for racially-charged social media comments made against ethnic minority communities, and are eager to imprison people for such posts. 

Being inside the grace of the state has not gone unnoticed by the ethnic minority communities, and there are numerous community organisations whose sole mission is to advance the collective interests of the ethnic minority communities at the expense of the native English population. 

The combination of their dislocated trust in the British state, combined with a weak national unity through a faded ethnic identity set against the strong ethnic identities of non-indigenous communities has combined to create a kind of paralysis in the English people. It is difficult to see where the moral unity for a politicised English identity could originate, as though it may be something still held by the lower classes, the middle and upper classes appear to have vacated the concept entirely and seem unlikely to take on the mantle of leadership that some kind of revolution would require. 

Lack of Leadership

There has been an attempt at a kind of social revolution in England against the reign of multiculturalism, but it was ruthlessly stamped out. The pressure of the injustices against the English people kept building throughout the 2000s, and without elite leadership emerging to take the reins of an English revolt, this vacuum was filled by working class activists, instead.

The English Defence League (EDL) erupted out of the bread-and-circuses culture of football  in 2009, and lasting until 2013, the EDL represented an organic reaction to the privileged status of the Muslim community in England.  This represented a large number of primarily working class men who had found themselves on the wrong side of the state and society when attempting to find justice for the victims of the rape gangs, among other indignities and terrors inflicted upon them by these new communities. 

The EDL itself was an unabashedly nativist organisation and proud of their Englishness, and represented an alarming insurgent force to the bourgeois Blairite establishment. Under successive Labour and Conservative administrations, both agreeing on the essential middle-class nature of modern politics, the EDL and its leader, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, otherwise known by his stage name Tommy Robinson, were persecuted by the state, stigmatised by the media, deplatformed by various internet service providers and social media, and debanked by various financial institutions. 

Not only did this this brutal treatment of a group with just concerns send out the signal that the liberal order was not prepared to countenance collective concerns from the majority group–no matter how vulgar and severe the crimes–but the bourgeois moral consensus instantiated by the Blair era, which was continued by the Conservative Party, relegated any such concerns as low-class and unworthy of consideration in polite company. Robinson’s great crime was to negatively characterise the Muslim community, putting him in direct contradiction to the state’s ruling ideology, which views the ethnic minority communities as an unvarnished positive contribution to the country and things that must be protected from wider society. This puts Robinson beyond the pale of reasonable discourse and inappropriately associates the issues raised with hateful bigotry, rather than a legitimate concern and toxifies the issue in the minds of otherwise sympathetic bourgeois political commentators and politicians.

Put simply, there is too large a personal cost for anyone in the elite class to take on this issue as a cause to champion, in not only the social stigma it will incur from one’s peers, but also in running the risk of ruining one’s own career prospects to even being actively ruined by the powers-that-be. The risk is not worth the reward for them, even if it would be the right thing to do; indeed, it could be that they would have to make tremendous personal sacrifices to achieve an uncertain result. It is just easier for them to do nothing and allow this immoral state of affairs to persist.  

Abandoned by their leaders and left to their own devices, the common people of England don’t know what to do, nor do they have the means of successfully forming a cohesive group identity, and when they do, the state crushes them. 

Things Aren’t That Bad Yet

When each event is taken in isolation and aggregated by a social media feed, it makes things in England seem worse than they immediately are. That is not to say that these stories are a misrepresentation of events, or fail to capture the grim pall of despair across the country, but they fail to provide balance to fully represent our current circumstances. 

The way the country is being run is terrible, the injustices visited upon the English are real, and the number of people who are suffering are numerous. However, these things are spread across a wide area, through a long period of time, and encompassing a large number of people, so that in the mass, most people aren’t being directly impacted on a day-to-day basis. It is, therefore, easier to do nothing about them. 

After all, most people still have responsibilities that tie them into the system. They have jobs, families, mortgages, and various other reasons why it simply becomes irrational to throw everything away in some kind of revolution. Indeed, it becomes a preposterous suggestion, and this lethargy forces them to look to their unrepresentative political system for answers or simply check out of politics entirely. At the last general election, 41% of people simply didn’t bother to vote. 

The brute reality of the situation is that the English have become effectively atomised and placed at the mercy of communities which at best view them with disinterest and a bureaucracy which sides with these communities whenever any dispute arises. We are not represented in our own political system and are stigmatised as “far right” if we demand representation. This renders us powerless in the face of the atrocities that sporadically occur and the elite classes of Britain ruthlessly crush any attempt on behalf of the English to collectively organise. 

Despite the harrowing stories that appear on the news, those stories are happening to someone else, somewhere else, with whom there is no strong felt bond of connection as being part of the same group. A tragedy on an individual level, of course, but not one directly related to themselves. What would they be expected to do? Who are they expected to do it with? What results ought they expect from it? 

As it stands, material life is not great, but not that bad. Why tear apart your life and ruin your good reputation if you can still afford to live, even if your standard of living is in decline? It is not only easier but more rational on an individual basis to limp along and continue to struggle against the tidal forces which are eroding our country than doing something dramatic. 

The most important things that are being stolen from us are not material, but instead moral and spiritual. The psychic sense of collective ownership over England, the sense of safety that tomorrow will be like today and one can walk anywhere they like without danger lurking around the corner. What truly characterised England for the Englishman is that he could live his life off of his guard, safe in the knowledge that his life and property were secure, so that his wife and children could live without his need to be on watch. From this position, a person can truly begin to nurture a deep love for their country. From this shared togetherness the deep self-knowledge of the English is built. This knowledge is unreflective and unspoken, but lived in the propriety and normality that is generated from such a level of unconscious trust in one another and expectations that are confirmed by habit on a daily basis. 

All of this is simply alien to those strangers who have been brought to live alongside us. They come from countries which do not exist in this state of domestic tranquility, and live lives which are often suspicious of their neighbours, wary of corrupt state officials, and where violence is an everyday occurrence. They do not have the experience of their own countries which the English have of theirs, an experience which fosters the necessary prerequisites to create a beautiful, calm, homely, and prosperous place. The very thing they come here to be a part of is destroyed by their presence. What they don’t have at home they cannot contribute to here. 

This is a broad way of looking at the situation, there are, of course, exceptions to every rule. But in general it is true, and the immaterial nature of the circumstances we enjoyed which one would struggle to consciously perceive and hard to draw a boundary around. This etherealness is therefore difficult to protect, but easy to harm, and it is only in the wake of millions of strangers entering into England that it becomes apparent that we are losing something we didn’t even realise that we had. 

Conclusion

The English don’t revolt against the indignities, thefts, atrocities, and bleakness of their future because they are individually powerless and ruled by a liberal mysticism which not only collectively blinds them to their own circumstances but also imposes a strict moral imperative to maintain the multicultural paradigm at any cost. To change direction now, for the liberal multiculturalist, risks unleashing an ethnic conflict which could be catastrophic for not only the political harmony of the country but could, in their view, lead to racial violence and pogroms between the native community and the new communities they have imposed upon us.   

To prevent this horrific potential future, therefore, there is nothing that the English must not suffer in order to protect the minority groups from the moral accounting they have incurred because of their behaviour towards us. This is why the state persecutes people for negatively characterising foreign communities and prosecutes anyone within reach of the law when they approach the expanding boundary of their presence. 

I do not believe there is a physical revolution against the multicultural order coming. The best the English will hope for is a democratic solution in which a nativist party comes to power to represent their interests in the face of the international liberal order, and enacts a series of policies to gradually bring about the desired changes.