This year sees the ninetieth anniversary of the publication of a book called The Strange Death of Liberal England by the Anglo-American historian George Dangerfield. Though the title was referring to the British Liberal Party before the outbreak of the First World War, in a broader sense it implied the correlated values of a more general political philosophy, including the germs of the recently-born welfare state. So, far from dying, this new liberalism would over the coming decades infiltrate and colonise almost all British political parties. Even as the British Empire continued to expand after the war, these values remained a powerful vector for those that governed Britain: of the power of reason, of negotiation, of law, of accepting people – even opponents – at face value. More than anything else, it spoke of a gentlemanly optimism that could always detect a glimmer of light at the end of the longest tunnel. It was this spirit that enabled the British people to survive the bloodshed and impoverishment of two world wars, the second of which destroyed the remains of the Empire and saddled unborn generations with a self-replicating debt mountain which, in coded debentures, probably remains concealed in British current accounts to this day. The main point was that the British spirit, with its English core, rather resembled a buoyantly liberal plastic duck, for it always righted itself.
There was a moral continuum that co-existed with some of the worst of the late-imperial atrocities in Palestine, Cyprus and Kenya. Throughout there was always a voice of decency that spoke of a good England that stood for honour, and uprightness, and duty. The men and women who embodied these values were never numerous, but they were there, and they were audible, if only barely, the voice of conscience that spoke to others, an echoing morality that ensured that all was not quite lost.
The very year that Dangerfield’s masterpiece appeared in 1935, the English statesman Thomas More was canonised on the four hundredth anniversary of his martyrdom by beheading at Tower Hill. He was not in our sense a saint, for he dealt ruthlessly with Protestant dissidents and applauded their incineration at the stake. However, his idealised vision for mankind was revealed in his work, Utopia, a perfect society in which the barbarity of capital punishment did not exist. But it did in his world, as he was to discover, in the terrifying dystopia created by Henry VIII.
As first minister of the crown of the day, it could be said that his place in British life has been taken by Keir Starmer, the current prime minister who was chief crown prosecutor when gangs of Muslim men across England were unmolestedly grooming and raping tens of thousands of white underage girls. As The Daily Telegraph reported on Monday, in Oxford, a Mohammed Karrar had prepared his victim “for gang anal rape by using a pump… At one point she had four men inside her. A red ball was placed in her mouth to keep her quiet.” Anna from Bradford at the age of 14 had made repeated reports of rape, abuse, and coercion. When she “married” her abuser in a traditional Islamic wedding, her social worker attended the ceremony. …In Telford, Lucy Lowe died at 16 alongside her mother and sister when her abuser set fire to her home in 2000. She had given birth to Azhar Ali Mahmood’s child when she was just 14, and was again pregnant when she was killed.”
When Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, vigorously followed up complaints about the white serial rapist and television personality Jimmy Savile. However, the same cannot be said of his reaction to the rape of thousands of girls, no doubt because to pursue the rapists might have been perceived as racist. When Elon Musk recently added his voice to calls for a national enquiry into the grooming gangs, Starmer said he was “jumping on the bandwagon of the far right.” And very possibly, Starmer really does believe that protecting little white girls from rapists is the diseased pre-occupation of racist bigots.
In the meantime, London has also become the acid-attack capital of Europe, with 752 such assaults in 2022 alone, or over two a day. Acid attacks are the quintessence of evil, since they require both careful preparation and a desire to cause lifelong facial scarring, with the victims usually being women. Because of the racial dimension to these attacks – the perpetrators are usually of Indian/Pakistani origin – feminist groups have strangely silent about them, again because raising the issue might be perceived to be racist.
Indeed, the concept of “perception” now has legal status in Britain. As the London Metropolitan Police website proclaims, A hate incident is any incident which the victim, or anyone else, thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender. Evidence of the hate element is not a requirement. (My emphases).
Ordinary adult-rape in England has increased sixfold in the past ten years, and even allowing for historical underreporting and possibly spurious reporting today, these are inescapably terrifying figures. Modern statistics are (perhaps deliberately) hard to access, but what is clear is that though the black population of England and Wales is 4 per cent, 10 per cent of men charged with rape are black: or in other words, approximately one in fiftieth of the population is responsible for one tenth of all rapes. Furthermore, there were 15,000 recorded incidents of “knife-crime” in London last year, a meaningless figure because there is no way of knowing how many men were illegally carrying knives. But what is known is that two-thirds of knife-crimes involve black or minority ethnic young males. This can be discussed openly, because most of the victims are also young black males, though the opposite fiction – that black males are disproportionately victims of white racist gangs – has been officially endorsed by the British Government with Prime Minister Theresa May declaring April 22nd forever to be known as “Stephen Lawrence Day”, in honour of a black teenager who was stabbed to death by white youths in 1993. Since that dreadful crime, hundreds of black youths have been knifed to death by other black youths, but since these murders lack that beloved “race” dimension, they have been officially forgotten.
During the past quarter of a century, half a dozen English cities, including London, have become ethnically and culturally alien, with Caucasians in the demographic minority. Many of these immigrants arrived after Prime Minister Blair secretly opened the doors to an immigration surge. But even illegal immigrants can now no longer be expelled, which is why 150,000 of them crossed the English Channel on in barely seaworthy boats in the past four years. Many of these were rescued by the Royal Navy, but instead of being returned to France where they had embarked, they have been brought to the safety of England and her insanely-welcoming courts. Once registered as an illegal aliens/asylum seekers (and such categorical differences are now meaningless) they can present themselves in hospitals and as a matter of policy be fast-tracked to consultants within minutes, past queues of British people who might have been waiting hours or even days.
That is not the only very public absurdity in Britain. Casting characters in television and stage plays is now of course race-blind, but only in one direction. Black actors can play white parts, even in plays set in medieval England where blacks were non-existent, though white actors can never play black parts. Slavery is now universally presumed to be by whites of blacks: even to suggest that that the African slave trade was the invention of black Africans, and the transatlantic slave trade was ended by the Royal Navy might itself be regarded as a hate-incident worthy of investigation by the Metropolitan police, who, like most English police forces, no longer investigate domestic burglaries. What the Royal Navy does these days is either tragic or comic according to taste, since it is burdened with two vast aircraft carriers whose range is just about sufficient to carry them nicely within striking distance of Chinese defences, and since the carriers lack any airborne early warning aircraft to detect enemy forces at sea or in the air, their primary military function is presumably as targets.
Less factually verifiable but nonetheless evident at every level is the irreversible coarsening of public life in England. When the current deputy prime minister Angela Rayner boasted that in the Commons she had opened her legs to reveal her naked genitalia (her “growler”, in her words) to the then prime minister Boris Johnson, she was encapsulating perfectly the collapse of public values. The virtues of stoicism, reticence and restraint are not merely no longer esteemed, they are barely evident. Perhaps the biggest single culprit for the corruption of British values is Tony Blair, who not merely lied to the House of Commons to get the UK involved in invasion of Iraq, but who invited the IRA army council to be his guests in Downing Street. This was an unprecedented capitulation that symbolised the decay of Liberal England. That decay is evident in scores of English towns and cities, in which tawdry charity chops have replaced the smart chain-stores that were once the proud emblems of the English high street.
Ninety years on, Dangerfield’s premature proclamation has finally been realised. Yes, Liberal England is well and truly dead, but there is nothing remotely strange about it. A death wish, the outworking of a deranged id, usually gets its way. England as England died because those who governed her wanted her dead.
Brexiteers voted ‘Out!’ but are left still tied to foreign regulators they did not elect