Aside from my parents’ dog, no one close to me has died recently. And yet I have received regular messages of condolence for my loss from good friends in America throughout the last couple of years. They’ve been consoling me on the loss of my country.
Our American cousins look with bewilderment at what Britain has inflicted upon itself in recent years as it has willfully lost control of both legal and illegal immigration. While a fair bit of online clickbait declaring “London has fallen!” is exaggerated (one is still much safer walking around London than New York), it’s not far from wrong.
This summer, something changed. It has been a summer of demonstrations, riots, and flag raising, all capped off by the huge Unite the Kingdom rally in London in early September. Police estimates say around 150,000 people attended. Organizers claim an outlandish 3 million. The truth probably lies in-between. Either way: It was a lot. And, as many have observed, they were mostly not the kind of people who would ever have imagined themselves at a rally or demonstration. The event was a cri de coeur for disaffected middle England. Mass immigration and the censorship of free speech were the targets of their ire, Great Britain the object of their affection.
The rally was organized by controversial right-wing activist Tommy Robinson. Robinson is no angel: former football hooligan, self-confessed fraudster, alleged coke fiend (facts that seem to have genuinely escaped those on the American right who have taken a curious interest in him). Yet many Brits find themselves willing to overlook his flaws given his recent vindication on the reality of Pakistani grooming gangs in Britain.
With all this afoot, those same American friends who have sent me condolences have been asking me what this all means. Is Britain back?
This question has been asked regularly since the end of World War II. When Anthony Eden threw himself into the Suez Crisis in 1956, the conservative British press, pained by post-imperial decline, were convinced it would make Britain great again. So too when the Special Air Service dared to win during the London Iranian embassy siege under Margaret Thatcher in 1980, or when British troops triumphed in the Falklands in 1982 (which were, unlike Suez, unqualified successes). Britpop and the Cool Britannia movement of the mid-90s invoked similar feelings of renewal, at least at home. And then of course Brexit sent shockwaves around the world in 2016, arguably setting the ball rolling for upheaval on the political right the world over as the people attempted to “take back control.”
And yet, although each of these apparent comebacks have been laudable, the overall trajectory has been that of inheritance squandered away for a mess of pottage by our governing elites. Military victories and cultural achievements are well and good, but the constitutional, political, and spiritual integrity of the nation that underpins these has been continually degraded. Ever since Britain entered the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950, we have been handing over more and more control to people who loathe our national history and character, whether they are bureaucrats in Brussels, globalist politicians in Whitehall, or radically progressive members of our own judiciary. Even Brexit has been continually prevented from reversing this, with the entire British system working to defang it at every turn. Our governing class has attempted to ignore a basic fact about the world we live in: that there are such things as nations and their distinct people. This is an easy thing to ignore when voting approvingly for pro-immigration parties while enclaved in urban townhouses or leafy shires. But it has left the rest of us, who actually live out here in this nation called Britain, feeling increasingly powerless.
It is this sense of powerlessness that brought people onto the streets this summer. The immediate cause is the small boats crisis, which has seen over 31,000 illegal migrants—nearly 90 percent of them men—cross the English Channel this year. Since 2018, it’s been over 182,000, more than the total personnel in the British armed forces. The control we have ceded to judges and international conventions has made it basically impossible to deport these people, and so they are housed in communities around the country, usually in hotels, at a cost of £3.5 billion to the taxpayer per year. Wherever they go, dysfunction and disorder follow. A number of high-profile sexual assaults conducted by migrants against British girls tipped many over the edge this year, and so began our summer of discontent.
But this has merely catalyzed years of anger over mass legal immigration, compounded by the fact that, far from driving immigration down, post-Brexit Britain has thrown open its doors. In 2015, net migration was 332,000—enough to trigger the referendum. In 2023, under Boris Johnson, the supposed Brexiteer-in-Chief, it was over 900,000. If there are no such things as nations or peoples, none of this should matter. But there are. And so it does. Nations are a part of the warp and woof of reality. Attempting to unravel them into a bland, decultured humanity is the most dangerous of fool’s errands.
And here is, perhaps, where I begin to wonder if Britain might be back in a way that it has not been before. As I said, we have seen people on the streets this summer who do not have a political bone in their body. But they have for too long borne the consequences of their leaders’ disbelief in the natural idea of nations.
What we’ve witnessed this summer has not been the daring feats of the SAS or the swagger of a Union Jack–wearing pop star, as patriotism-inducing as those things are. Although there has undoubtedly been ugliness at the edges, the summer demonstrations have largely been the heartfelt and peaceful effort of a nation, of a people, to reassert that it exists and is not going anywhere. Our leaders need to hear that. If they do not, that ugliness may not be confined to the edges for very long.
And even if our leaders do listen as they should, a nation that has been confused about itself for so long will require some soul-searching to remind itself who it is. Our history is rich, but much of what has defined our national spirit—Anglo-Saxon liberty, establishment moderation, historic Protestant Christianity, high-trust community—has been beaten out of us for so long that it will take time to remember ourselves as we were.
But great moments of renewal have happened in the past: the reign of King Alfred, the Magna Carta, the Reformation, the Glorious Revolution.
England and Britain have been back before. I pray that they might be again.
Image by Christopher Furlong, via Getty Images.
