Britain’s burning

The walls of Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham were yesterday adorned with two graffiti.

One of them said “Get out England”, which was upsetting. It should have been “Get out of England”, which would have satisfied the pedant in me, if not the realist.

The other inscription was a colloquial rendering of ‘copulating persons from the Indian subcontinent’, which failed to satisfy any of my constituent parts. All in all, I have to return to the subject of rioting – the issue just won’t go away.

Yesterday, I wrote that “uncontrolled immigration is a serious problem. By all means, we must discuss it – but not with the likes of Tommy Robinson.”

So let’s pick up where I left off and try to discuss it – the way all serious problems should be discussed: dispassionately, analytically and without name-calling rancour.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper describes the rioters in uncompromising terms: “’They are thugs, criminals and extremists who betray the values our country is built on.” I can’t argue with her epithets, but the second part of her sentence raises all sorts of questions.

Prime among them concerns the values Britain is built on. What exactly are they? The question is too broad, and it would take many a volume to cover adequately. So let’s narrow the enquiry down and look at the British values that are immediately relevant to the unfolding mayhem.

All such values ultimately boil down to the matter of British, and specifically English, identity. Miss Cooper, poor Ed Balls’s wife, evidently thinks that these values are identical with those espoused by the woke consensus. But she is wrong.

All modern nations are ethnically synthetic, and neither England nor Britain is an exception. The indigenous population of the British Isles boasts numerous inputs: Celtic, Basque, Germanic from various tribes, Norse, French, Norse-French – and these are just the most obvious ones.

However, while such groups were ethnically heterogeneous, they were racially homogeneous. Moreover, they all shared the same religion and hence the bulk of the same culture over many centuries, folkloric variances apart.

That’s why Englishmen hardly ever qualify their ethnicity the way Americans do. You are unlikely to hear people describing themselves as, say, Norse English or Saxon English the way Americans routinely qualify their nationality with their ancestral origin.

Neither will you hear many Scotsmen stressing, say, their Danish, Pict or Irish origin. Their ethnic identity is Scottish, their civic identity is British, and most of them won’t repudiate the latter by advocating separatist particularism.

Hence national identity was never a problem until the disintegration of the British Empire after the Second World War. Suddenly millions of people of different ethnicity, race, religion and culture began to insist that citizenship in any Commonwealth country entitled them to live in Britain.

Now, about 2.5 billion people currently have Commonwealth citizenship. At that time, the number was smaller, but still undeniably too large for unlimited admittance. Hence the Commonwealth Immigrants’ Act was passed in 1962, stripping most Commonwealth citizens of the right to settle in the UK.

The inflow of immigrants consequently slowed down, but not to a trickle. Racial, ethnic and religious tensions appeared, and further restrictions were deemed necessary. In 1968 Enoch Powell delivered his famous speech warning against the dangers of mass immigration, and three-quarters of all Britons agreed.

As a result, the Labour government passed the Commonwealth Citizenship Act, which effectively put a moratorium on immigration from the former colonies. Still, many people found legal or illegal ways of circumventing such restrictions. The door was still cracked ajar – until another Labour government, that of Tony Blair, flung it wide-open.

If until then Commonwealth immigrants had been coming in their thousands, they now began to arrive in their millions, and the “foreboding” with which Enoch Powell was “filled” was coming true. Multiculturalism became the official ideology and, like all ideologies, it exacted a frightful cost.

British identity gradually became, or rather was presumed to be, ill-defined; English identity almost shameful. Both were assumed to carry the stigma of colonial oppression, racism, jingoism and everything else that was rotten in life.

The new ideology demands that indigenous Britons see themselves as just one group among many, with none entitled to any special status. Now, ideologues tend to be as strong of conviction as they are weak of foresight. They naively expected Britons to do an Esau and happily trade their birthright for a pot of message.

That was never going to happen. British identity in general and English identity in particular were forged over so many centuries that they have entered the nation’s psychological and mental DNA. When that core found itself under attack, tectonic plates began to move, tensions grew, cracks appeared.

Out of those cracks crawled the kind of creatures both Yvette Cooper and I abhor. But even every moderate, conservative Briton I know is in broad sympathy with the rioters’ declared grievances, even if he’s contemptuous of their methods and indeed personalities.

Thuggish ideologues like Tommy Robinson were always likely to fish in troubled waters. However, much as we despise that lot, we shouldn’t deny that the waters are indeed troubled.

It’s possible that at some point decent Britons will join the indecent Yahoos because no legitimate recourse seems to be on offer. If – or rather when – that happens, social order may disintegrate altogether, with consequences as awful as they are unpredictable.

Britain was indeed built on certain values, and one of them is disdainful distrust of any ideologies. All of them are seen as alien and threatening, and Yvette Cooper lives in cloud cuckoo land if she thinks that the ideology she cherishes, that of multi-culti self-righteousness is any exception.

Britain is becoming a powder keg of identity, and the likes of her are playing with fire.